The MBNA tales: When Joe and Hunter Biden were super cozy with a Delaware bank
Timothy P. Carney
Video Embed
“My son did nothing wrong,” Joe Biden has repeatedly said. Of course, Hunter Biden used his name and his access to his powerful father to make tons of money and land massive clients. This is corrupt. Even if Joe Biden never altered policy in order to benefit Hunter or his clients, Hunter’s business practices are corrupt, and it’s damning that Joe Biden approves.
As Hunter goes to trial on all sorts of federal charges, and as the White House swears that the president has not had anything to do with Hunter’s corrupt businesses, it’s worth turning back the clock and recalling how tightly interwoven Hunter’s and Joe’s undertakings have been.
HUNTER BIDEN PLEA DEAL COLLAPSES IN COURT AS JUDGE THROWS ‘CURVEBALL’
Let’s start in 1996 when Joe Biden easily won reelection. During that campaign, he sold his home to an executive at the Delaware-based credit-card company MBNA for the asking price (which American Spectator investigative reporter Byron York argued was above market value), and the bank reimbursed the buyer for $330,000 of moving expenses. That’s a bit shady, but Biden pointed out that the house appraised for what it sold for.
Here’s where the Joe-MBNA-Hunter connection gets harder to deny. Sen. Biden was the champion at the time of a bankruptcy reform that financial institutions like MBNA loved. MBNA in turn was Sen. Biden’s largest source of campaign funds in that reelection.
York reported: “According to Federal Election Commission records, MBNA became by far Biden’s biggest single source of contributions. Company employees gave him $62,850 in the 1996 cycle, while the second-biggest contributor gave just $21,000.”
Senator Biden and MBNA in 1996 formed very tight ties, it is clear. Then after the election, Hunter was roped in.
Hunter graduated law school in May 1996, and within a few months, he landed a job at MBNA. Less than two years after graduating law school, by age 28, Hunter was a senior vice president at MBNA, which, again, was his father’s largest donor.
Then Hunter passed through the revolving door to work at Bill Clinton’s Commerce Department on “electronic commerce issues,” according to the New York Times. After Clinton left office, Hunter cashed out, returning to MBNA as a consultant on the very same issues he had regulated at the Commerce Department.
In the years Hunter was a consultant for MBNA, MBNA was once again Senator Biden’s largest source of campaign funds — easily. Employees and executives at MBNA gave Biden more than $94,000, equal to the sum of the next two sources combined, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
It stretches credulity to argue that while Senator Biden was the chief champion of a bankruptcy bill sought bill by MBNA, and while MBNA was consistently the top donor to Senator Biden’s campaigns, Hunter Biden’s employment as a 20-something senior vice president at MBNA and then again as a revolving-door consultant at MBNA was a coincidence.
Yet neither Joe nor Hunter Biden has acknowledged that anything was improper in this relationship. This should inform everyone analyzing Joe Biden’s claims that there was no corruption or cronyism in Hunter’s more recent business dealings.