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Some of Joe Biden’s top political donors also financed the nonprofit that’s been publicly promoting him in the years between his stint as vice president and the declaration of his 2020 candidacy on Thursday.
The Biden Foundation plans to close its doors as the former VP seeks the White House, The New York Times reported this week. On Wednesday, it released its 2018 annual report, detailing a host of activities that have affixed the Biden name to a number of charitable endeavors, such as the foundation’s public awareness campaign to promote LGBT inclusion. The report also disclosed dozens of the group’s top donors, and some of them have also generously supported Biden’s American Possibilities PAC over the past two years.
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Tim Gill, a prominent Colorado entrepreneur and gay-rights activist, donated $105,000 to the PAC in 2017 and 2018. That’s far more than the group could legally accept, and it refunded all but $10,000 of those donations. As Gill was helping to fund Biden’s political group, he was also pouring money into the Biden Foundation. According to its annual report, he donated more than $1 million to the group in 2018.
Bernard Schwartz, a prominent Democratic financier, donated between $500,000 and $1 million to the Biden Foundation last year, according to the report. And he chipped in $5,000 to American Possibilities PAC in November. Joe and Sarah Kiani, an Iranian-American couple behind the medical-device company Masimo, both donated the legal maximum to Biden’s PAC last cycle, and together they contributed between $100,000 and $500,000 to his foundation last year.
Those donors are among the 10 who have contributed to both Biden’s PAC during the 2018 cycle and his charitable group last year. But there may be additional ones who aren’t yet public. A day before it was scheduled to file its first Federal Election Commission report of 2019, American Possibilities PAC changed its filing schedule. Now we won’t get a look at this year’s finances until July.
The overlap between political and charitable donors is common for politicians who run nonprofit groups on the side. And it’s natural that donors who support a politician’s work in government would also support it in other forums.
But it also underscores the inherent synergy between a politician’s electoral activities and those geared toward more apolitical general welfare. The Biden Foundation never engaged in any activity that could be considered overtly political. But any vehicle for keeping a public figure’s name in the news—and associated with positive charitable endeavors—is one that can only help that public figure’s political prospects.
The foundation’s decision to close up shop as its principal seeks the presidency suggests that Biden understands the moral hazard and public perception issues that such overlap can entail. It’s nothing compared to the controversy that enveloped the Trump Foundation, which shut down amid allegations of illegal politicking on the president’s behalf in 2016. They don’t even rise to the level of conflict-of-interest questions that bedeviled Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for the presidency.
But it appears that Biden learned a lesson from other presidential candidates who maintained charities on the side.
