![]() Others, including York, see more cynical motivations. “I kept climbing the escalator,” he explains, “and didn’t know how to get off.” In his 2021 memoir Beautiful Things, Hunter casts MBNA as an innocent but impactful move in a career - and a life - that spiraled out of control. And yet his time working for the bank offers an illuminating origin story for Hunter. His work there was, by all available accounts, perfectly legal. Hunter’s stint at MBNA predates the examples of influence peddling that have received the most attention during the current maelstrom. (The White House and Hunter Biden’s representatives declined to comment for this story.) Recently agreed to sit for a private deposition with the House next month. After months of insisting he testify before Congress in public, Hunter All of this has culminated in a moment of unprecedented scrutiny for Hunter - personal scandals, mounting legal troubles, and congressional investigations over his business dealings that threaten to taint his father’s presidency and could prompt a House impeachment vote. Over the intervening years, Hunter’s last name has become both a blessing and a curse, elevating him professionally at the cost of increasingly knotty conflict-of-interest questions. “He was a Biden, and we were in Delaware,” Crouse explained. While he had no first-hand knowledge of how or why Hunter was hired, Crouse said “nobody was really surprised” when he was brought onboard. lobbyist between 19, told me that Hunter had no role in the bank’s lobbying activities.) (Joe Crouse, who served as MBNA’s top D.C. Over that same period, his father helped aĪggressively championed by MBNA and other credit card companies become law. That year, MBNA rehired him as a consultant and kept paying him until 2005. In 2001, Hunter left government and co-founded a lobbying firm. He worked full-time at the bank for more than two years, entering its management training program in late 1996 and exiting as a senior vice president in 1998 for a job in Washington at the Commerce Department. The move to MBNA thrust Hunter into a small, chummy world where it would prove impossible to escape his father’s shadow. In part detailing what he termed Hunter’s “mystery job.” Later trouble him with the left when he ran for president.) After investigating these ties, in 1998 conservative journalist Byron York derided Biden in The American Spectator as “The Senator from MBNA,” Biden was friendly with MBNA officials, including Cawley, and a reliable ally for their issues. Over the course of Joe Biden’s congressional career, MBNA executives showered him with more than $200,000 in campaign donations, the largest amount in his war chest tied to any one company. MBNA was then the largest independent credit card issuer in the world, and perhaps the most plum professional gig available in Delaware. In doing so, he settled into a pattern that would last the rest of his life, taking opportunities and putting himself in positions marked by good money and terrible political optics. Hunter ultimately took the job with MBNA. It was the place where he was born and raised, but also where his mother and 1-year-old sister died in a terrible car crash that nearly killed Hunter and his older brother, Beau. “I don’t belong there.” But for Hunter, Delaware was in his bones. “I don’t want to live in Delaware,” she explained to him. The Bidens visited their graves on the grounds of Saint Joseph on the Brandywine Roman Catholic Church in Wilmington, Delaware, where they also attended Mass with family.Hunter lobbied hard for this new, well-paying opportunity. The date marked the 50th anniversary of the car crash that killed Biden's first wife, Neilia Biden, and their 13-month-old daughter, Naomi. ![]() ![]() Joseph on the Brandywine Catholic Church in Wilmington, Delaware, on Dec. President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden walk between tombstones to attend Mass at St. The mother and daughter died in 1972 when a tractor-trailer struck their car while Neilia was taking their children to pick out a Christmas tree. 18 when they visited the graves of his first wife and baby daughter on the 50th anniversary of their deaths in a car crash.īiden was joined by first lady Jill Biden, their daughter, Ashley, and other family members for his annual visit to the gravesites of Neilia Biden and their 13-month-old daughter, Naomi. President Joe Biden and his family marked a somber anniversary on Dec. ![]()
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