The Tangled Life Of Hunter Biden

People respond in many different ways to childhood tragedies, and in Hunter Biden's case, it's probably not out of line to suggest that his troubled life sprang rather directly from its troubled beginning. In December 1972, just a month after 30-year-old Joe Biden was elected to the U.S. Senate, his first wife Neilia took their three children — toddlers Beau and Hunter, and Naomi, 13 months — to go shopping for a Christmas tree as Joe interviewed potential staffers. As they passed through an intersection, a truck collided with their vehicle — severely injuring Beau and Hunter, and killing Neilia and Naomi. 

After publishing his memoir, "Beautiful Things," Hunter Biden opened up about how the incident was a formative one, and one which contributed to his well-publicized substance abuse issues later in life. In a conversation with CBS News Sunday, he examined the reasons behind his lifelong struggles with addiction. "I am more convinced now that trauma is at the center of it," he explained. Asked if he was referring to the loss of his mother, he said, "Yeah, absolutely. And I don't know why I had such a hard time ever admitting that." Biden has often said that his first memory is of Beau telling him he loved him as they lay together in a hospital bed, in a room in which Joe Biden would be sworn in as a U.S. senator.

In 1994, Hunter Biden wed Kathleen Buhle after a year-long courtship during which she became pregnant with their first child. Everything seemed fine for the young couple until early in the next decade, as Hunter's new status as partner in a private lobbying firm began to prove problematic. His enviable salary, combined with long, boozy nights out with clients, were helping Hunter to develop a formidable drinking problem — one that only got harder to shake as the years went on.

In her memoir "If We Break" (via Vanity Fair), Buhle shared that Hunter's relatively brief stretches of sobriety would give way to increasingly long, hard stretches of drinking, during which her husband would doggedly attempt to hide the extent of his problem. "Each time he drank, the process of getting him to admit he wasn't sober took longer and was more exhausting," she wrote — and as his brother Beau Biden tangled with the brain cancer that would eventually kill him in 2015, Hunter's struggle went from bad to much, much worse. "The denials grew angrier and more bitter ... Hunter's drinking was obvious in the darkest, angriest way," she wrote. After Beau's death, Hunter went so far as to turn to crack — at which point, Buhle wrote, she had "lost the ability to be surprised by him."

In 2011, in the midst of his substance struggles, Hunter Biden became friends with Greg Keeley, an Australian-American who was chock full of exciting stories about his time as an intelligence officer in the Royal Australian Navy. Upon relocating to the U.S., Keeley had applied for and received an age waiver to join the U.S. Navy as a reserve officer at the age of 40 — and he was keen to convince a rather unmoored Biden that it was never too late for him to do the same. "My message to him was: If you feel the call to serve, which I encouraged, it doesn't really matter what your rank is," Keeley told the New Yorker. "It is that you're serving your country. Hunter took that message to heart and acted upon it." At the age of 43, with a letter of recommendation from Keeley, Biden was granted not one, but two waivers: one due to his age, and the other due to the fact that he disclosed his prior drug use to the Navy, which has a strict zero-tolerance policy.

Unfortunately, that very policy meant that Biden's naval career was over before it started. In 2013, Biden failed a drug test administered by the Navy, testing positive for cocaine. In 2014, he was administratively discharged, leaving Biden once more in search of a direction.

Hunter Biden's private life has gotten a lot of attention in the last several years, particularly during the brutal run-up to the 2020 presidential election. But among all of the details that have become public, one might have escaped the attention of many. Biden's go-to outlet for dealing with his demons happens to be one that human beings have leaned on since time immemorial: He's an artist. A painter, to be exact, specializing in mixed-media works — and in 2021, his work was showcased in a show titled "The Journey Home," at the SoHo gallery of Georges Bergès.

It was initially reported that the prices of the 25 pieces on display would range up to $500,000, and this (of course) drew scrutiny from the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Bergès, though, shot that figure down, acknowledging to The New York Times that some pieces might sell in the lower six-figure range while asserting that only he and Biden would know who the buyers were and how much they paid — and also that "Hunter will go down as a great artist for this century." Famed Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee disagreed, telling CNN, "To me, Biden seems a bit of a dabbler. His work has the feeling of an afterthought ... If I were a museum curator, I would struggle to find compelling reasons to share it with the public." Asked by Vanity Fair art columnist Nate Freeman if he had anything to say about those questioning his artistic bona fides, Biden succinctly answered with a question of his own: "Other than f*** 'em?" (via Page Six).

As to that renewed publicity, you may be aware that there has been a great deal of speculation around a certain laptop that Hunter Biden supposedly took in for service at a Delaware repair shop, then abandoned. The contents of the laptop's hard drive range from the extremely personal (such as, allegedly, homemade pornography) to the potentially politically explosive (such as, allegedly, a gigantic trove of emails that may or may not indicate that Joe Biden profited from his son's business dealings with foreign entities). A number of news organizations, such as The Washington Post, have conducted forensic examinations of the laptop's hard drive in an attempt to authenticate its contents, with only partial success. 

The Post was able to authenticate a goodly number of emails from Hunter's days sitting on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, and also from his time participating in a business partnership with a cadre of Chinese associates. Hunter was paid handsomely from these endeavors, and he freely admitted in his memoir that his hefty income was a major factor enabling his addictions during that period. As to whether the laptop contained any evidence of criminal wrongdoing, that is more difficult to say — because the Post's forensic analysis also indicated that an unknown number of individuals other than Hunter had accessed the laptop's hard drive and written files to it. "The drive," said Johns Hopkins University security researcher Matt Green, "is a mess."

Throughout his often turbulent life, Hunter Biden has always been able to count on one thing: the love and support of his father. The younger Biden expressed as much when, in 2019, it was widely speculated that his personal troubles might throw a monkey wrench into Joe Biden's potential run at the presidency. In a statement to Vanity Fair, Hunter Biden did not mince words. "I believe that my father has become an ongoing symbol of what it means to keep on fighting for what is good in oneself, in others and in our country," he said. "I can tell you that I wouldn't be alive today, if my dad hadn't kept fighting for me, too ... My father has always been proud of me ... and he remains proud of me today. He loves me. And he loves the American people."

Even facing the possibility that his son might be in deep legal trouble over his tax issues and that handgun form, that support has not wavered. In 2022, President Biden addressed that possibility in a conversation with CNN's Jake Tapper. "He's overcome [his drug problems]. He's established a new life," Joe Biden said. "I have great confidence in my son. I love him and he's on the straight and narrow, and he has been for a couple years now. And I'm just so proud of him."