The News-Journal in Delaware has done some investigating along the lines of the good real-estate digging regularly done by Carolina Journal’s Don Carrington. What they found is that Sen. Joe Biden has a home that seems way beyond his means:
In 1996, Biden sold a home in Greenville for the asking price of $1.2 million — more than six times what he paid two decades earlier — to John R. Cochran III, a top executive at the MBNA credit card bank that was a longtime political benefactor.
Using profits from that sale, Biden paid $350,000 cash to real estate executive and developer Keith D. Stoltz for 4.2 vacant acres — a long, narrow lot a few miles from Biden’s old home. Stoltz had bought that same lot five years earlier for the same price.
Stephen Pyle, who sold the land to Stoltz in 1991, said he was surprised that Stoltz, who lived on a neighboring estate, did not make any profit selling to Biden. “That doesn’t sound like Keith Stoltz,” Pyle, an artist who now lives in Texas, said of Stoltz, whose company recently proposed a $525 million project at nearby Barley Mill Plaza, a former DuPont Co. office campus.
Cochran did not return numerous calls for this article.
It’s unlikely the national media will jump on this story, even though it comes from a mainstream daily newspaper. They’re too busy reacting to DailyKos smear theories, including that Sarah Palin cheated to win the Miss Wasilla Pageant, that she had an affair with her husband’s business partner, that she burned books at the local library, and probably that she clubbed harp seals for fun and profit in her spare time.
