Hunter Biden and his lawyer, Marc LoPresti, maintain that the deal was fair, given the state of the company. But people close to Park say he was emotionally fragile and felt indebted to the Bidens, which put him in a vulnerable position.
Finally, in 2008, the economy collapsed, after which it emerged that Allen Stanford, whose firm was soliciting investors for one of Paradigm’s funds, was running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. While the fund itself was solid, investors were spooked. In 2010, Paradigm filed for voluntary liquidation. “It was a thicket,” Hunter Biden told me. “Every time you thought you saw a way out, there would be another road block.”
November 16, 2013
"The Fall of the House of Moon /Sex rituals, foreign spies, Biden offspring, and the Unification Church's war-torn first family."
A long article by Mariah Blake in The New Republic. Excerpt:
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Okaaaaay. Why does this make me think of L.Ron and his Dianetics? (Great name for a band! Thanks, Dave Barry!)
You didn't earn that. Is it any wonder Democrat politicians feign hostility toward hedge funds as undeserving and owing the government something when they and their idiot spawn cash in so easily in exchange for access?
At the time, Biden was mulling a 2008 presidential bid. According to sworn statements from people involved in the deal, he worried that his son Hunter’s lobbying career could hurt his campaign and asked his brother James to find Hunter a new line of work. (Hunter Biden disputed this account in an interview with The New Republic.) James Biden approached a business associate named Anthony Lotito, who connected him with James Park’s camp, and the three men began negotiating to buy Paradigm.
On its face, the deal looked solid. Paradigm’s marketing materials boasted $1.5 billion under management and generous returns, and Lotito believed they could quickly expand into union pension funds, which tend to have close ties to democratic politicians. So Lotito and the Bidens pushed ahead. In the spring of 2006, they signed an agreement that gave them a controlling stake in the company, in return for $21 million in cash, to be paid in six months. Hunter Biden—who had no financial industry experience—was named CEO, with a salary of $1.2 million. But it was clear that they needed James Park’s hedge-fund expertise, which meant confronting him about his cocaine habit. According to three sources close to the negotiations, James Biden visited James Park and persuaded him to seek treatment at a center in Florida.
All kinds of interesting things happen in America every day.
Why do I have the feeling that every single thing that happens anywhere between Boston and Northern Virginia every single moment of every single day is nothing more than a fraudulent intrigue perpetrated by graduates of Harvard and Columbia?
Mariah Blake is a reporter for Mother Jones. Her work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and Washington Monthly, among other publications.
My, how TNR has changed! In the TNR of yore, writing for the Nation & Mother Jones would have earned one exile from its pages. The old TNR would have excised such lefty tropes as "anti-communist bile" from the article, too.
Notice that the article makes great hay of the Unification Church's relations with American conservatives. While it's true that Rev. Moon's teachings were more in line with social conservatism, the article makes clear that he & his family seemed to be equal opportunity palm greasers.
And, yes, CL, I do wonder how the children of the high-placed, who seem unable to find their butt cheeks with both hands, all seem to wind up with Ivy League degrees. You don't think that the Ivies auction off their prestige to the highest bidder, do you? Naaaah! Can't be!
Clinton-bomb thrown at the Bidens? I wonder how long The New Republic's been sitting on this? Since 2010, or earlier? The Biden connection isn't particularly meaty - ugly, but not illegal or anything other than venal and crony-capitalist crass. It gets its real nastiness by being balled up in the cult-craziness of the rest of the mess.
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