Lobbyist bought tropical land from Biden’s brother
Lobbyist bought tropical land from Biden’s brother
Scott Green, a lobbyist with close ties to Joe Biden, purchased Virgin Islands property from James Biden and then extended him a private mortgage.
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In 2005, Joe Biden’s brother bought an acre of land with excellent ocean views on a remote island in the Caribbean for $150,000. He divided it into three parcels, and the next year a lobbyist close to the Delaware senator bought one of the parcels for what had been the cost of the entire property. Later, the lobbyist gave Biden’s brother a mortgage loan on the remaining parcels.
The Virgin Islands land deal, reported here for the first time, furthers a pattern in which members of the Biden family have engaged in financial dealings with people with an interest in influencing the former vice president.
In this case, a Biden staffer left the Senate in the early ’90s to become a lobbyist. Both before and after the land transaction, his clients benefited from Biden’s support and appropriations requests. A firm the lobbyist co-founded — which features a testimonial from Biden praising his “emotional investment” in his work on its website — specializes in federal contracts for niche law enforcement and national security programs for which Biden long advocated.
After the land deal, Joe Biden vacationed elsewhere on the tiny island, which once protected a nearby submarine base before it became a tropical getaway, on at least three occasions.
The property itself has remained vacant and undeveloped. It is not clear why the lobbyist, Scott Green, purchased the parcel from Biden’s brother James, or why James Biden later went to the lobbyist for a loan, rather than to a bank. An easement James Biden obtained granting road access to the land before selling it to Green may have made the land more valuable, but it is unclear whether the dramatically higher price Green paid for his parcel reflected its true value. The terms of the loan were not disclosed in property records.
It is also not clear whether Joe Biden was aware of the transactions. Following the land purchase, Green continued to lobby on issues over which Biden wielded influence and to meet with Biden’s staff. Green’s firm also continued to land government contracts related to federal programs for which Biden advocated.
Representatives of the Biden campaign declined repeated requests over weeks to comment. Shortly before publication, spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement: "Joe Biden was wrong. Politico does have a sense of humor. Because this story is an absolute joke."
Green did not respond to several requests for comment. A lawyer for James Biden, George Mesires, acknowledged receiving questions, but did not respond to them.
James Biden, six years Joe’s junior, served as finance chairman on his older brother’s first Senate campaign in 1972. He went on to pursue an entrepreneurial career that regularly intersected with Joe’s public duties. He once sought to launch a Washington lobbying firm, but the venture was cut short when his would-be partners were convicted of attempting to bribe a judge in an unrelated matter. He has previously been accused by former business contacts of seeking to exploit the former vice president’s clout for financial gain in court proceedings in New York, Kentucky, and Florida, though he has denied such claims.
Water Island is a 500-acre spit of land in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Department of Defense purchased the island from a Danish company during World War II, using it to protect a submarine base on nearby St. Thomas. Since then, it has become an under-the-radar tropical getaway dotted with several-dozen homes, where the largest beachfront estates can fetch north of a million dollars.
In May 2005, James Biden and his wife, Sara, purchased a one-acre plot of land in the middle of the island, according to property records. Tax records describe the view from the property as “excellent.” The price: $150,000.
Then, the couple got an easement to access the land and divided it into three parcels. The easement, granted by the Virgin Islands territorial government, gave them the right to use an existing driveway to the property that cut across government land. A year later, in May 2006, the Bidens sold the northernmost parcel, just over a third of an acre, to Green and his wife, Julie, according to property records.
The price, again, was $150,000. In effect, James and Sara Biden had gotten their money back while keeping most of the land — recouping their investment in just 12 months.
Land value can fluctuate, making it difficult to assess whether such a dramatic increase in land price was reasonable. An easement can make land more valuable, depending on how costly the easement was and how difficult it was to obtain.
The paperwork costs for this type of easement would be minimal, according to Raf Muilenburg, managing partner at Morrisette & Muilenburg, a law firm based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Muilenburg estimated that the cost of planning and surveying a driveway easement would be under $1,000. Filing fees would be in the hundreds of dollars, and that the easement could also entail a small amount of legal work, he said.
Typically, the recipient of an easement also pays the party granting the easement for the rights they are getting on that party’s land. If James and Sara Biden paid the Virgin Islands territorial government for the driveway rights, it was not reflected in property records.
A tax bill from 2006 lists the assessed value of Green’s parcel at $87,000, but tax records indicate the bill was rescinded. Subsequent tax bills list the assessed value of Green’s plot at just $38,000 — a quarter of the $150,000 purchase price — until 2013, when it jumped to $83,700. Typically, land sells for more than its assessed value.
