“I lived in these motels full of crack users. I hung out with these people, walked the streets with them, and got some crazy highs with them.” The story of Hunter Biden, the 53-year-old son of Joe Biden, including his descent into hell, is the weak one flank with which the Republicans are trying to attack the President of the United States. It’s nothing new. The campaign against him began with Donald Trump as president: his pressure on Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate him led to the first impeachment proceedings against him. Now that Republicans have taken control of the House of Representatives, they want to turn the tables. They have launched a formal investigation as a precursor to a possible impeachment of Biden, even though they have found no compelling evidence against the president and the crimes under investigation took place before he took office.
Hunter Biden, who was indicted this week for allegedly purchasing and possessing a revolver while addicted to drugs, is also the emotional frailty of a president who lost two of his four children and struggled to pull Hunter out of his self-destructive spiral. . He has always supported him, especially in his lowest moments, even if it could undermine his popularity.
The accident that destroyed and united the family
In “Beautiful Things,” his memoir published in 2021, Hunter Biden reviews the Bidens’ “tragic, human, emotional, enduring, deeply consequential and ultimately redemptive” love story. His first memory was of being two years old, sitting in the back of the spacious white Chevy family car, next to his brother Beau, who was a year older than him, with his mother Neilia driving and his one-year-old sister Naomi in the front seat. They wanted to pick up the Christmas tree. At an intersection, a trailer loaded with corn cobs ran over them. It was December 18, 1972. His mother and sister died almost immediately. Hunter suffered a severe skull fracture and the next thing he remembers was waking up in the hospital next to his brother Beau. This accident brought the two brothers and their father together: “The deepest love I have ever known,” Hunter writes.
Tragedy struck the Bidens again. The president’s son sees the origin of his personal crisis as the death of his brother Beau, an Iraq war veteran and Delaware attorney general who had a promising political career ahead of him, from a brain tumor in 2015 at the age of 46. “I am an alcoholic and drug addict. I bought crack on the streets of Washington DC and cooked it myself in a hotel bungalow in Los Angeles. “I wanted to drink so desperately that I couldn’t walk the block between the liquor store and my apartment without opening the bottle to get a drink,” he wrote after he recovered.
Hunter had a successful professional career. He graduated from Yale and Georgetown universities, was a director of the financial company MBNA (later acquired by Bank of America) and was appointed by George W. Bush as vice president of Amtrak (the American Renfe). He worked as a lobbyist in Washington, founded investment firms and was an adviser to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma from 2014 to 2018 – a position that unexpectedly shaped the recent history of the United States. His father was vice president and earned $50,000 a month.
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“I worked for people who were not my father, I rose and fell alone,” Hunter Biden claims in his memoir. “I did serious jobs for serious people. There is no doubt that my last name has opened doors for me, but my qualifications and achievements speak for themselves. It was impossible for these achievements not to intersect at times with my father’s spheres of influence during his two terms as vice president,” he adds.
Republicans have tried unsuccessfully to link Biden directly to his son’s business dealings. At most, investigations have shown that the current president once said “hello” on the phone and attended a dinner with Hunter’s partners or clients when he was Barack Obama’s vice president. Joe Biden assures that he has always stayed away from these deals, although it is difficult to imagine that Hunter Biden would have reached positions like Burisma without being the vice president’s son.
Hunter explains the harassment he endured in his memoir: “I became the embodiment of Donald Trump’s fear of not being re-elected. “He spread debunked conspiracy theories about my work in Ukraine and China, even though his children made millions in China and Russia and his campaign manager was in prison for laundering millions of dollars from Ukraine,” he says. “Trump thought that if he could destroy me, and by extension my father, he would be able to take down any decent candidate from both parties while diverting attention from his corrupt behavior,” he added.
A lost computer in the hands of Trump’s lawyer
The president’s son took his laptop for repairs to a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, where the family lives. He forgot to pick it up. A copy of the contents, containing tens of thousands of emails, text messages and photos, including some with sordid sexual content, ended up in the hands of Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and Trump’s lawyer. They landed on the front page of the New York Post tabloid, including news that the vice president would be taking his son to dinner with his partners. The Biden campaign labeled it Russian disinformation intended to influence the election (and managed to get those in charge of social media moderation to initially cover up the story). Republicans viewed it as definitive evidence against Biden, which was not the case.
Biden clearly won the election (although Trump did not acknowledge this). The day after she took office, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the previous president’s loyal squire, presented a proposed impeachment inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business dealings. It was too early. Republicans launched an investigation that has been trying unsuccessfully to gather evidence for months. They have an anonymous complaint to the FBI, which was not verified and dismissed by investigators, that Biden received bribes from Ukraine. They had bank account transactions that raised suspicion but did not require further investigation. They have testimony that Biden greeted one of his son’s associates on the phone and apparently attended a dinner.
In a 2020 election debate, Biden said his son did not do business in China, which turned out to be untrue, but it is unclear whether he was trying to mislead him or whether he simply didn’t know. The president assures that he has never discussed business with his son. He admitted that he only told him that he hoped he knew what he was doing when he took the job at Burisma. To which he replied: “I know, Dad, I know.” Is this business with your son? Does it justify impeachment?
Trump has been charged four times with 91 crimes
The White House has launched a legal and communications offensive to discredit Republicans’ allegations. Democrats believe this is a political fight in which Republicans want to drag out the investigation as long as possible due to a lack of evidence and convincing arguments. After Trump was charged four times with 91 crimes, they want to spread suspicion of a “culture of corruption” against Biden. The president avoids talking about the issue. “I don’t wake up and think about it. “I have a job to do,” he said this week when asked about it.
The indictment for allegedly illegally purchasing and possessing a weapon is another blow to the president, who keeps repeating: “My son did nothing wrong.” It is likely that the trial will come in the middle of the race for the November 5, 2024 elections will be held. And new charges cannot be ruled out, even when it comes to the two minor tax crimes to which Hunter was prepared to plead guilty before the deal with prosecutors fell through.
“I have experienced worse and survived. I have experienced the extremes of success and ruin. (…) I come from a family shaped by tragedy and bound by an extraordinary and unbreakable love,” Hunter Biden wrote in his memoirs after the Republicans’ first harassment campaign. A new personal and political test is coming for the Bidens.
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