President Biden’s brother James was secretly recorded by the FBI during a bribery investigation into a Mississippi trial attorney who shelled out $100,000 to his consulting firm in the late 1990s, a report said on Sunday.
Richard Scruggs, the trial attorney, hired James and Sara Biden’s DC consulting firm while seeking to gin up support for tobacco legislation being contemplated by Congress in 1998, the Washington Post reported.
Neither James, 74, nor his brother President Joe Biden, 81, were implicated in any major criminal wrongdoing in the case. But the revelation comes amid an impeachment probe into alleged influence-peddling by the president’s family members.
“I probably wouldn’t have hired him if he wasn’t the senator’s brother,” Scruggs told the Washington Post about why he forked over cash to James Biden’s firm.
“Jim was never untoward about his influence,” he added. “He didn’t brag about it or talk about it. He didn’t have to. He was the man’s brother.”
Scruggs, who was later sent to prison over a separate bribery scheme, had been closing in on a deal to push the tobacco companies to cough up billions of dollars in a lawsuit alleging they withheld information that