Teetotal Joe Biden has always defended son Hunter. (File)
Washington:
If US President Joe Biden ever worried about the effect his son Hunter’s troubles could have on his 2024 re-election bid, he never showed it. Hunter Biden’s history of controversial business deals, drugs and women has long made him a target for the elder Biden’s Republican enemies.
That culminated on Tuesday in the opening of an impeachment inquiry by the House of Representatives against the president.
But if some see Hunter as the black sheep of America’s first family, 80-year-old Joe Biden has stood firmly by his only surviving son against a backdrop of tragedy.
“My son has done nothing wrong. I trust him. I have confidence in him,” Biden said in an interview earlier this year about tax and gun charges against 53-year-old Hunter.
Asked how Hunter’s troubles could affect his presidency, Biden said: “It affects my presidency by making me proud of him.”
But while Biden’s love is steadfast, Hunter’s woes show no signs of fading.
In fact, the impeachment inquiry into whether Biden lied about his son’s business deals in Ukraine and China threatens to create a bigger headache than ever for the White House ahead of next year’s election.
‘Lost Hope’
The bond between the Bidens was forged through devastating losses.
A car accident in 1972 left Hunter’s mother Neilia and sister Naomi dead, two-year-old Hunter with a skull fracture and his older brother Beau with several broken bones.
“The pain seemed unbearable at first,” Joe Biden wrote in his 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad.”
He was sworn in as a newly elected senator at Hunter and Beau’s hospital bedside and the three of them met his second wife, Jill.
“They were always there for each other, from the time they were little boys,” Biden wrote.
Yet Hunter also lived in the shadow of Beau, who had a stellar military career and entered politics, with Biden imagining Beau could one day become president.
A graduate of Yale Law School, Hunter drifted between jobs in government, banking and lobbying before landing at a family-run hedge fund and his own international business consulting firm in the late 2000s.
His life became increasingly marred by alcoholism and addiction to crack cocaine. In 2014, he was discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine.
Things took a drastic turn for the worse after his brother died of brain cancer in 2015 at the age of 46.
“After Beau’s death, I never felt alone again. I lost hope,” he wrote in his 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things.
His marriage failed and he lost custody of his three daughters. His ex-wife Kathleen Buhle said in her memoir that his addictions grew and he racked up bills for strip clubs and liquor stores.
Hunter then had an affair with Beau’s widow and had a daughter with a woman in Arkansas who Joe Biden only recently publicly acknowledged as his seventh grandchild.
Then he saw his files, emails and lurid photos from his laptop made public by his father’s enemies as they claimed there was a toxic brew of nepotism between Joe Biden and his son.
‘Completely inevitable’
Despite all that, teetotal Joe Biden has always defended Hunter.
“My son, like a lot of people… had a drug problem,” Biden said when Donald Trump brought up Hunter’s drug use and business deals during a TV debate in the 2020 presidential race.
Hunter said he had been clean since 2019 after an intervention by his second wife Melissa – with whom he had a son, Beau – and his father.
“He never abandoned me, never shunned me, never judged me no matter how bad things got,” Hunter wrote.
“There were times when his persistence infuriated me – I was trying to blacken out from alcoholism or drug addiction, and then he would come rushing back in with his lantern, shine a light and disrupt my plans to disappear,” he says. said.
He took up painting, but that sparked new controversy when unnamed collectors bought his works for prices in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Biden has kept his son close this year, taking him to Ireland in April and hosting him on the White House balcony for Independence Day celebrations.
But the DailyExpertNews last week quoted unidentified Biden allies as saying this “has resulted in entirely avoidable political distractions.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
