Don Graves
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2021-01-08 Joe Biden names former KeyBank official Don Graves his Deputy Commerce Secretary President-elect Joe Biden on Friday formally introduced former KeyBank official Don Graves as his nominee to serve as a deputy Commerce Department secretary, calling Graves “a longtime trusted adviser” who helped him lead efforts to get Detroit out of bankruptcy during President Barack Obama’s presidential administration.
“He did a great job working with city and state officials on its road to recovery,” Biden said of Graves, who was KeyBank’s Cleveland-based head of corporate responsibility and community relations before he went back to work for Biden.
2020-11-12 Joe Biden’s Transition Aide Helped Steer $3M to Hunter Biden-Linked Firm In December 2013, Hunter Biden, along with his long-time business associate Devon Archer, invested in a Hawaii-focused venture capital fund called mbloom. The investment, which was meant to provide seed capital for technology startups, was the result of a public-private partnership between Biden’s firm, Rosemont Seneca Technology (RST) Partners, and the state of Hawaii.
As part of the agreement, RST would provide five million for the fund, with the Hawaii Strategic Development Corporation (HSDC) matching the same amount. Little-known at the time, however, was that more than half of HSDC’s contribution, nearly $3 million, came from the Treasury Department’s State Small Business Credit Initiative. The program, which expenses more than $1.5 billion to state economic development agencies, fell under the purview of then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Don Graves.
Graves’ success in leveraging his relationship with the Biden family sharply contrasts with that of taxpayers in the state of Hawaii. Within months of HSDC inking the mbloom deal with Hunter Biden’s firm, the fund was embroiled in scandal. Most notably, two of the companies that first received capital from mbloom were owned by individuals, Arben Kryeziu and Nick Bicanic, tasked with managing the fund.
The scandal only grew when the company owned by Bicanic went under, without ever reporting a profit, and Kryeziu fell afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission. HSDC, which initially saw mbloom as an opportunity to diversify Hawaii’s service-centered economy, stepped in to stabilize the fund.
Those efforts proved futile, especially when Archer was indicted for defrauding a Native American tribe in May 2016. The charges against Archer stemmed in part from allegations that he and a business associate conspired to use tribal bonds under their control to drive up the stock price of Code Rebel, a technology company also owned by Kryeziu.
In the aftermath of the indictment, RST Partners agreed to give up its stake in mbloom to an investor lined up by HSDC. It remains unclear if Hunter Biden’s firm recouped its initial five-million-dollar investment. Despite hopes of salvaging mbloom, further investment never materialized. In June 2016, HSDC opted to shutter the fund in an effort to prevent any more tax dollars from going to waste.
2020-11-10 Biden’s tough choice on who will lead Treasury Biden’s Treasury secretary, which he is expected to name in the coming weeks, will be tasked with presiding over a U.S. economy that has not only been ravaged by the pandemic, but is facing new reckonings over racial inequality and climate change. The Treasury chief is also the incoming cabinet’s primary financial policymaker, with influence over bank regulatory changes, reforming the housing finance system, and what legislation affecting banks gets the administration’s support.
2020-10-27 Here’s who is on Biden’s new economic transition team Biden’s economic team appears to be diverse in gender, age, and ideology, but most of them have the common background of having worked with Biden or former President Barack Obama during the last administration.
The first four members of Biden’s new economic transition team confirmed by the Washington Examiner are Jared Bernstein, a longtime Biden economic adviser, Don Graves, who advised Biden for many years, Cecilia Munoz, who was a senior staffer in the Obama White House, and Joelle Gamble, a Democratic organizer who interned at the Treasury Department in 2018.
Other prominent economists known to be advising the Biden campaign include Ben Harris and Heather Boushey. Harris served as chief economist to Biden when he was vice president and is now teaching at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Boushey is president of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a liberal nonprofit research organization. She also served as chief economist for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential transition team.
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