How Joe Biden Got Paid

“Where’s the money?” Joe Biden asked after being accused of corruption.

The answer is emerging in a pattern of financial transfers uncovered by the House Oversight Committee which has been looking into the complicated affairs of the Biden family. The investigation has previously uncovered over 20 shell companies set up by the family. This complicated web allowed money to be moved from overseas and to various family members.

But until recently there was no clear evidence that the money was going to Joe Biden.

There was ample evidence that Hunter and James Biden had been in the business of cashing in on their access to Joe Biden. And Joe Biden had helped them by showing up at restaurants and joining in the phone calls involving clients and business partners. Emails and testimony show that Hunter and James Biden traded on access to Joe, and Joe Biden, who had spent most of his life in politics, could not have been unaware of how family members were profiting from it.

But where’s the money?

In a 2019 text message, Hunter Biden wrote, “I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family Fro (sic) 30 years. It’s really hard. But don’t worry unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary.” What did Hunter mean by that reference?

In September, the House Oversight Committee found that James Biden, Joe’s brother, had taken six figure loans from Americore: a company that was trying to turn around failing hospitals which had brought him in to monetize the Biden connection. On the same day that Americore wired $200,000 to James Biden’s bank account, he wrote a $200,000 check to Joe.

This alleged loan repayment was followed by another example uncovered more recently.

On July 30th, 2017, Hunter Biden angrily threatened his Chinese business partner in a WhatsApp message warning that, “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.” He further invoked his father to warn that, “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”

In early August, the Chinese sent $5 million which was moved to a Hunter Biden company, $150,000 of which was sent to James Biden, and his wife Sara, and she moved $50,000 into a personal account and sent a $40,000 check to Joe Biden marked “loan repayment.”

A loan repayment may sound innocent but, together with the Hunter Biden text, may tell us how the Biden family business worked. Rather than directly investing in family enterprises, Joe Biden might have invested in the family members themselves in the form of personal loans. Those loans were used to finance new business opportunities that monetized access to Joe Biden. When payments came in, Joe Biden got his cut in the form of a “loan repayment”.

On the surface such an arrangement may have looked clean. Rather than sending money from shell companies to Joe Biden (a move that would have almost certainly set off a variety of red flags), the shell companies directed the money to entities controlled by other family members, they moved the money into personal accounts and then used those accounts to pay Joe Biden.

Were Joe Biden’s loans interest free? Considering that Hunter was complaining about family members paying half their salaries to his father, the interest free loan seems less likely.

While family loans have to be disclosed to the IRS, they don’t have to appear in federal disclosures. For example, the House Ethics Committee states that, “loans made by the filer on which the filer is charging interest must be disclosed, unless the borrower is the spouse, parent, sibling, or child of the filer.” Biden had found a way to take money and avoid disclosing it.

Shady loans have always been at the heart of Biden Inc. Hunter had taken in a $250,000 loan from China right before Joe Biden launched his presidential campaign. The debt, which listed Joe Biden’s home, was then transferred over to a lawyer he met at a fundraiser for his dad. In 2021, some unknown figure gave Hunter Biden a $2.6 million “loan” to cover his IRS tax bill. But Hunter isn’t actually paying that unknown someone’s loan back. At least not yet.

We don’t know where all the money comes from, but we have some insight into where it ends up

The best way to think about Biden Inc. is that Joe may have been ‘staking’ family members who then went out and used his name and even his personal appearances to do what he could not do personally. The product, as we have already learned from previous messages, was Joe Biden, but he was also the personal bank financing the familial exploitation of his office.

That may have been why the IRS whistleblowers revealed that they were banned from looking at Joe Biden’s financial affairs. The crucial interchange was taking place in the personal bank accounts which then may have laundered the cash sent to the shell companies.

Joe Biden’s actions could be seen as investing money in a family business, but the problem is that the family business was public office and that the method of investing it conveniently avoided scrutiny. By moving money from China through three shell companies followed by a personal account, Biden’s family members were disguising the origin of the money paid to Joe.

The next question to ask would be whether Joe Biden had formal family loan agreements and how many personal loans he had extended to family members. Those would be the questions that the media would be asking any Republican politician with a similar financial profile. Currently the media is stirring up speculation about Speaker Mike Johnson because he only has $1,000 in his personal bank account, but won’t ask Joe Biden about all those checks.

As the ‘Big Guy’ Joe Biden was informally the epicenter of a family business that he has claimed to know nothing about, but these payments show that he directly benefited from it.

When Joe Biden met his son’s clients or joined phone conferences, he stood to cash in on them. Whatever the nature of the loans and the terms of repayment, Joe Biden was aware that the ability of family members to pay him money depended on him making himself ‘available’. The loan repayments take Joe Biden’s personal interactions with family clients and business partners from a favor done for family members to a financial arrangement with family members.

We now know not only “where’s the money”, but a big part of how Biden Inc. worked.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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