Jim Biden | |
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Born | James Brian Biden May 16, 1949 |
Education | University of Delaware |
Relatives | See Biden family |
James Brian "Jim" Biden (born May 16, 1949) [1] is an American former nightclub owner, insurance broker, political consultant, and fundraiser. Biden is a brother of Joe Biden, the 46th and current president of the United States. He was his brother's chief fundraiser for his 1972 Senate campaign. [2]
James Biden studied at the University of Delaware for over four semesters but left without earning a degree. [2]
When Joe Biden first ran for the Senate in 1972, James' role was as a fundraiser, according to The Washington Post . [3]
Shortly after his brother's first Senate victory, he went into the nightclub business. He and four partners ran a restaurant-lounge called Seasons Change. Finding success, he then opened another club called The Other Side. [2]
James has been described in The Washington Post as a "potential liability" for Joe Biden. "His repeated efforts at business deals — sometimes using the family name or enlisting Hunter (Biden) — have not infrequently ended in recrimination, bankruptcy or lawsuits." [3]
On November 8, 2023, Republicans in the United States House of Representatives subpoenaed James Biden along with Hunter Biden, requiring them to appear before the House Oversight Committee to provide deposition, according to the Associated Press. [4] The issuance of the subpoenas came as House Republicans looked for evidence of influence-peddling within the Biden family. [5] An attorney for James Biden said the subpoenas were not justified, while an attorney for Hunter Biden called them a "political stunt" based on "debunked claims." [4] The Washington Post reported that James and his wife, Sara, were recorded by the FBI in a 1998 bribery investigation related to a well-known Mississippi trial attorney, Richard Scruggs, who was contemplating a business partnership with James Biden. [6]
Executive privilege is the right of the president of the United States and other members of the executive branch to maintain confidential communications under certain circumstances within the executive branch and to resist some subpoenas and other oversight by the legislative and judicial branches of government in pursuit of particular information or personnel relating to those confidential communications. The right comes into effect when revealing the information would impair governmental functions. Neither executive privilege nor the oversight power of Congress is explicitly mentioned in the United States Constitution. However, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that executive privilege and congressional oversight each are a consequence of the doctrine of the separation of powers, derived from the supremacy of each branch in its area of constitutional activity.
Contempt of Congress is the misdemeanor act of obstructing the work of the United States Congress or one of its committees. Historically, the bribery of a U.S. senator or U.S. representative was considered contempt of Congress. In modern times, contempt of Congress has generally applied to the refusal to comply with a subpoena issued by a congressional committee or subcommittee—usually seeking to compel either testimony or the production of requested documents.
Robert Hunter Biden is an American attorney and businessman. He is the second son of U.S. President Joe Biden and his first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden. Biden was a founding board member of BHR Partners, a Chinese investment company, in 2013, and later served on the board of Burisma Holdings, one of the largest private natural gas producers in Ukraine, from 2014 until his term expired in April 2019. He has worked as a lobbyist and legal representative for lobbying firms, a hedge fund principal, and a venture capital and private equity fund investor.
Joe Biden, the 46th and current president of the United States, has family members who are prominent in law, education, activism and politics. Biden's immediate family became the first family of the United States on his inauguration on January 20, 2021. His immediate family circle was also the second family of the United States from 2009 to 2017, when Biden was vice president. Biden's family is mostly descended from the British Isles, with most of their ancestors coming from Ireland and England, and a smaller number descending from the French.
James Richardson Comer Jr. is an American politician from the Commonwealth of Kentucky who represents the state's 1st congressional district in the United States House of Representatives. A member of the Republican Party, he has served in the Congress of the United States of America since 2016, during the 114th United States Congress. He previously served in the Kentucky House of Representatives and also served as the Agriculture Commissioner of Kentucky.
This is a timeline of events in the first half of 2019 related to investigations into the many suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies relating to the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. It follows the timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, both before and after July 2016, until November 8, 2016, the transition, the first and second halves of 2017, the first and second halves of 2018, and followed by the second half of 2019, 2020, and 2021.
The Trump–Ukraine scandal was a political scandal that arose primarily from the discovery of U.S. President Donald Trump's alleged attempts to coerce Ukraine into investigating a Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory, and thus potentially damage 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden. Trump enlisted surrogates in and outside his administration, including personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr, to pressure Ukraine and other governments to cooperate in supporting conspiracy theories concerning US politics. Trump blocked payment of a congressionally-mandated $400 million military aid package, in an attempt to obtain quid pro quo cooperation from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Contacts were established between the White House and government of Ukraine, culminating in a call between Trump and Zelenskyy on July 25, 2019.
