Compared to Hunter Biden’s admitted alcohol and hard drug abuse — and, according to Republicans, his influence-peddling crime spree — a federal railroad patronage appointment seems mild and milquetoast. But 17 years later, it takes on a darker tinge considering the troubles President Joe Biden’s often-wayward son would embroil himself in.
Hunter Biden was a member of the Amtrak Board of Directors from July 2006 until January 2009, resigning when his father became vice president under President Barack Obama. Technically nominated by President George W. Bush as part of a broader deal with Democrats over Senate appointments, Hunter Biden’s Capitol Hill patron was Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE).
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Carper, who announced Monday that he wouldn’t seek reelection in 2024, admitted in the summer of 2006 that Hunter Biden’s main qualification for the prestigious post was being a frequent train rider. Not unlike his now-president father, whose daily Wilmington, Delaware-to-Washington-and-back train trip helped forge his political identity over 36 years in the Senate.
“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,” Carper said shortly before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation moved the younger Biden’s nomination to the Senate floor.
“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 added.
But a Republican Amtrak board nominee with whom Hunter Biden was paired, career transportation official Donna McLean, made plain that the senator’s son was chosen more for his last name than any real qualifications in the field. 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. Nonetheless, the Senate confirmed Hunter Biden by voice vote.
To be sure, Hunter Biden was hardly the first senator’s kin helped by family connections. In February 2002, the Senate confirmed David Bunning, the son of then-Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY), as a federal district court judge for the Eastern District of Kentucky. Lawmakers set aside a finding by the American Bar Association that he was unqualified for the lifetime post. Years later, the daughter of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), Heather Bresch, was largely spared widespread scrutiny when the pharmaceutical company she led raised the price of EpiPens in a case of what critics called gouging of allergy sufferers desperately seeking relief. Many also saw it as reflective of a backscratching Senate culture whose members sought to shield each other from embarrassment.
As for Hunter Biden, his 2 1/2 years on the Amtrak board seem to have gone smoothly enough. Yet, considering his later bad behavior and possible legal troubles that continue to cause headaches in his father’s administration, the appointment looks more like a political gateway drug. One that seemed harmless at the time but later morphed into serious problems. Since it was the first in many steps of Hunter Biden, sometimes more effectively than others, cashing in on his father’s high stations.
It was during Joe Biden’s vice presidency that his older son’s life went downhill. With personal foibles, and possible lawbreaking, happening while his older brother, Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, suffered from and, in 2015, succumbed to brain cancer at age 46. In 2014, Hunter Biden was kicked out of the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine.
In later years, he started to become a political liability for his father, who successfully sought the presidency in 2020 at nearly 78 years old. Republicans have scrutinized Hunter Biden’s bouts with drug addiction and his business dealings in Ukraine and China with an eye toward weakening his father politically. Former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment was tied to a phone call in which he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open an investigation into the Bidens.
The ’Delaware Way’ of Politics
None of those Hunter Biden troubles had happened when Carper pushed him successfully for the Amtrak board. Nor can he in any way be blamed for another man’s bad behavior — and possible lawbreaking years later, as the U.S. attorney in Delaware is reportedly nearing a decision on whether to charge Hunter Biden with tax- and gun-related violations.
But Carper back then offered a pretty thin rationale for the Hunter Biden Amtrak nomination. After all, how many frequent fliers would claim to be aviation experts?
The episode points more to a long-standing, clubby way of politics in Delaware, the nation’s second-smallest state. One that many only know as a summer beach getaway, or perhaps the maddening Delaware toll on I-95, through a few miles of the state before hitting Maryland, or New Jersey, heading north.
Delaware, though now reliably Democratic, was for decades a swing state. President Joe Biden first won election to the Senate in 1972, at age 29, by defeating an incumbent Republican. And Biden was Delaware’s junior senator for 28 years along with GOP Sen. William Roth.
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The Delaware political culture encouraged favor trading and backscratching. It reached a zenith of sorts in the 1992 political “trade,” when Gov. Mike Castle (R-DE) faced term limits after eight years in office. Carper, first elected to the House in 1992, eyed the governorship. As Carper ran for governor (successfully, it turned out), Castle seamlessly slid into the state’s lone House seat, with voters stamping their approval by wide margins.
As politics has become more nationalized and partisan in recent years, the Delaware way has diminished somewhat. But Carper’s retirement is a reminder of an earlier political era. One that allowed a questionably qualified Hunter Biden a prestigious federal position, which, it turned out, was only the beginning of his trading in his father’s name, with reverberations to this day.
