When Hunter Biden left his job in Bill Clinton’s Commerce Department in 2001, the then-senator’s son passed through the revolving door and launched two lobbying firms together with his father’s longtime fundraiser and campaign adviser, William Oldaker.
The firms won their clients earmarks from Sen. Joe Biden and otherwise lobbied Senate committees on which Biden served.
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As Biden continues to deny that he has any business dealings with his indicted lobbyist son, Hunter Biden’s lobbying work in the early 2000s tells a different story.
Hunter Biden’s story from 2001 to 2008 reads almost like the tale of any other revolving-door Washington lobbyist: He held a political appointment in the Commerce Department regulating electronic commerce, and then in January 2001, when Clinton left office, Hunter Biden cashed out and launched a lobbying firm to represent clients facing the same sort of regulations he had just spent years crafting.
The difference: Most lobbyists aren’t the son of a sitting senator. Hunter Biden obviously knew that his last name would bring in clients, as he named his first firm Oldaker & Biden. Oldaker had been a fundraiser for the elder Biden for 25 years, according to a 2008 article in the Wilmington News Journal.
Lobbying Congress while your father is a senator together with your father’s longtime fundraiser is quite obviously monetizing your father’s political power.
On March 1, 2001, Hunter Biden first registered as a lobbyist, with file-sharing service Napster as his client. One lobbying filing, from Oldaker & Biden, says Hunter Biden lobbied on “compulsory licensing,” while another, which Hunter Biden didn’t submit until 2004, said he lobbied the House and Senate on trade issues.
In 2002, the president of the University of Delaware hired Oldaker and Biden’s other firm, the National Group, to help the school win earmarks. While Hunter Biden wasn’t listed as a lobbyist on this account, Oldaker was, as was Eric Schwerin, a very close friend of Hunter Biden’s. Dozens of other companies or government entities retained Oldaker & Biden or the National Group as their lobbyists.
“With Oldaker's firm playing rainmaker, the University of Delaware's earmarks climbed dramatically,” reported the Wilmington News Journal in 2008.
“Though the university's main source of federal funding is still annual grants of about $100 million,” the paper reported, “the university has secured another $68 million from the Delaware delegation in the five years since The National Group's lobbyists began working for UD.”
Hunter Biden wasn’t listed as a lobbyist on the University of Delaware lobbying filings, but his very close friend Eric Schwerin was. And Schwerin the lobbyist was very tight with Sen. Biden.
Schwerin was a “close confidant and counsel” to Joe Biden, Hunter Biden wrote in a 2014 letter. Sure enough, records show that Schwerin was involved in transferring then-Vice President Joe Biden’s Senate papers to the University of Delaware.
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The Bidens, Oldaker, and others from the firm swear up and down that Hunter Biden never lobbied his father and that the two never spoke about his lobbying work. Even if that’s true, it is clear that their business overlapped in a way that benefited both men’s finances.
Hunter Biden obviously pulled in clients thanks to his father’s power, and Joe Biden seemed to pull in donors thanks to his son’s firm. Recall that Oldaker was a Biden fundraiser. Also, employees and partners at the firm contributed more than $10,000 to Biden’s campaigns in the years Hunter Biden was there, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.