A helpful reminder from a Politico investigation titled, "Biden, Inc." that the upper echelons of the Democrats are basically organized crime. This goes beyond the familiar stuff, homes in Iraq, lobbying, Ukraine, China, etc to some interesting background on the Biden's hedge fund.

The day the Bidens took over Paradigm Global Advisors was a memorable one. In the late summer of 2006 Joe Biden’s son Hunter and Joe’s younger brother, James, purchased the firm. On their first day on the job, they showed up with Joe’s other son, Beau, and two large men and ordered the hedge fund’s chief of compliance to fire its president, according to a Paradigm executive who was present. After the firing, the two large men escorted the fund’s president out of the firm’s midtown Manhattan office, and James Biden laid out his vision for the fund’s future. “Don’t worry about investors,” he said, according to the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation. “We've got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.” At the time, the senator was just months away from both assuming the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launching his second presidential bid. According to the executive, James Biden made it clear he viewed the fund as a way to take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money to his older brother or his campaign account.

This is the same party that's been howling incessantly about foreign collusion and foreign interests influencing our elections. Meanwhile they're set to have two presidential candidates in a row whose interests including setting up shop in foreign countries in exchange for political influence.

Biden is probably not as bad as the Clintons. But he never had the same scope due to his more limited vision and political power.

In James and Hunter’s five-year tenure, Paradigm became associated with a number of alleged and confirmed frauds, including Allen Stanford’s multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, while seeking to draw on their powerful relative’s political allies for financing. The pattern of dubious associations and possible conflicts of interest would continue later with Hunter’s foreign dealings, which led him to a lucrative appointment to the board of a Ukrainian oil company and to deals with firms connected to the Chinese state. But it started far earlier. Paradigm was the brainchild of James Park, a son-in-law of the billionaire Sun Myung Moon, who claimed to be the messiah and founded the Unification movement, a religious group often accused of being a cult and whose members are known as Moonies. Started by Park in 1989, Paradigm was an early entrant in the hedge fund industry and among the first funds of funds — that is, a hedge fund that invested in other hedge funds. The Biden involvement began in January 2006. James Biden called Anthony Lotito, a New York financial adviser, and said his older brother, Joe, wanted his son Hunter to find a job outside of lobbying to avoid damaging his planned campaign for the presidency, according to a complaint Lotito later filed in a New York court, after his relationship with James and Hunter soured. According to court filings, James Biden and Lotito had been introduced years earlier by Tom Scotto, a former president of New York’s Detectives' Endowment Association, a union, around 2002. A year before, Scotto had been named an unindicted co-conspirator by federal prosecutors in an organized crime scheme — described at the time as the largest securities fraud bust in U.S. history — to bribe union leaders in order to access union pension funds. Things quickly got messy. The prospective purchasers discovered that because of an accounting trick, the fund had only a fraction of the $1.5 billion in assets under management that it claimed, according to court filings. James and Hunter also discovered that the attorney the trio had hired on Lotito’s recommendation to explore the purchase, John Fasciana, had recently been convicted on 12 counts of fraud, according to court filings.

... and it just keeps going like that for a while.

Is this the resume of a president or a member of a crime family?

Paradigm appears to have been staffed by members of a Korean cult and was operating inside a building owned by Iran.

A month after Joe Biden was elected vice president, the Justice Department seized the building that housed Paradigm’s offices, 650 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y., alleging that it was secretly owned by the same Iranian bank that was financing the nation’s nuclear program.

A nuclear program that Biden, his booss and the Democrats have sought to protect.

But Paradigm tapped into the Obama and Clinton networks, along with the DNC.

In the Bidens' first months at the helm, Paradigm reached an arrangement with Longship Capital Management, a New York investment firm, in which Longship would serve as an investment adviser to Paradigm, according to an Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The arrangement put James and Hunter in business with Longship partner Brian Mathis, a veteran of the Clinton Treasury Department and a Democratic bundler who was friends with Barack and Michelle Obama at Harvard Law School. In March 2011, Mathis, who declined to comment, was among the roughly 30 financiers invited to a controversial White House meeting to discuss the state of the economy. The meeting was arranged by the Democratic National Committee and omitted from Obama’s public schedule. There is no evidence Joe Biden was involved in the meeting.

Interesting that the meeting was omitted, but politics is also very much about financial networking. As the Clinton Foundation demonstrated. The Bidens were just tapping into their father's political network.

Paradigm had also rented space to Francesco Rusciano, whose Ponta Negra fund shared both an office and a phone number with Paradigm. In April 2009, the SEC accused Rusciano of a multimillion-dollar fraud. He got a year in prison. There is no evidence Paradigm participated in the scheme.

"No evidence".

Meanwhile Biden Inc. extensively documents how desperate Paradigm and the Bidens were for cash, after putting up their houses as collateral.

How close to Biden does this scandal get?

In his suit against Hunter and James, Lotito alleged they invoked their political connections in their dispute with Fasciana, the lawyer who was later jailed. “The Bidens refused to pay the bill, repeatedly citing their political connections and family status as a basis for disclaiming the obligation,” Lotito claimed in his complaint. “The Bidens threatened to use their alleged connections with a former United States Senator to retaliate against counsel for insisting that his bill be paid, claiming that the former senator was prepared to use his influence with a federal judge to disadvantage counsel in a proceeding then pending before that court.” James and Hunter denied those allegations.

So we have these claims from their end. It's not proof that Biden did or was willing to do anything, but it's strongly suggestive.

According to a 2013 New Republic story on the Unification Church, Park, who did not respond to requests for comment, was never able to collect from James and Hunter on the promissory note they used to acquire the fund.

Don't take notes from Bidens, is the moral of the story.