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The alleged arrangements would be some of the closest known links between a Biden relative and a foreign government.
James Biden, brother of President Joe Biden, arrives for a deposition before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees on President Biden's impeachment inquiry in Washington on February 21, 2024. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
By Ben Schreckinger
04/28/2024 07:00 AM EDT
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New details about Jim Biden’s foreign fundraising efforts are spilling out in a Kentucky bankruptcy court, where recent testimony indicates that President Joe Biden’s brother partnered with Qatari government officials in his quest to find money for U.S. health care ventures.
The sworn testimony by fund manager Michael Lewitt, a former business partner of Jim Biden’s, attests that two companies that facilitated the efforts were part-owned by “members of the Qatari government.”
One company named in the testimony partnered directly with Jim Biden in the multi-year fundraising efforts.
The second company provided financial backing for a series of loans that a hospital chain paid Jim Biden to arrange, according to documents and testimony Lewitt submitted in the course of the federal bankruptcy proceedings.
If substantiated, the alleged arrangements would constitute some of the closest known financial links between a relative of President Joe Biden and a foreign government.
The alleged arrangements stem from an effort by Jim Biden to raise money from Qatari sources for ventures in the U.S. beginning in the months after his older brother left the vice presidency. At the time, the tiny, gas-rich nation faced a financial blockade from its neighbors and was spending lavishly to shore up its political standing in the West.
Public records and emails obtained by POLITICO offer a window on fundraising efforts in which Jim Biden invoked his ties to older brother and sought workarounds to restrictions on international money movements. Transactions related to the efforts are also at the heart of a recently-settled fraud case brought by the SEC and are being scrutinized as part of a federal criminal investigation in South Florida.
Much about the efforts remains unknown, and the White House, the Qatari Embassy, and a representative for Jim Biden all did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Jim Biden suggested to congressional investigators in February that his fundraising efforts stalled for lack of viable projects to back. But the previously unreported testimony by fund manager Michael Lewitt about the ownership of the two companies — the Platinum Group USA and Obermeyer Engineering Consulting — indicates that Jim Biden forged closer ties to Qatar’s government than previously understood.
Lewitt, a former business partner of Jim Biden’s, is likely to face questions about the efforts when he sits for a planned interview with House impeachment inquiry investigators.
No date has been announced for the interview, and Lewitt declined repeated requests to comment further on his courtroom testimony.
In June 2017, Qatar’s neighbors, led by Saudi Arabia, ganged up and cut diplomatic ties with the country, citing its alleged support for terrorism. The ensuing financial and physical blockade threw the country — a peninsula that juts out from Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf — into a sustained crisis.
In response, the country’s rulers began showering well-connected Westerners with gifts and financial benefits, sometimes in the form of investment funding. The Qatari influence offensive strengthened the country’s ties to the U.S. and Europe but has also led to corruption scandals, including the European Parliament’s sprawling Qatargate fiasco.
Around the time of the blockade, Jim Biden was embarking on a foray into the health care business in which he worked closely with troubled hospital chain Americore.
To raise money for the company, he teamed up with the Platinum Group’s CEO, a Florida businessman named Amer Rustom who has boasted of his ties to officials in the Middle East, and Lewitt.
A hedge fund manager known for authoring a popular finance newsletter, the Credit Strategist, Lewitt has written that he pursued graduate studies under the legendary literary critic Harold Bloom at Yale, where he rubbed shoulders with Italian novelist Umberto Eco and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida before embarking on a finance career at........