A person answering the phone at John Foster Real Estate, a local realtor, identified Chuck Gidley as the agent listed on the original 2005 transaction.
Gidley declined to comment.
Scott Green’s career has been tied to Joe Biden’s, from his days as a member of Biden’s Senate staff to his work as a lobbyist on projects of special interest to Biden.
As a young man, Green played linebacker for the University of Delaware football team, overlapping at the school with James Biden for a few semesters, and graduated in 1973. He is best known for his work as an NFL referee, having led the officiating crew at Super Bowl XLIV in 2010. He is currently listed as the executive director of the NFL Referees Association, which acts as a bargaining representative in labor negotiations.
At the same time, Green has led a parallel career in Washington. After working as a probation officer after college, Green accepted an offer from Biden in the early 1980s for a job on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he worked for a decade in roles that included staff assistant and senior advisor.
From the Senate, Green pivoted to the private sector.
In 1994, he co-founded Lafayette Group, a lobbying and consulting firm focused on law enforcement and national security that is now headed by his son.
The firm’s website features a photo of Green with Biden. It also quotes Biden praising his former staffer’s commitment to law enforcement, saying, “Scott Green was emotionally invested. It wasn’t just a job for him; it was an emotional investment.”
Government contracts for niche support services for law enforcement and national security agencies have been central to the firm’s business over the years, according to a firm history posted on its website.
In the Senate, Biden over the years proposed appropriations for many of the niche areas in which the firm specialized, including “interoperable communications” for first responders and “fusion centers” for processing threat-related intelligence.
Lafayette Group’s government contracting business extended into the Obama years, as did Green’s ties to Joe Biden. Government data shows tens of million of dollars in contract awards to the firm from federal agencies over the course of the Obama administration.
If Joe Biden knew of his brother’s dealings, he should have stopped allowing Green to lobby him or his staff, according to Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, who recently became a Democrat.
“It's really time to send a message to the lobbyist that ‘If you’re doing deals with my brother, I really can’t see you,’" Painter said. It is not clear whether such measures were ever taken in response to the property deals.
In both January and September of 2010, Green met with a Biden aide in the Old Executive Office Building, according to White House visitor logs, which do not record the purpose of those meetings. In May of that year, he attended a reception in honor of firefighters and law enforcement officials at the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory, according to the logs.
Among Lafayette Group’s biggest single days for government business during the Obama years was April 11, 2010, when records show it received two awards from the Federal Emergency Management Agency worth a total of $5.8 million as a subcontractor to Booz Allen Hamilton. Lafayette Group was charged with providing “Support for [the Office of Emergency Communications] contract developing communications strategies,” according to a description of the award. There is no indication that Biden played a role in the awarding of the contract.
On April 14 of that year, Green and his wife gave James and Sara Biden a $133,300 mortgage on their remaining Water Island real estate, according to property records.
This was not the first time a Biden-tied lobbyist had figured into James Biden’s personal finances. In an unrelated episode, he and Joe’s son, Hunter, took out loans worth seven figures from WashingtonFirst Bank to repay a business debt around 2006. The bank was co-founded by a lobbyist and Biden adviser who was also a lobbying partner of Hunter Biden’s for several years. A former executive at the bank previously told POLITICO that James and Hunter repaid that loan.
In September 2013, the Greens released the Water Island mortgage, saying they had “received full payment and full satisfaction,” according to property records.
From 2012 to 2018, according to Lafayette Group’s firm history, it received contracts tied to at least one government program championed by Biden: the Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network.
The network, which set aside broadband internet spectrum for first responders, was proposed following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to improve emergency communications in the event of disaster and endorsed by the 9/11 Commission.
Among the biggest proponents of creating the network was the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a police association that hired Green as a lobbyist in 2007 and was represented by Lafayette Group until Dec 6, 2019.
In the Senate, Biden supported setting aside broadband spectrum for the network both before and after Green registered to lobby for the police group, but the initiative encountered years of delays.
As vice president, Biden was the administration’s chief advocate for the creation of the network, making the public case for it and guiding legislation through Congress that reserved broadband spectrum for it.
“We owe you,” Biden told a group of police officers in Alexandria, Virginia, promoting the measure in September 2011. “We said we'd give you what you need, and we told the public they'd have what they needed to be protected.”
The creation of the network finally passed as part of the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012.
