As Dems Panic over 2024, Washington Post Dredges Up Biden Brothers’ Ties to Corrupt Mississippi Lawyer and Associates

S unday’s eye-popping 4,000-word Washington Post report on Biden corruption ties is, to my mind, more indication that a serious move is under way within the top ranks of the Democratic Party establishment to nudge President Joe Biden into bowing out of the 2024 presidential race.

In the past month, we’ve seen a second Hunter Biden indictment, one that extensively details the tax evasion and lavish spending by the president’s son, a story that — however much the prosecutor labored to keep the president’s name out of it — cannot obscure that Hunter and other Bidens made millions by trading on the now-president’s political influence. We’ve further seen remarks by the Obama-whisperer, David Axelrod, to the effect that President Biden should consider bowing out of his reelection bid — and then more recently adding that the president’s record-low approval rating is “very, very dark” news for his campaign. And just this weekend, we found an unidentified source “familiar with [former President Barack Obama’s] thinking” telling the Wall Street Journal that Obama knows the presidential race is going to be “close,” “feels the Democrats very well could lose,” and worries that “the alternative” — Donald Trump — “is pretty dangerous for democracy.”

This, mind you, was contemporaneous with Hunter Biden’s defying a subpoena for deposition testimony issued by two House committees, for which the House has signaled it will hold him in contempt, and with a full House vote to formally approve an impeachment investigation of the president.

The timing of the Post’s report is thus intriguing. For the president, it will sting for several reasons. First, it’s the Post, a pillar of the Democratic administration’s Praetorian Guard — this is not just more brickbats hurled by House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) and the other Republicans investigating Biden-family influence-peddling. Second, the subject matter of the report goes back to the start of Joe Biden’s Senate career in the early Seventies (yes, the family business goes back decades), meaning the Post has intentionally dredged up unseemly details about Biden’s past that have been vaguely known for decades but that Biden must have figured were long forgotten. Third, the length of the report shows that the Post had to have spent weeks reporting its story; the paper could have dropped this report at any time, but it chose to do so now, when the president and his campaign are reeling.

The full report is worth everyone’s time. To summarize, Joe and Jim Biden, as well as Jim’s wife, Sara, have long-standing relationships with legendary (and legendarily sleazy) plaintiff’s lawyer Richard (“Dickie”) Scruggs and his close associates in Mississippi Democratic circles, particularly Steve Patterson (a former head of the Mississippi Democratic Party and top aide to Biden’s friend and colleague, the late segregationist senator John Stennis [D., Miss.]), and a lawyer named Tim Balducci.

Scruggs, Patterson, and Balducci were eventually convicted and sentenced to federal prison in a plot to bribe a judge. At the same time that the bribery plot took place, Patterson and Balducci, with Scruggs’s encouragement, were on the verge of opening a consultancy and legal partnership with Jim and Sara Biden — the latter is a lawyer and former congressional staffer. It was contemplated that Hunter Biden would also be a participant. The partnership was scuttled by the bribery scheme. Jim Biden was secretly recorded by the FBI during the corruption investigation, but he was never implicated in the bribery scheme and was not charged — nor, apparently, was he interviewed in connection with the case.

But that’s later — around 2007–08. The beginning of the relationship goes back decades, when, through Senator Stennis, Senator Biden became acquainted with Patterson — his path, and brother Jim’s, to Mississippi Democratic Party connections, which mobilized for Joe’s short-lived presidential campaigns in 1987–88 and 2007–08.

In the early Nineties, Patterson introduced Jim Biden to Scruggs. The Post relates that Jim was hoping to work in connection with Scruggs’s highly profitable cases against asbestos manufacturers. That did not come to pass, but Jim finally scored in connection with Scruggs’s crusade against cigarette manufacturers (as the Post notes, that crusade was dramatized, with Scruggs’s help, in the 1999 movie The Insider).

Scruggs theorized that Big Tobacco was ripping off Medicare by concealing data about the addictiveness and lethality of cigarettes. He was trying to cobble together a gargantuan federal settlement that would have netted his firm over $100 million in fees. Such a settlement would call for antitrust-law waivers, so it needed congressional approval. At the time, Joe Biden was the powerful chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was a skeptic about the settlement, publicly asserting that he was not convinced it was a good deal for the public and predicting that, without major improvements, it would go “down the tubes.”

In mid 1997, Patterson urged Scruggs to speak with Senator Biden and other naysayers. After a meeting with the senator, Scruggs calculated that he would need help winning him over. So he turned to Jim and Sara Biden, who were running a consultancy called “Lion Hall.”

Scruggs retained Lion Hall, through which he paid Jim Biden $100,000 in $10,000 installments, beginning in April 1988. In the meantime — mirabile dictu! — Senator Joe Biden went “from being one of [the tobacco settlement’s] biggest critics to becoming one of its leading defenders — a significant victory for Scruggs,” as the Post report puts it.

(For readers with a good memory, Jim and Sara maintained a Lion Hall bank account. In 2017, after Hunter pressured his partners at CEFC, an arm of the Communist Chinese regime, to pay the Bidens $5 million — warning that he was sitting with his father and that they wanted answers — Hunter took a $400,000 chunk of the haul and transferred $150,000 to Jim and Sara Biden’s Lion Hall account. From that $150,000, Sara transferred $40,000 to another account on which she wrote a $40,000 check to Joe Biden — sounds an awful lot like “ten percent for the big guy,” no? — which was described as a “loan repayment.”)

