Guest Post by Jerome R. Corsi
“Six-Pack Joe” Biden prided himself on riding Amtrack virtually every day from his job as U.S. Senator in Washington, D.C., to be home for dinner with his family in Delaware. As Peter Schweizer has correctly pointed out, politics for Biden has always been a family affair. More pointedly, Schweizer, in his 2020 book Profiles in Corruption, pointed out that Biden entered politics running for the Senate in 1972, understanding that politics was his ticket to personal and family wealth. Born in 1942 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to a middle-class Catholic family, Biden’s father ended up his working career as a used-car salesman. Schweizer quotes Biden when first running for the Senate in 1972, at 29, as saying the following about campaign fundraising:
You run the risk of deciding whether or not you’re going to prostitute yourself to give to give the answer you know they want to hear in order to get funded for office. I went to the big guys for money. I was ready to prostitute myself in the manner in which I talk about it, but what happened was they said, ‘Come back when you’re 40, son.[1]
In a 1998 article entitled “The Senator from MNBA,” Byron York pointed out that MBNA, then the nation’s second-largest credit-card bank known for its prominence in the “affinity card” market, helped bail Biden out financially. York noted that in Biden’s 1995 financial disclosure form, his liabilities exceeded his assets. He owed money on bank lines of credit and various loans, including two loans totaling between $100,000 and $250,000 for his sons’ college educations. York stressed that Biden’s principal asset was “a lovely old mansion on three and a half acres of what used to be a du Pont family estate outside Wilmington.” In 1996, Biden gained windfall profits when MNBA executive John Cochran purchased the house for an arguably above-market price of $1.2 billion. As a reflection of the premium MNBA paid for Biden’s home, York reported MBNA gave Cochran “a lot of money—$300,000—to help with ‘expenses’ related to the move.” In Biden’s 1996 senatorial race, MNBA became Biden’s largest single source of contributions, with MNBA employees donating $62,850 to his campaign. In 2008, when he ran as Barack Obama’s vice-presidential running mate, MBNA had been Biden’s single largest contributor for over two decades.
A few weeks after Biden’s reelection in November 1996, MBNA hired Biden’s son Hunter for his first job after graduating from Yale Law School and passing the Delaware bar exam, promoting him to senior vice president by 1998. The New York Times reported that after Hunter worked at the Commerce Department on electronic issues from 1998 to 2001, MBNA signed him back onto consulting contracts from 2001-2005, reportedly with a $100,000 per year retainer to work on online banking issues. During the 2019 presidential campaign, Rachel Mullen, a former personal banking officer at MBNA from 1994-2001, tweeted that MBNA managers referred to Hunter Biden as “Senator MBNA.” In a 2008 interview on the NBC News Sunday program “Meet the Press,” correspondent Tom Brokaw asked Biden, “Wasn’t it inappropriate for someone like you in the middle of all this [financial services industry legislation] to have your son collecting money from this big credit card company [MBNA] while you were on the floor protecting its interests?” Biden answered, “absolutely not,” pleading that his son “came home to work for a bank” rather than working as a Wall Street fora much higher salary.
MNBA’s generosity came with a price tag. Since the mid-1990s, financial institutions lobbied to change bankruptcy laws that were cutting into profits. In 1998, 2000, 2001, and in March 2005, when the final version passed the Senate, Biden championed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act that made declaring bankruptcy much more complicated and more challenging to obtain—legislation that MNBA and the credit-card industry applauded. A 2019 report by Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research found that the law cut the rate of household bankruptcies in half. There were about one million fewer household bankruptcy filings in the two years following the legislation than otherwise would have occurred under the old system. The study also pointed out that since credit card debt is not collateralized, it is the type of debt most likely to be discharged in bankruptcy, “thus the most responsive type of credit to changes in the bankruptcy code.”
Biden voted for the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994, enabling commercial banks to do business across state lines. He also voted for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, overturning the Glass-Steagall Act, Depression-era legislation separating commercial and investment banks, allowing banks to conduct business in the insurance and securities industries. These two laws contributed to the national expansion of MBNA’s credit card business and the Bank of America’s acquisition of MNBA in 2006 for an estimated $34.2 billion. In 2011, in the aftermath of the recession caused by the collapse of the subprime real estate market, f the U.S. Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations issued a report entitled “Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse.” That report credited the 1994 and 1999 banking legislation for consolidating the banking industry, creating “the rise of too-big-to-fail” U.S. financial institutions. During a 2016 speech at Georgetown University, Vice President Biden called his vote for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act “the worst vote I ever cast in my entire time in the U.S. Senate.”
In Profiles in Corruption, Schweizer commented that in 2008, when Obama selected Biden as his running mate, that decision “boosted the Biden family fortunes to another level. Now suddenly there were opportunities on a global scale.”[2]
Investigative reporter Jerome Corsi has agreed to write an exclusive series of stories for TGP to explore the exploits of the Biden crime family in depth. Since 2004, Corsi has published over 30 books on economics, history, and politics, including two #1 New York Times bestsellers. In 1972, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University. His book, Volume I in his Great Awakening Trilogy, The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation, received highly positive reviews from prominent climate scientists. Volume II, The Truth About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy: Exposing Woke Insanity in an Age of Disinformation, is scheduled for publication on November 14, 2023. Dr. Corsi has resumed podcasting on his new website TheTruthCentral.com, which is now on the Internet in its first development phase.
[1] Peter Schweizer, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite(New York: Harper, 2020), p. 50.
[2] Ibid., p. 54.
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