Agood many people think Joe Biden is two very different things at once: Too aged or too senile to function effectively as president — yet smart enough and wily enough to enrich himself and his family through political connections.
A story on The Washington Post website explored his family’s political connections by linking the president’s brother James — and by extension, the president himself — to the tobacco lawsuit bribery scandal of 2007.
It told of the president’s brother’s business relationship with Mississippi trial lawyer Dickie Scruggs, who went to prison for trying to bribe a judge; and former state auditor Steve Patterson, who had to resign his office in 1996 over a failure to pay car tag taxes.
Some of the information about the Biden connections was in Summit native Curtis Wilkie’s 2010 book about Scruggs, “The Fall of the House of Zeus.” Wilkie gave the Post permission to review his archives at the University of Mississippi for more details, and the newspaper also reviewed court documents and interviewed Scruggs, Patterson and others.
“What emerges is a tale of money, politics and influence, stretching from Mississippi to the corridors of power in Washington,” the story said. “It is, at its heart, a tale of the bond between the Biden brothers — one that is now being tested anew amid a flurry of subpoenas issued by Republican lawmakers.”
The product liability lawsuit against tobacco companies was an ideal intersection of money, politics and influence. In the late 1990s, Scruggs was close to a deal to settle the case and earn hundreds of millions of dollars in fees. But Congress was divided on a bill approving the settlement, and Scruggs believed Joe Biden, then a U.S. senator, was a key to victory.
Scruggs already knew James Biden, who ran a consulting firm in Washington, and paid him $100,000 in 1998 for advice on getting the bill passed. The future president had been skeptical of the tobacco settlement, but when the bill got to the Senate floor, Joe Biden was “one of its leading defenders — a significant victory for Scruggs,” the Post reported.
The bill died because Republicans, swayed by a tobacco industry lobbying blitz, opposed it. After that, Scruggs got around Congress by negotiating settlements with the states that totalled $248 billion — and brought his law firm $300 million or more.
The Bidens and Scruggs stayed in touch. The senator visited Oxford around 2000 to watch a football game in a skybox, and again in 2007 to discuss his new memoir at an Oxford bookstore near Scruggs’ law office.
By then, the FBI was wiretapping Scruggs and others, and recorded a conversation between James Biden and a Scruggs associate about starting a new consulting firm. In what must be manna from heaven for the president’s current investigators, the recording said Hunter Biden also would be part of the consulting firm.
The president’s contacts with Scruggs & Co. have not produced evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegal or wrongly profited from his brother’s business dealings. At the very least, though, as a senator, his change of mind on the tobacco settlement bill that ultimately failed to pass Congress is a signal that the $100,000 consulting fee Scruggs paid James Biden’s firm produced power and influence.
It’s not a good image for the president, though history is littered with politicians who changed their opinion in this manner. Republicans determined to impeach Biden can use this story to make him look bad, but so far it does not create a reason to remove him from office.
