After nearly 50 years in elective office, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has accumulated a large collection of folksy (and phony) personal narratives that he rehashes whenever he feels the need to remind voters what an unpretentious, regular guy he is. A favorite is the one about how, just like us, he sits with his family around the dinner table at night, fretting about bills that need to be paid.
Sure he does. This is a guy who plagiarized his way through law school and then served two years on a county council in Delaware before getting elected to the U.S. Senate at the age of 30. The man has never held a real job or worked an honest day in his life. Somehow, however, during five decades of “public service,” he became a millionaire.
As we are now learning, his son Hunter also got rich without really working, trading on dad’s position – and influence and intercession – as senator and VP. Sweetheart deals in Ukraine and China are the most glaring examples, but there are plenty of others, foreign and domestic.
For instance, the old SimmonsCooper law firm in East Alton once staked Hunter and his brother $1 million in a hot-mess hedge-fund buyout. Gosh, that was nice of them to do, with no expectation of anything in return. Okay, maybe Papa Biden did use his position on the Senate judiciary committee to block proposed legislation to reform asbestos litigation at a time when SimmonsCooper was filing asbestos suits in Delaware in association with other-Biden-son Beau’s law firm, but that’s just a coincidence.
The Cooper of SimmonsCooper is Jeffrey Cooper, and the Cooper-Biden connection is worth exploring (helpful hint for J-school grads). From 2012 to 2014, Hunter Biden listed himself as a manager of Eudora Global, an investment firm set up by Jeffrey Cooper. Did Hunter do any work? Did he ever make an appearance at the office? Who cares? Just send him a check and he’ll show his appreciation somehow.
It looks like the chickens are coming home to roost, at last.