The inquiry process which preceded the first impeachment of Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States, was initiated by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on September 24, 2019, after a whistleblower alleged that Donald Trump may have abused the power of the presidency. Trump was accused of withholding military aid as a means of pressuring newly elected president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky to pursue investigations of Joe Biden and his son Hunter and to investigate a conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind interference in the 2016 presidential election. More than a week after Trump had put a hold on the previously approved aid, he made these requests in a July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president, which the whistleblower said was intended to help Trump's reelection bid.
The first impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, began in the U.S. Senate on January 16, 2020, and concluded with his acquittal on February 5. After an inquiry between September and November 2019, President Trump was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives on December 18, 2019; the articles of impeachment charged him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. It was the third impeachment trial of a U.S. president, preceded by those of Andrew Johnson and of Bill Clinton.
As part of a large and baseless conspiracy theory, Donald Trump posited that Barack Obama had spied on him, which Trump described as "the biggest political crime in American history, by far." The series of accusations have been nicknamed Obamagate. Obama had served as President of the United States from 2009 until 2017, when Trump succeeded him; Trump served as president until 2021.
The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of false allegations that Joe Biden, while he was vice president of the United States, improperly withheld a loan guarantee and took a bribe to pressure Ukraine into firing prosecutor general Viktor Shokin to prevent a corruption investigation of Ukrainian gas company Burisma and to protect his son, Hunter Biden, who was on the Burisma board. As part of efforts by Donald Trump and his campaign in the Trump–Ukraine scandal, which led to Trump's first impeachment, these falsehoods were spread in an attempt to damage Joe Biden's reputation and chances during the 2020 presidential campaign, and later in an effort to impeach him.
The 46th and incumbent U.S. president Joe Biden has seen multiple efforts by some members of the Republican Party to impeach him. An impeachment inquiry into Biden was launched in September 2023, without a vote, by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who designated three House committees led by James Comer, chairman of House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. A number of prominent Republican lawmakers, along with Donald Trump and some of his political allies, have indicated the motivation behind efforts to impeach Biden is also driven by resentment over Trump's previous two impeachments.
Tristan Leavitt is an American attorney who is the president of Empower Oversight as of March 2023. He formerly served in several roles at the Merit Systems Protection Board, including member, acting chair, and general counsel.
This is a timeline of major events in second half of 2019 related to the investigations into the myriad links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies that are suspected of being inappropriate, relating to the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. It follows the timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections before and after July 2016 up until election day November 8, and the transition, the first and second halves of 2017, the first and second halves of 2018, and the first half of 2019, but precedes that of 2020 and 2021.
In October 2020, a controversy arose involving data from a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden. The owner of a Delaware computer shop, John Paul Mac Isaac, said that the laptop had been left by a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden. Mac Isaac also stated that he is legally blind and could not be sure whether the man was actually Hunter Biden. Three weeks before the 2020 United States presidential election, the New York Post published a front-page story that presented emails from the laptop, alleging they showed corruption by Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee and Hunter Biden's father. According to the Post, the story was based on information provided to Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney of incumbent president and candidate Donald Trump, by Mac Isaac. Forensic analysis later authenticated some of the emails from the laptop, including one of the two emails used by the Post in their initial reporting.
The United States House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government is a select subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee created by the House on January 10, 2023. Established to investigate alleged abuses of federal authority, including collusion between federal agencies and private sector entities to suppress conservative viewpoints, the committee has broad authority to subpoena law enforcement and national security agencies, including with regard to ongoing criminal investigations.
On January 9, 2023, CBS News reported that attorneys for U.S. President Joe Biden discovered classified government documents in his former office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., and in his personal residence in Wilmington, Delaware, dating to his time in the United States Senate and his vice presidency in the Obama administration. The number of documents was later revealed to be between 25 and 30. By June 2023, classified documents from Biden's Senate tenure were discovered in materials donated to the University of Delaware.
The United States House Oversight Committee investigation into the Biden family is an ongoing investigation since January 2023 by the United States House of Representatives into US President Joe Biden and his family. The investigation was initiated on January 11, and includes examination of the foreign business activities of Biden's son, Hunter, and brother, James, as well as Twitter's involvement in the Hunter Biden laptop controversy.
The Weiss special counsel investigation is an ongoing criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of U.S. President Joe Biden. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the appointment of David Weiss, U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware, as the special counsel on August 11, 2023, three days after Weiss requested such authority.
On September 12, 2023, Kevin McCarthy, then-speaker of the United States House of Representatives, announced an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. The inquiry was conducted by the House's Judiciary, Oversight and Ways and Means committees. James Comer, chairman of the Oversight Committee, was named to lead the investigation.