Joe Biden’s younger brother told potential business partners that the former vice president would help their firm land business with court systems and would incorporate their health care model into his 2020 presidential campaign, according to new allegations made in a court filing in Tennessee.
The allegations are consistent with others made over the years that relatives of Biden have sought to enrich themselves off of his public service. But they go further, representing the first explicit claims that James Biden offered to have the former vice president use his clout to further private business interests.
The allegations come in sworn declarations made by executives at firms suing Biden’s brother that were filed in federal court on Friday. They do not allege any wrongdoing by Joe Biden or indicate that the former vice president had knowledge of his brother’s alleged promises.
Neither George Mesires, a lawyer for James Biden, nor Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, immediately responded to a request for comment on the new allegations.
The firms, Azzam Medical Services and Diverse Medical Management, provide rural health care solutions. They sued James Biden and his business partners in June, claiming that, beginning in 2017, the group offered disingenuously to partner with the firms as part of a fraudulent scheme to bankrupt them and steal their business models.
In the Friday filing, three executives at the firms allege new details about their interactions with James Biden.
According to one of the declarations, by Diverse Medical Management’s CEO Michael Frey, James Biden suggested he would enlist his older brother’s help in landing the firm contracts for court-ordered outpatient care.
Frey describes meeting James Biden in January 2018 at a hospital in Pineville, Kentucky, where Frey was asked to make a presentation about his firm’s operating model.
"During my presentation regarding intensive outpatient treatment, James Biden interrupted me to say, ‘My brother needs to have you in every court system in America,’” Frey alleges, adding, “I left the meeting very excited and optimistic about the future of DMM [Diverse Medical Management].”
According to another declaration, by Mohannad Azzam, in the lead-up to Biden’s presidential campaign launch, James Biden promised in a phone call “that the DMM psychiatric care model would be used by Joe Biden as part of his campaign.”
Azzam alleges that in another phone call last fall, “James Biden mentioned that his brother’s connections to labor unions and the Department of Veterans Affairs would help DMM expand its model nationwide.”
Similarly, in a third declaration, Mitchell Cohen, Diverse Medical Management’s former general counsel, alleges that at a dinner outside of Philadelphia around early September 2018, James Biden said that his brother’s connections at the Department of Veterans Affairs could help the firm land VA contracts.
Cohen also alleged that James Biden “stated that he could facilitate contracts between DMM and first responders based on the relationships that his brother had with certain labor unions.”
Those allegations echo the accounts that former executives at Paradigm Global Advisors, a defunct hedge fund firm once owned by James Biden and the former vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, have previously given to POLITICO.
The former Paradigm executives said James and Hunter spoke of their plans to capitalize on Joe Biden’s ties to unions, including firefighters unions, to land investments from union pension funds, although Paradigm did not successfully land such investments.
In a response to the original complaint, James Biden and his associates have denied engaging in any fraudulent scheme.
James “Biden and his wife, Sara, have a long-held and passionate commitment to finding solutions for the improved treatment of both substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder and the linkage between them, particularly in rural areas where so many local hospitals are failing,” according to the response.
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