MT. HOLLY, N.J. – The NJ-03 GOP primary stayed hyper-personal in the week after the Ocean County convention, with former Burlco Freeholder Kate Gibbs accusing her opponent, ex-construction CEO David Richter of ties to Joe Biden’s embattled brother James.
The Gibbs campaign specifically demanded that Richter “release all of his electronic communications with James Biden regarding the formation of Hillstone International and their efforts to secure contracts in the Middle East.”
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“David’s so-called business experience amounts to using money to buy political access in order to line his pockets at taxpayer expense,” said Gibbs in a press release. “One did it through his daddy and the other through his brother, but in both cases David Richter and James Biden are poster boys for entitlement, crony capitalism and are card-carrying members of ‘The Swamp’ that President Trump has railed against for years.”
Hillstone International is a subsidiary of Hill International, the company formerly spearheaded by Richter. James Biden was an employee of the subsidiary.
Gibbs’s attack seizes upon a 2012 column by Fox News’s Charlie Gasperino in which the cable news star cites an unnamed sources who claimed Richter extolled the benefits of having “the brother of the vice-president as a partner” and the “access to senior levels of government” such a connection produces during a closed door 2011 meeting.
Gibbs then sought to connect the purported Richter comment to a recent FBI raid at an unrelated company connected to James Biden.
“Does anyone believe that James Biden was a choir boy when David Richter went into business with him? Does anyone believe Richter’s company landed a $1.5 billion government contract to build houses in Iraq on actual merit? Of course not!” said Gibbs. “Republicans in Burlington and Ocean Counties need David Richter to be completely transparent about how his shady deal with James Biden got done, including all of their communications and the specific financial details to their business partnership.”
Richter says the premise of Gibbs’s attack is based on bad information. For starters, he says the Iraq contract fell through.
“It never pursued any work with the U.S. government,” Richter told the New Jersey Globe on Tuesday evening when asked about the Hillstone charge. “It got one contract with a South Korean real estate developer to help build housing in Iraq that never moved forward because their company never got financing.”
Both David Richter and Kate Gibbs spoke to Save Jersey’s Matt Rooney at last weekend’s NJGOP Summit in Atlantic City. Richter addressed some of the allegations concerning his work with Hill including his work in Gaddaffi’s Libya.
Click here to watch the interviews.
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