One of the nastiest moments during the acrimonious 2020 election battle between Joe Biden and Donald Trump came during their first TV debate, when Biden started listing his son’s accomplishments.
‘He’s got a Bronze Star,’ he said.
‘Really?’ President Trump interrupted. ‘Are you talking about Hunter?’
Biden barked back: ‘I’m talking about my son Beau Biden!’
‘I don’t know Beau, I know Hunter,’ Trump replied, before reminding voters of the latter’s sordid battle with drugs and his questionable business history.
Biden’s two sons, Beau and Hunter – one a state Attorney General who died aged 46 from a brain tumor, and the other a crack addict, alcoholic and convicted felon – are not easily confused, although together they epitomize the twin themes of tragedy and controversy that have dogged the current president’s long political career.
Newly elected Sentator Joe Biden with his wife Neilia, 1972.
Senator Biden with his young sons Beau (left) and Hunter attend an event at the White house in 1982.
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And as he now – finally – bows out from the presidential race and heads for what many would surely characterize as a long-overdue retirement, his fellow Democrats are showering him in praise… even as they hide their sighs of relief.
Biden, 81, no doubt still genuinely believes he was the only Democrat who could beat Trump in November.
However, for all the two men’s mutual antipathy, the fact remains that Biden should be eternally grateful that his rival has such a sleazy personal and business history.
For it took the spotlight off his and his family’s not inconsiderable shortcomings.
Controversies small (Hunter’s depraved private life) and great (evidence that Hunter and his uncle James Biden repeatedly tried to cash in on Joe’s name and connections) were either downplayed, completely ignored or even falsely dismissed as Kremlin propaganda.
The liberal media preferred to focus on Joe the ordinary man, beset by tragedy – rather than Joe the transactional politician, dogged by controversy.
In this former narrative, the empathetic and straight-shooting ‘Middle-Class Joe’ (as he has called himself) couldn’t be more different to Trump.
But, from his own endless capacity for telling complete whoppers, to the accusations of Biden family greed and graft, was Uncle Joe really that far removed from The Donald?
As the Second World War raged in Europe, Biden was born in 1942 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to an Irish-Catholic family plagued by alcoholism (the reason why Joe now doesn’t drink).
His father, a lowly second-hand car salesman, moved the family to Delaware, where Biden trained as a lawyer and overcame his stutter in his 20s by reciting poetry in a mirror.
In 1972, aged just 30, he became one of the youngest Senators in US history – representing his home state.
However, only weeks after being elected, tragedy struck: his wife of six years, 30-year-old Neilia, died along with their 13-month-old daughter Naomi in a car crash while out Christmas shopping. Biden had been away in Washington DC hiring staff.
Joe and his wife Neilia celebrate his 30th birthday in 1972 with their two boys.
The remains of Neilia’s car after the tragic 1972 crash that killed her and the Bidens’ 13-month-old daughter Naomi.
Beau and Hunter, then aged just three and two, were also in the car but survived with non-life-threatening injuries – Beau with a broken leg and his younger brother with a fractured skull.
Biden, who considered resigning to care for the boys, was so distraught he briefly considered committing suicide by jumping off the Delaware Memorial Bridge.
The deaths rocked his Catholic faith, he later admitted, feeling that ‘God had played a horrible trick’ on him.
He would walk around seedy neighborhoods at night, where he ‘thought there was a better chance of finding a fight’, he wrote in his memoir years later. ‘I had not known I was capable of such rage.’
Distracted by grief, Biden recalled having such trouble concentrating on his job that his staffers took bets on how long he would last.
But he would overcome his despair and anger, and even find love again. Three years later in fact – when, in 1975, he met divorced teacher Jill Jacobs on a blind date.
They married in 1977 and had a daughter, Ashley, in 1981.
But his woes were only just beginning.
In 1988, Joe’s first run for the presidency was derailed after it emerged he’d exaggerated his school record and plagiarized a speech by a British politician, former Labour leader Neil Kinnock.
Meanwhile, Beau, the apple of his father’s eye, became an army lawyer in Iraq and later Delaware’s Attorney General.
‘I really do admire Beau more than anyone I know. He’s a decent, honorable man,’ Joe said during his son’s successful 2006 run for the AG position.
And yet Joe, who had taken his Senate oath in the chapel of the hospital where his sons were being treated after their mother’s fatal car crash – making sure he was pictured next to Beau who was still in bed, his leg elevated in a support sling – wouldn’t have his favorite son around for much longer.
In 2015, Beau died of brain cancer – not in Iraq, as his father often now claims, but at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland.
Hunter was now all Joe had left of his first marriage – so, predictably, his tight grip on his son only hardened.
