Hell By Way of Little St. James: The Biden Family Island Plot Next to Epstein's, The Fact-Checker Attempt to Cover It Up, and Corruption at the Highest Levels
Hell By Way of Little St. James: The Biden Family Island Plot Next to Epstein's, The Fact-Checker Attempt to Cover It Up, and Corruption at the Highest Levels
Coincidence or Corruption?
Up next in our series on Epstein and the panoply of American political figures who surrounded him is this article on Water Island, a parcel of which was owned by James Biden…and is an island that also happens to be a short boat ride away from Epstein’s pedo island.
Previously in the series were articles on Ghislaine Maxwell, who created a charity with a similar name to a child sacrifice cult, and former AG Bill Barr, whose career tracked Epstein’s until 2019.
Little St. James, Water Island, and Biden Family Business
If you were shelling out cash hot off the Chinese printing press, where might you buy an island? Near a picturesque bay in the Caribbean? Near enough to get to by boat or plane but far enough away to have a bit of privacy? Well, that’s just what James Biden did. In 2005, he bought a flyspeck piece of an island in the aqua-blue water of the Caribbean. Only it wasn’t in the bright blue ocean next to no one. It was next to someone important and his island. That would be Jeffrey Epstein and Little St. James.
Epstein bought Little St. James, which is 71 acres, in 1998.1 He also bought its larger, 161-acre neighbor, Great St. James, 18 years later in 2016.2 The smaller island, Little St. James, is the one at the center of many of the “pedo island” allegations, as it is the one he owned when his operation was at its peak.3
Little Saint James is also the island right next to Water Island, an acre plot bought by James Biden in 2005 and promptly divided by him into three plots. Water Island and Little St. James sit about 7.4 miles apart, which is a less than 30-minute journey in a boat traveling at 15 knots.4 Unlike with airplane flights, there are no incriminating flight logs in travel by boat, as the journey does not need to be recorded. Further, Little St. James has a private dock, so travel to it by boat is possible.5 Biden visited Water Island but apparently vacationed at a spot other than his brother’s plot.6
So, speculation surrounds the Biden Family’s ownership of Water Island real estate. Were they speculating on land prices in the charming Caribbean? Or, acting with a bit more understanding of discretion than the other Pedo Island guests, traveling to the island by covert boat rides rather than logged flights? Or was something else going on?
Biden Family Corruption: What Was Probably Going on at Water Island
However suspicious the proximity might have been, the story here appears to be a classic case of Biden Family corruption and influence peddling rather than anything pedophilia-related.
Evidence for that corruption comes from James Biden’s sale of one of the three parcels of the subdivided acres to an individual closely connected to Biden. The sale occurred in 2006 and was to a Democrat lobbyist, Scott Green. Green began his political career working for then-Senator Joe Biden in 1985 and later turned into a lobbyist who quite successfully lobbied Biden for appropriations during his time in the Senate and Vice Presidency.
The National Review, describing the background of the situation and reporting on the suspicious sale in 2020, noted7:
In May 2005, James Biden purchased an acre of land on Water Island for $150,000. He then applied for and received an easement to divide the property into three plots, one of which he sold to lobbyist Scott Green — a decade-long Senate staffer for Joe Biden in the 1980s — for $150,000. James had initially purchased all three parcels for $150,000, meaning that he made his money back and was able to keep the majority of the one acre plot for himself.
Green’s lobbying firm, Lafayette Group — which features a photo of Green with Biden on its website and quotes Biden endorsing Green — earned two government contracts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency worth a total of $5.8 million on April 11, 2010.
Three days later, Green extended a $133,300 mortgage to James Biden for his remaining Water Island property. Property records reviewed by Politico show that Green had “received full payment and full satisfaction” and released the mortgage in September 2013.
And Green overpaid by about 500% for his share of the Water Island parcel, as The Real Deal, a real estate news site, noted, saying8:
Just a year later he sold one to Green and his wife for $150,000 in what appears to be a nice deal for the Bidens, who retained control of two-thirds of the property. Subsequent tax bills put the assessed value of Green’s parcel at around $38,000 until that number jumped to $83,700 in 2013.
The only change to the land between James Biden’s purchase and Green’s purchase was that Biden obtained an access easement to the parcel. Though that increased the value somewhat, it hardly justified a 500% leap.