The Bidens would, of course, point out that there is no evidence they discussed the tobacco deal, that Senator Biden’s support for the deal coincided with the settlement amount’s being increased, and that the deal fell through in any event (as a result of Republican opposition). None of that alters the facts that (a) Joe Biden changed his position while the lawyer pleading with him to change his position was paying Biden’s brother $100,000, (b) that lawyer, with whom Joe Biden developed a fruitful relationship, was later convicted in an unrelated federal bribery scheme, and (c) Joe Biden’s repeated claims never to have discussed business with his brother Jim (and his son Hunter) were never plausible and have been shown to be untrue.

The Post further details that, at roughly the same time Jim and Sara Biden were receiving money from Scruggs while Scruggs was trying to influence Senator Biden, Jim and Sara were elsewhere touting that clients would profit from their connections to Senator Biden. Specifically, the law firm of Leonard Barrack filed a lawsuit alleging that Jim Biden assured the firm that if it retained Lion Hall, Jim promised to “generate business for the Barrack Law Firm through his family name and his resemblance to his brother.” (The implication is that Jim was referring to the strong physical resemblance he bears to his famous sibling, who is six years older.) The Post reports that Sara Biden countersued the Barrack firm and that the matter was “settled confidentially.” (As we’ve observed, nondisclosure agreements confidentially settling civil litigation are common and unremarkable . . . except when Donald Trump does them, in which case Democrats and the Post scorn that they are “hush-money arrangements,” which become fodder for an elected Democratic district attorney to file an indictment absurdly charging 34 felony counts of business-record falsification.)

Despite the failure to reach a federal tobacco settlement, Scruggs hit the jackpot by cutting separate deals with the states. The combined $248 billion settlement netted his firm over $300 million in fees. Scruggs maintained his close ties to the Bidens, hosting Joe at the iconic Grove and then in a skybox for an Ole Miss football game; flying Joe on his private jet to a fundraiser in Jackson in 2000; and in 2007, helping launch Joe’s bid for the Democratic nomination — Joe did a talk about his just-released memoir at a bookstore around the corner from Scruggs’s law office in Oxford, Miss., and then a fundraiser at the nearby University Club.

In the interim, Jim Biden began talks about a new consulting and law firm that he and his wife hoped to start together with Scruggs’s two close associates: Patterson (who had had to resign as a state auditor in 1996 after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor tax charge) and Balducci. The firm was to be known as Patterson, Balducci & Biden PLLC Law Group. As a 24-page promotional booklet explained, Sara Biden was the named partner because she’s a lawyer (Jim is not), but besides noting her Washington background, the marketing materials took pains to add, “In 1995, Sara married Jim Biden, brother of Senator Joe Biden (D) Delaware.”

Alas, simultaneously with the preparation to launch the firm, Jim and Sara Biden’s partners bribed a judge. The scheme drew an FBI probe, resulting in some recordings of Jim Biden (which do not evince knowledge of the bribery scheme on Jim’s part).

So let’s get to these gory details. Scruggs had a big case in front of Mississippi judge Henry Lackey, in which his firm stood to rake in $26.5 million in fees if successful. Balducci floated to the judge the idea that, after Judge Lackey retired, Balducci could hire him as “of counsel” to his firm. Lackey understandably believed this was an attempt to bribe him, so he reported Balducci’s offer to the FBI and federal prosecutors. The FBI opened an investigation and got wiretap coverage on Balducci’s phone.

Around the same time in 2007 (i.e., five weeks after Joe Biden’s above-described presidential campaign fundraiser in Oxford), Jim and Balducci discussed the imminent creation of their firm. Later that day, Balducci met Judge Lackey and, not knowing Lackey was a covert FBI informant, handed him the first of two envelopes containing $20,000 in cash.

After passing the envelope, Balducci went right to Scruggs’s office, where the pair discussed, among other things, the formation of Balducci’s and Patterson’s new firm with the Bidens. Scruggs was told the firm would not only have Sara Biden as a named partner but would also feature the involvement of both Jim and Hunter Biden. Subsequently, in a phone call recorded by the FBI, Balducci reported to Jim Biden regarding his discussion with Scruggs about the new firm. After detailing for Jim how he’d told Scruggs, “we had formalized our relationship with you guys,” and that “Hunter was going to be involved and you [Jim] were going to be involved,” Balducci related Scruggs’s reaction: “With the political connections you guys are putting together now, I know you’re going to do really, really well.” Later the same day, Jim Biden reported that he, too, had had a “great conversation” with Scruggs, who’d opined, “I think you can make a lot of money.”

On the verge of the firm’s being publicly announced, the FBI braced Balducci about paying off Judge Lackey. Balducci quickly agreed to turn, becoming a Bureau informant. He wore a wire for the government on visits to Scruggs’s office, recording their conversations. Not long afterward, the FBI executed a search warrant at Scruggs’s office, seizing computer hard drives. Scruggs and his son, Zach, turned themselves in to federal authorities the following day.

Dickie Scruggs served five years in federal prison. Patterson, Balducci, and Zach Scruggs were also convicted on various charges and did jail time. Jim Biden was not accused of wrongdoing and, the Post says, was never questioned by the government in connection with the case. Not long after the arrests, Democrats nominated Senator Joe Biden to run as presidential nominee Barack Obama’s vice president.

I imagine that the House impeachment investigators will be interested in the Bidens’ dealings with Scruggs and his associates. More intriguing, I think, is why the Post published it now. Maybe the paper was just waiting for House investigators to leave town for a four-week vacation. Or maybe it decided this was a propitious time to add to media-Democrat-complex alarm regarding President Biden’s 2024 prospects.