Hunter Biden: the president’s son in Republican crosshairs

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Joe Biden had just finished speaking about artificial intelligence at the Fairmont hotel in downtown San Francisco this week when reporters started to pepper the US president with questions about something entirely different: the legal troubles of his 53-year-old son.

Had he talked to Hunter? What did he think of the deal Hunter had just reached with federal prosecutors? Biden smiled, then answered: “I’m very proud of my son.”

Earlier in the day, Hunter had agreed to plead guilty for wilfully failing to pay federal income taxes in 2017 and 2018, while he also reached a deal to avoid jail in connection with a separate charge related to the possession of a firearm.

The announcement capped an investigation into Hunter’s finances that has cast a shadow over the president’s son for years — and will allow him and the White House to put the matter behind them in the least damaging manner. But the guilty plea has also brought a new wave of attention to a man who has struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction, and whose business dealings have made him a lightning rod for Republican attacks.

Hunter was born in 1970 in Wilmington, Delaware, and his early childhood was marked by tragedy. When he was nearly three years old, and shortly after Biden was first elected to the US Senate, his mother Neilia and his baby sister Naomi were killed in a car crash as they went shopping for a Christmas tree. Hunter was in the Chevrolet station wagon with his older brother Beau, and both were severely injured.

“The first memory I have is of lying in a hospital bed next to my brother,” Hunter said at Beau’s funeral after he died of brain cancer in 2015. “I remember [him] . . . holding my hand, staring into my eyes, saying, ‘ I love you, I love you, I love you’, over and over and over again.”

Hunter grew up with his father commuting back and forth from Washington DC to Wilmington on Amtrak trains. He attended a Catholic high school in Claymont, Delaware, before earning a bachelor’s degree at Georgetown University and a law degree at Yale Law School. His first employment was at the Wilmington zoo, but his first big job was at MBNA, the Delaware-based credit card company. He then moved into government, working at the commerce department during the Clinton administration.

Following George W Bush’s election to the White House, Hunter operated at the intersection of money and politics, both domestically and internationally. He served on the boards of Amtrak and the World Food Programme, and did stints as a lobbyist, consultant and investor.

His business ties extended from China to Ukraine, where he snagged a lucrative position on the board of Burisma, the energy company — just as his father assumed a pivotal role in shaping US policy towards these countries as Barack Obama’s vice-president.

“I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden,” Hunter said in a 2019 interview with ABC.

Hunter’s personal struggles have in many ways been more defining than his career. He was discharged from a brief period of service in the US Navy after failing a drug test and has spent time in and out of rehab clinics. “I’ve bought crack cocaine on the streets of Washington DC, and cooked up my own inside a hotel bungalow in Los Angeles. I’ve been so desperate for a drink that I couldn’t make the one-block walk between a liquor store and my apartment without uncapping the bottle to take a swig,” Hunter wrote in his 2021 memoir Beautiful Things.

His romantic entanglements have been tumultuous. For 24 years, he was married to Kathleen Buhle. They have three adult children together. But they divorced in 2017 after he became romantically involved with Hallie Biden, his brother’s widow. They eventually split up. Hunter fathered a fourth child with a woman from Arkansas, and in 2019 married South African film-maker Melissa Cohen within six days of meeting her. They have one child.

Hunter’s political profile rose sharply after Donald Trump came into office and was impeached for trying to dig up dirt on his Ukraine business ties in a phone call with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But he became the subject of even greater conservative suspicion after he allegedly left a laptop at a computer repair shop in 2020 and its contents were leaked, though no smoking gun emerged connecting members of the Biden family to corruption.

Despite congressional Republicans launching their own investigation into the Biden family, the bond between father and son, says Chris Whipple, author of The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House, has “grown stronger since Beau’s untimely death. The president talks to Hunter multiple times a day.”

In any case, argues Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University, “the president’s political future will rise or fall on how well he has governed and not on the foibles of his much troubled son”. Lichtman adds that previous presidents, including James Madison, Theodore Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, have had to deal with troublesome family members while in office.

And Biden’s backing for his son has never wavered. “He never let me forget that all was not lost,” Hunter wrote in his memoir. “He never abandoned me, never shunned me, never judged me, no matter how bad things got.”

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