Politico, in its report on the land deal9, noted that the deal, even if Green overpaid, was an excellent one for his lobbying firm and clients, which squeezed the Biden lemon for every last drop it was worth:
Both before and after the land transaction, his clients benefited from Biden’s support and appropriations requests. A firm the lobbyist co-founded — which features a testimonial from Biden praising his “emotional investment” in his work on its website — specializes in federal contracts for niche law enforcement and national security programs for which Biden long advocated.
Those deals between Green’s lobbying firm and Biden continued through Biden’s time as a Senator for Delaware into his time as Obama’s Vice President, with the numerous appropriations Biden proposed for businesses connected to Green’s firm lasting for many years.10 Politico, reporting on that aspect of the sale and relationship, said11:
In the Senate, Biden over the years proposed appropriations for many of the niche areas in which the firm specialized, including “interoperable communications” for first responders and “fusion centers” for processing threat-related intelligence.
Lafayette Group’s government contracting business extended into the Obama years, as did Green’s ties to Joe Biden. Government data shows tens of million of dollars in contract awards to the firm from federal agencies over the course of the Obama administration.
[…]
In both January and September of 2010, Green met with a Biden aide in the Old Executive Office Building, according to White House visitor logs, which do not record the purpose of those meetings. In May of that year, he attended a reception in honor of firefighters and law enforcement officials at the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory, according to the logs.
Among Lafayette Group’s biggest single days for government business during the Obama years was April 11, 2010, when records show it received two awards from the Federal Emergency Management Agency worth a total of $5.8 million as a subcontractor to Booz Allen Hamilton. Lafayette Group was charged with providing “Support for [the Office of Emergency Communications] contract developing communications strategies,” according to a description of the award. There is no indication that Biden played a role in the awarding of the contract.
On April 14 of that year, Green and his wife gave James and Sara Biden a $133,300 mortgage on their remaining Water Island real estate, according to property records.
[…]
From 2012 to 2018, according to Lafayette Group’s firm history, it received contracts tied to at least one government program championed by Biden: the Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network.
So, rather than then-Senator and future VP and President Joe Biden or his brother looking for a spot just a breezy sailboat’s jaunt away from Epstein, it looks like this was another example of the Biden Crime Family attempting to squeeze lobbyists for cash: James Biden still has two of the three plots of the original Water Island acre, totaling about a 66% of the original plot, and he got the full purchase price back in the sale to Mr. Green the lobbyist intimately connected to Joe Biden. Green, for paying far more than the value of the land, got millions upon millions of dollars in government business for his firm.
The Cover Up
Despite the somewhat mundane explanation for the island - corruption rather than perversion - the fact-checkers have been out in force to try and quash any and every tweet about the Biden purchase on Water Island.
The Associated Press, for example, ran an article titled, “President Biden does not own Caribbean island near Epstein’s.”12 The article refers to the claim that Joe Biden owned property in the territory as “baseless,” though it at least admits that James Biden does own the parcel of land at the beginning of the article.
Reuters didn’t even do that. In its fact-check article, titled, “Fact check: Joe Biden does not own island in the U.S. Virgin Islands,” it said, “Posts circulating on Facebook make the primary claim that former Vice President and current presidential candidate Joe Biden owns a private island in the Caribbean next to Little St. James, the island owned by the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. This claim is false,” but then waits until the fifth paragraph to admit James Biden owned land in the area and that Biden visited Water Island.13
Then there was PolitiFact, which had a fact-check article titled “No, Joe Biden doesn’t own a private island near Jeffrey Epstein’s” and rated the claim made on Facebook that he does “Pants on fire,” which means an outright lie.14 It said, “There’s no evidence that former Vice President Joe Biden owns a private island near Little St. James, the spot in the U.S. Virgin Islands where the late financier Jeffrey Epstein was accused of running a sex trafficking ring before he died in jail in 2019,” and then, like Reuters, waited until deep into the article that James Biden owned a spot of land on Water Island.
None of the articles noted the seeming corruption of James Biden’s deal with Green, an important aspect of the story. The fact-checkers are correct that Joe Biden didn’t own land on Water Island. But his brother did, and seems to have used it for influence peddling, which is just as important as its location near Jeffrey Epstein’s Pedo Island. So, though they berate those for posting about the island, their not reporting on the corruption aspect of the situation is about as misleading as the “misinformation” posts.
Biden and his family don’t appear to have used the island real estate for Epstein-connected purposes. But they do appear to have used it for influence-peddling, which is corruption the American people need to know about.