When the Department of Homeland Security set about launching the initiative, it contracted with Lafayette Group to persuade state authorities to participate in the network, according to the firm’s website. In total, Lafayette Group has received more than $10 million in contracts for work related to the network, now called FirstNet, according to government data.
Reached by phone, Lafayette Group’s current CEO, Green’s son Keil Green, asked a reporter to call him back the following day. He did not respond to follow-up communications.
Another lobbying client of Green’s, the non-profit Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, had benefited from Biden’s support over the course of more than two decades, both before and after Green’s land purchase.
The program, known as D.A.R.E. America, began in Los Angeles in 1983, and, helped by federal backing, grew along with the War on Drugs. D.A.R.E, which sent police officers into classrooms to warn against drug use, enjoyed bipartisan support and was eventually implemented in the vast majority of school districts in the United States.
After leaving Capitol Hill, Green signed up D.A.R.E. as a client in the early ’90s and lobbied his old boss on behalf of the program. Green made $40,000 a year in lobbying fees from the drug education program from 1999 to 2010, the years for which his lobbying disclosures are available online.
Biden ensured its inclusion in the 1994 Crime Bill, making it eligible to compete for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds.
"As you know, it's a pretty popular program, so it wasn't a question of not including it," a Biden staffer told Reason magazine at the time.
D.A.R.E. was in fact popular with schools and police departments, but it was also controversial.
Research consistently showed it was ineffective at its stated purpose of curbing substance abuse. It also cost taxpayers money.
The 1995 Reason article cited an estimate from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy that the program was taking in about $40 million in federal funding annually, despite research showing it was ineffective.
Over the following years, the program faced mounting criticism from researchers and skeptics of the war on drugs as more studies piled up — from universities, the Surgeon General and the Government Accountability Office — concluding it was ineffective at preventing drug abuse.
Yet Biden’s support for the program continued through his time in the Senate.
In Biden’s final few years in the Senate, he continued to act as one of D.A.R.E’s top proponents in Congress, helping secure its funding, even as critical news coverage in The Columbus Dispatch and Harper’s Magazine noted the evidence of the program’s ineffectiveness and cited Biden’s relationship to Green as a possible reason for the senator’s support. After congressional reforms required legislators to attach their names to earmark requests, disclosures for the fiscal year 2008 budget show that Biden, along with Republicans Chuck Grassley of Iowa and the late Ted Stevens of Alaska, co-sponsored a $450,000 Senate earmark for Justice Department funding for D.A.R.E. The earmark died in conference.
A spokesman for Grassley, Michael Zona, said staffers who would be familiar with the details of the 2008 earmark have since left Grassley’s office, but he pointed out that Grassley and Biden had co-chaired the Senate Drug Caucus. “There’s nothing unusual at that time about a grant like this,” Zona said, “But I couldn’t speak specifically to this grant.”
In the years since the land deals, the U.S. Virgin Islands have been a favored destination for the Biden clan. In between election night 2008 and Barack Obama’s inauguration, Biden and his family traveled to Water Island over the winter holidays. As vice president, he returned to the island over the next two holiday seasons.
News coverage of Biden’s travel to the small island said he was visiting “family friends” but did not name them.
The undeveloped land owned by Green and his brother is abutted on one side by a nature conversancy and by Virgin Islands government land on the other.
One Water Island landowner, who asked not to be named discussing a sensitive subject, said the Bidens learned about the “forgotten little island” through family friends from Baltimore, but that those friends were not among the island’s hundred-odd residents. The landowner said the Bidens rented a house when visiting the island.
"I was amazed that the Bidens ever wanted to come down there,” she said, citing the logistical challenges of traveling to the remote island, which normally requires taking a boat from nearby St. Thomas. “I guess it’s where you want to go when you want to get away from the rat race of D.C., and supervision, and observation."
In late 2009, the entertainment outlet E! News reported that a Biden relative had called neighbors on the island, looking for a place to put up the vice president, and one family agreed to cancel their vacation plans so that Biden could use their home. A Biden spokeswoman told E! News at the time that a realtor had made the request, not a Biden relative.
An Airbnb listing for a treehouse cottage at “Shipwreck Point” on the island states that Biden has stayed at the rental property with his family and entourage. The owner of the property did not respond to a request for comment.
In the later years of the Obama administration, Biden and his family continued to vacation annually in the Virgin Islands, but on St. Croix. The Water Island landowner said the Bidens switched to the larger island because it was more practical for traveling with an entourage that included Secret Service agents.
Over the holiday season before launching his presidential campaign, Biden again traveled to St. Croix, where he was spotted on New Year’s Day 2019.
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