Hunter Biden’s Controversial Affairs | Joe Biden alongside his son, whatever the cost

(Washington) Joe Biden may be worried about the consequences of his son’s setbacks on his campaign to get re-elected in 2024, but the American president has never shown it.


Hunter Biden, with his past strewn with addictions and his troubled business relationships, is regularly the target of an American right headstrong against his father.

This hostility led on Tuesday to the launch by the Republicans of an impeachment investigation into the head of state.

The investigation, which will examine whether the president lied about his son’s affairs in Ukraine and China, could turn into a headache for the White House before the presidential election.

Hunter Biden is notably criticized for having accepted a mandate as administrator of the Ukrainian gas group Burisma in 2014, while his father was vice-president. Donald Trump even accused Joe Biden of having obtained the dismissal of a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect Burisma from prosecution for corruption.

Some see Hunter, 53, as the black sheep of a family victim of tragedy, but the president has never wavered in his support for his only surviving son.


PHOTO NICK WASS, ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES

Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, in 2010

“My son did nothing wrong. I have confidence in him,” Joe Biden said recently regarding Hunter’s charges of tax evasion and illegal possession of firearms.

” Lost hope ”

The Bidens’ bonds were forged on the soil of tragedy.

In 1972, Hunter’s mother, Neilia, and Naomi, his younger sister, were killed in a car accident. Hunter suffered skull fractures while his older brother Beau was seriously injured.

“At first, the pain seemed insurmountable,” Joe Biden wrote in “Promise Me Dad,” his memoir published in 2017.

Newly elected senator, Joe Biden was sworn in at the hospital. They lived as a threesome until he met his second wife, Jill.

And if the two brothers have “always been there for each other” since childhood according to Joe Biden, Hunter lived in the shadow of Beau, an officer during the war in Iraq, and who seemed destined – to according to his father – to a presidential destiny.

A Yale law graduate, Hunter tried his hand at several careers before landing at a family-controlled investment fund and opening his consulting firm in the late 2000s.

But his drug and alcohol addictions worsened. In 2014, he was discharged from the Navy reserves after testing positive for cocaine.

And the death in 2015 of his older brother from brain cancer at the age of 46 precipitated his downfall.

“After Beau died, I had never felt so alone. I had lost hope,” he says in his book “Les Belles choses” published in 2020.

” Never give up ”

His marriage breaks down and he loses custody of his three daughters. His ex, Kathleen Buhle, had talked about how his addictions had spiraled out of control against a backdrop of salty notes in strip bars and liquor stores.

Then Hunter had a short-lived affair with Beau’s widow, and a daughter with a woman from Arkansas – a child whose existence was only recently acknowledged by the Bidens.

His father’s enemies also released files, lurid photos and problematic emails from his laptop to accuse the father of having a toxic nepotistic relationship with his son.

The president, who himself does not drink, nevertheless always responded.


PHOTO KEVIN DIETSCH, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES

Jill Biden, Hunter Biden and Joe Biden during the latter’s inauguration on January 20, 2021.

“He never gave up on me,” Hunter Biden wrote about his father. “At times, his perseverance put me beside myself. I was trying to disappear into a black hole with alcohol or drugs and then there he was, showing up again with his lantern.”

Hunter assures that he has not taken anything since 2019 following an intervention by his second wife Melissa, with whom he had a son, and his father.

He took up painting, but attracted further controversy when anonymous buyers paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to acquire his works.

Joe Biden kept his son close to him this year, for example taking him to Ireland in April.

But anonymous allies of the president cited recently by the New York Times said that Joe Biden had thus attracted “entirely avoidable political distractions”.


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