But their ‘incredible bond’, as Joe has called it, has certainly been tested over the years.
Joe, who had taken his Senate oath in the chapel of the hospital where his sons were being treated after their mother’s fatal car crash – making sure he was pictured next to Beau who was still in bed, his leg elevated in a support sling – wouldn’t have his favorite son around for long.
In 2015, Beau died of brain cancer – not in Iraq, as his father often now claims, but at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland.
Hunter was now all Joe had left of his first marriage – so, predictably, his tight grip on his son only hardened. But their ‘incredible bond’, as Joe has called it, has certainly been tested over the years. (Picture from Hunter’s laptop).
Hunter attended Georgetown University and Yale Law School, also joining a Jesuit volunteer group in Portland, Oregon.
It was through church that he met his first wife, Kathleen Buhle.
They wed in 1993 and had three children – Naomi, Finnegan and Maisy.
However, in 2017 they separated – Kathleen by then having had enough of Hunter’s severe addictions and wild spending habits.
Hunter had started drinking as a teenager. By the time he was in college, he was abusing cocaine.
Working out of university as a lawyer and lobbyist, Hunter later admitted he was ‘functioning alcoholic’.
He was discharged from the US Navy Reserve in 2014 after testing positive for cocaine – though Hunter often insists his substance abuse only drastically increased after his brother Beau died the following year.
On many days he reportedly only left his house to buy vodka.
‘He and Beau were one,’ Hunter’s daughter Naomi once tried to explain. ‘One heart, one soul, one mind.’
His 2017 divorce with Kathleen was acrimonious. It came just as Joe was stepping down as Barack Obama’s Vice President – following Trump’s win – but Kathleen didn’t hold back on publicly revealing what a nightmare Hunter had been like to live with.
She described how he would obsessively trawl through internet porn, frequently hired prostitutes and had such a serious drug problem that she found a crack cocaine pipe in their ashtray.
In court papers, she accused him of ‘spending extravagantly on his own interests (including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he had sexual relations) while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills’.
His rampant sexual behavior had other serious consequences.
A DNA test in 2019 revealed he was the ‘biological and legal father’ of a child born to Lunden Roberts, a stripper from Arkansas.
Hunter and Hallie Baldwin, Beau’s widow.
Hunter’s estranged daughter Navy Joan with her mother, Lunden Roberts.
Hunter with a prostitute – picture from his laptop.
Hunter claimed in his memoir to have ‘no recollection’ of meeting Roberts, but he has since settled a paternity suit and pays child support.
For years, the Biden family refused to acknowledge baby Navy Joan – now four years old. But after substantial media pressure, the President last year finally publicly recognized his seventh grandchild.
But the Hunter humiliations didn’t stop there.
His affair with his own brother’s widow, Hallie Biden, while still married to Kathleen, was particularly shocking.
In his 2021 memoir ‘Beautiful Things’, Hunter tried to elicit sympathy, saying the pair’s two-year fling was due to bonding over a ‘very specific grief’ they shared after Beau’s death.
But fairytale it was not. Testifying at his federal gun trial in June, Hallie said Hunter ‘introduced’ her to crack cocaine.
The trial – at which Hunter was convicted – also heard how he boasted of his ‘superpower of finding crack anywhere, anytime’.
Hunter claims to be ‘the target of the unrelenting Trump attack machine’ – but Republicans could hardly be blamed for the toe-curling and shameful details we now know about the First Son’s life.
Many of the most lurid details were made public just weeks before the 2020 election, courtesy of Hunter’s laptop being leaked to the media after it was abandoned at a Delaware computer-repair shop.
A photo – extracted from the computer – of Hunter lying comatose in bed with what appeared to be a crack pipe hanging out his mouth seemed to sum up how low he’d sunk.
So too did the multiple nude pictures of him, often seen engaging in sex and taking drugs with prostitutes.
At the time, the Biden team insisted it was all a ‘smear campaign’ engineered by Russian disinformation, with more than 50 former senior intelligence officials signing a letter saying they agreed.
It was months before the US media was able to blow apart that lie and prove the computer was indeed authentic.
And there’s fresh embarrassment to come: Hunter goes on trial in Los Angeles in September on charges that include failing to pay taxes, tax evasion and filing false tax returns. (He denies the offenses).
In June, a federal jury found him guilty go three felony gun charges related to lying on government forms when purchasing a firearm. He awaits sentencing.
But while it’s hardly a secret that drug addiction and alcoholism makes people behave appallingly in their personal lives, Hunter’s alleged financial misconduct and suspicious business behavior is harder to blame on vodka or crack cocaine.
A cloud has hung over Hunter’s career – and indeed his father’s – ever since, after graduating from Yale Law School in 1996, he got a job at MBNA America, a bank holding company headquartered in Delaware.
