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Frank Biden’s long history of using his family name to secure contracts in Florida

Long before Hunter Biden capitalized on his father’s last name to land a gig with a Ukrainian company, the then-vice president’s younger brother touted his family connections to promote his business, according to a report.

When Joe Biden became veep, his brother Frank Biden used his DC ties to help secure a series of contracts from Florida officials for a fledgling charter school venture he was asked to lead, ABC News reported.

As a result, he earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from the company over a five-year period, according to the report.

In media interviews at the time, Frank Biden described his last name as “a tremendous asset” because of the family’s record of “taking care of people who need help.”





He bragged that it brought him “automatic acceptance” as he sought government approvals for the for-profit Mavericks in Education, which was focused on educating at-risk teens.

“Joe is my hero. My older brother is the best man I know,” Frank said during a 2016 promotional interview, according to ABC News, adding, “Barack ain’t bad either, trust me.”

But many of the schools eventually faced claims of mismanagement – with at least two lawsuits alleging they inflated enrollment as part of a scheme to gain more government funding.

Eventually, the Maverick charters were sold and the schools were reorganized under new management.

Critics suggest that Frank’s use of his last name to promote the business venture was just one example of the family benefiting from sharing a name with Joe Biden, which could pose a challenge for him as he seeks the Democratic nomination for president.





“Joe Biden needs to recognize it’s a problem,” Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, told Politico in August.

“You can’t control your brothers. You can’t control your grown son. But you can put some firewalls in place in your own office,” he added.

Biden’s campaign has said it would issue an executive order on his first day in office to “address conflicts of interest of any kind.”

President Trump has repeatedly called the Bidens “crooked,” particularly in reference to Hunter Biden’s decision to accept a position on the board of directors of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company.





In October, Hunter acknowledged that he showed poor judgment by taking the Burisma gig, which paid him up to $50,000 a month, and admitted he would not have gotten the job if his name weren’t Biden.

ABC News said Frank Biden declined to be interviewed for its report, but he has addressed his family ties publicly over the years.

In 2011, he told The Washington Post about his last name: “I enjoy automatic acceptance or at least listening to what I have to say.”

Joe Biden’s presidential campaign directed ABC News to his past public statements about the distance he has always maintained from the dealings of his relatives.

“I have never discussed with my son or my brother or anyone else anything having to do with their businesses, period,” Biden told reporters in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in September.

If elected, he said, “there will be an absolute wall between personal and private [business] and the government.”





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