Joe Biden thinks he wants to run for president. If he does run, he’ll regret it.
Biden is regarded as an elder statesman and an affable and devoted public servant. In truth, he is a typical Washington politician who has spent decades cutting crooked deals with special interests and greasing the revolving door between federal power and K Street.
Biden’s dalliances with corruption aren’t secrets. But they’ve mostly stayed out of the public eye because the media and the Democratic Party love him. That will change if he jumps into the crowded Democratic presidential field.
Liberals like to say that the privileged don’t realize their privilege until they lose it. Biden has enjoyed not only white male privilege, but also center-left Democrat privilege and Obamaworld privilege. It won’t last long after he announces.
He’s gotten the first taste already. His creepy tendency to paw at women and sniff their hair got nearly zero attention outside the conservative media during the Obama administration. Now everybody is writing about it and promising to dig deeper.
[Related: Buttigieg campaign says it will return $30k in donations from lobbyists]
And this isn’t just about “Me Too.” It’s about all his misdeeds. Joe Biden is no longer a protected man.
This time around, reporters might finally be curious about Joe Biden’s Myanmar problem. Because Biden seems to have weakened sanctions against a brutal, genocidal regime in order to serve a lobbying client of his revolving-door chief of staff.
In late 2007, Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., began a bill to expand sanctions on Myanmar, after the military regime there led a bloody crackdown on dissident monks. Lantos died in February 2008. Two months later, a deadly typhoon hit, and the Myanmar regime exacerbated the suffering by refusing foreign aid. This boosted momentum for Lantos’ bill.
Biden was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he was the chief sponsor of the Senate version of the bill. The major difference between Lantos’ bill and Biden’s bill: Biden had stripped out Lantos’ provision that would bar Chevron from claiming a U.S. tax deduction for money it paid to the Myanmar regime as part of its joint ventures in natural gas there.
Chevron owned a 28 percent stake in the Yadana natural gas field, and a 28 percent stake in the Yadana gas pipeline. The Myanmar government was one of Chevron’s partners in this gas project. Chevron had inherited the gas fields when it acquired Unocal, whose investment there was grandfathered under earlier sanctions against Myanmar.
Unocal and Chevron lobbied hard to protect their exemption, and thus their ability to make a profit off this partnership with an oppressive military regime. For instance, they lobbied against a John McCain bill in 2007 that would have ended that grandfathered status. Platts Oilgram reported: “If passed, Chevron would have to sell its stake in Yadana.”
Chevron, which made an estimated $100 million in revenues off the project in 2007, also lobbied against Lantos’ Yadana provision.
Here’s an interesting detail about Unocal/Chevron’s lobbying efforts: Beginning in 2003, Biden’s former chief of staff, Alan Hoffmann, was one of Unocal’s lobbyists on the Myanmar issue, according to lobbying filings.
Come 2007, when Chevron had acquired Unocal and Biden was pushing Chevron’s favored Myanmar bill, Hoffman had passed back through the revolving door, and was once again Biden’s chief of staff. Hoffman and four other Chevron lobbyists at the Timmons & Company lobbying firm contributed to Biden’s elections while lobbying on sanctions from 1999 to 2003.
In the end, Biden and Chevron won. The final bill, named the “Tom Lantos Block Burmese JADE Act of 2008,” would include neither McCain’s provision forcing Chevron to divest nor Lantos’ provision ending Chevron’s tax deduction for its payments to Myanmar’s regime. Instead, the law included a toothless provision urging “U.S., French, and Thai investors to voluntarily divest in the Burmese Yadana gas pipeline project.” Joe Biden never explained why he watered down sanctions against that brutal regime in order to protect a big oil company for which his former chief of staff used to lobby. That’s because he wasn’t asked about it.
The press remained uninterested in June 2008, when the weakened sanctions bill passed the Democratic Congress. The press was not interested two months later when Obama, supposedly running against “Big Oil,” tapped Biden as his running mate. The press was not interested in 2009 when Hoffman became deputy assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff to Vice President Biden.
But this year, you can bet the press will be interested.