A cloud has hung over Hunter’s career – and indeed his father’s – ever since, after graduating from Yale Law School in 1996, he got a job at MBNA America, a bank holding company headquartered in Delaware.
It was a bank with which, as one of his top campaign funders, Joe had such close ties that he was jokingly nicknamed ‘the senator from MBNA’.
At the same time that Hunter was promoted to the rank of executive vice-president, his father was working to push legislation that was favorable to MBNA through the Senate.
In 2001, Hunter became a Washington lobbyist, while still receiving consulting fees from MBNA that rose to $100,000 a year.
Although it led to him landing clients that overlapped with Joe’s senatorial committee work and legislative priorities, Hunter has always insisted they had an arrangement whereby father and son never discussed his lobbying work.
In 2006, Hunter and his uncle James Biden, Joe’s younger brother, bought an international hedge fund called Paradigm Global Advisors.
According to an insider who spoke to Politico, on their first day in the job, the pair marched into Paradigm’s Manhattan office, had the president fired and told staff: ‘Don’t worry about investors. We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.’ (A few months later, Joe was to take over as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launch a second presidential bid).
According to the Politico source, James Biden made it clear publicly that he viewed the fund as a way to take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money to his older brother or his campaign account. The Bidens denied this.
However, three former Paradigm executives said James and Hunter also sought to capitalize on Joe’s strong ties to labor unions in the hope of landing investments from them.
Charles Provini, who briefly served as Paradigm’s president, said both James and Hunter repeatedly cited Joe’s political ties when they recruited him.
The fund would go on to become connected with several alleged fraudsters, including Texan financier R. Allen Stanford, who was convicted of running one of the biggest ever Ponzi schemes.
However, the Bidens denied any wrongdoing and never faced charges. And in 2010, they liquidated the fund and returned money to investors.
‘There’s no evidence that Joe Biden used his power inappropriately or took action to benefit his relatives with respect to these ventures,’ Politico concluded in a major 2019 investigation. ‘Interviews, court records, government filings and news reports, however, reveal that some members of the Biden family have consistently mixed business and politics over nearly half a century, moving from one business to the next as Joe’s stature in Washington grew.’
Similar allegations of dubious associations and potential conflicts of interest continued to dog Hunter.
In 2013, he took a founding board seat at BHR, a Chinese private equity firm.
The company was registered in Shanghai less than a fortnight after Hunter flew with his father, by then Vice President, on an official US trip to China and met BHR’s chief executive. Hunter later insisted it had been for no more than a ‘cup of coffee’.
Joe had left office when Hunter then went into partnership with Chinese oil tycoon Ye Jianming in 2017 on a natural gas project in Louisiana.
Ye was arrested by the Chinese government on corruption charges and the deal fell apart.
An email from that year — extracted from Hunter’s notorious laptop — indicated he was receiving a $10 million annual fee from a Chinese billionaire for ‘introductions alone’ while another, sent by one of Hunter’s business associates, proposed including the ‘big guy’ in a planned venture with a Chinese company.
The associate admitted he’d been referring to Joe but insisted the project never went anywhere.
Given his father was in charge of handling US-Ukraine relations in the Obama administration, Hunter’s decision to join the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings in 2014 — earning as much as $1.2 million a year — proved particularly controversial.
Joe was, at the time, encouraging Ukraine to clamp down on corruption and urging its government to fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin.
He was ousted 2016 — but the fact that Shokin had been investigating Burisma inevitably muddied the waters.
In 2023, one of Hunter’s former business partners, Devon Archer, told a US congressional panel that Hunter put his father on speakerphone up to 20 times while speaking with business associates. Though Biden said in 2019 that he had never discussed with his son or anyone else in the family ‘anything having to do with their businesses’.
An email suggested Hunter set up a meeting between his father and an executive at Burisma, although Team Biden insists no meeting ever took place.
Republican claims that Burisma bosses paid both Joe and Hunter $5 million for removing the Shokin ‘threat’ were undermined this year when the US Justice Department charged an ex-FBI informant with falsely concocting the bribery scheme because he disliked President Biden.
After so many family tragedies, it’s not hard to understand why a father should be super-protective of his ‘only surviving son’, as Biden often calls Hunter.
However, his loyalty to Hunter — the source of so many of the President’s messes — has been as ferocious as it has uncompromising.
‘You’re a damn liar,’ he memorably snapped at an ordinary voter in Iowa who had questioned Hunter’s business dealings in 2019.
In doing so, Biden displayed the same stubbornness that made his final farewell to US politics not a time for thanks and celebration but for relief — and not a little anger that he didn’t do it long ago.