When Hunter Biden came before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in June 2006 for his nomination hearing for a seat on Amtrak’s board of directors, he was paired with a second nominee, career transportation official Donna McLean.
McLean, a Republican, and Biden, a Democrat, were both nominated by President George W. Bush. At that point, McLean had been an analyst at the U.S. Department of Transportation and for six years worked on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. She would go on to be a high-ranking Transportation Department official in the Obama administration.
Biden, by comparison, was a lobbyist with the firm Oldaker, Biden & Belair, with no transportation experience to speak of. But his name was more than familiar to senators — his father, Sen. Joe Biden, was into his 33rd year representing Delaware and would become vice president two-and-a-half years later. Hunter Biden, then 36, was also a frequent train rider from his home state to Washington, D.C.
“Hunter Biden has spent a lot of time on Amtrak trains. Like his father, like our congressman, Mike Castle, and myself, Hunter Biden has lived in Delaware while using Amtrak to commute to his job as we commute to our job in Washington almost every day of the week,” said Democratic Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware. “You know, you learn a lot about what could work and what would work better at Amtrak by riding trains and talking to the passengers, the commuters, the passengers, the folks who work on the trains and make them work every day.”
Carper also extolled how the son of a Democratic senator could restore the bipartisan balance of the Amtrak board, which he criticized as having been politicized by the administration.
Biden’s lack of expertise in the policy area he was nominated to oversee would reverberate more than a dozen years later. Biden was receiving a $50,000 monthly salary from Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings while his father, as vice president, was tasked by President Barack Obama with telling leaders in that country to root out corruption or face a cutoff of U.S. aid.
During Biden’s interview with ABC, which aired this week, he would cite his time on Amtrak’s board as a chief reason he was qualified to serve on the board of Burisma Holdings.
The Bidens’ overlapping roles with Ukraine became a focal point of President Trump’s July 25 phone call with his counterpart in that country, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which House Democrats are now investigating as part of an impeachment inquiry.
Biden in 2006 won confirmation to the Amtrak board unanimously, as did McLean. He served until 2009, when his father moved into the White House, and left his lobbying practice. During Joe Biden’s vice presidency, Hunter Biden founded the investment firm Rosemont Seneca and work as an attorney for Boies Schiller Flexner LLP.
