He has been at the center of controversy on several occasions, and his activities, some of which are questioned in the media, have become a problem for his father’s political career.
Hunter Biden, the second son of the president of the United States, Joe Biden, has returned to the news after learning that he has reached an agreement with the US Attorney’s Office to plead guilty to two offenses for tax evasion and a third charge for illegal possession of a firearm being a drug addict.
The agreement, which still needs to be validated by a judge, will put an end to a five-year investigation.
The two tax offenses arise from the fact that stopped paying more than $100,000 in taxes in 2017 and 2018.
The firearm possession charge also originated in 2018, when Hunter Biden was a crack addict, he acknowledged in a book published in 2021.
“I know Hunter believes it’s important to take responsibility for these mistakes you made during a turbulent and addictive period in your life. He looks forward to continuing his recovery and moving forward,” his attorney, Chris Clark, said in a statement.
In theory, the son of the US president could face a maximum sentence of one year in prison for each of the fiscal offenses and up to 10 years for possession of the weapon.
However, it is believed that – if the judge approves the agreement – I may be able to avoid going to jail.
Instead, Hunter is expected to agree to be monitored by authorities, as well as undergo addiction treatment.
But why is Biden’s second son so controversial?
Tragedies, addictions and suspicions of influence peddling
At 53 years old, Hunter drags a past in which tragedies, addictions and suspicions of influence peddling are interspersed.
Hunter was raised in a family where everyone worked hard to contribute to his father’s political career.
In 1972, his father, just 29 years old, combined his electoral campaign for the Senate in the state of Delaware with raising the three children he had with his wife Neilia: Beau, 3 years old; Hunter, 2; and Naomi, who was still a baby.
Biden was in Washington DC when his family, who was driving to buy a Christmas tree in Delaware, was involved in a traffic accident. Neilia and Naomi died.
Beau and Hunter were injured, but survived. As Hunter has recounted in interviews more than once, the oldest memory he has is waking up in the hospital and hearing his brother whisper to him: “I love you, I love you.”
The following month, Biden was sworn in as senator at the same hospital, at his son Beau’s bedside.
A race that raises suspicions
Hunter grew up remembering Neilia as mommy (mommy) and calling mom Jill Jacobs, the woman his father married in 1977.
He and his brother spent a lot of time in the Senate, sitting on their father’s lap while he worked or playing in other senators’ offices, he told the magazine. The New Yorker for a report published in 2019 with the title: “Will Hunter Biden endanger his father’s campaign?”
Hunter graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in History in 1992, after combining his studies with various unskilled jobs with which he contributed to his living expenses.
The following year, he volunteered with the Oregon Jesuit Volunteer Corps, where he met Kathleen Buhle, whom he married within a few months and had a daughter. Over the years, the family grew with the arrival of two more girls.
After getting married, he entered Georgetown Law School before transferring to Yale, where he had failed to gain direct entry.
The American press has pointed out for decades the relationship between Hunter’s jobs and those of his father.
“Since then [cuando se graduó de abogado]Much of Hunter Biden’s career has coincided with his father’s work as a senator and vice president,” read a report published in July 2019 in the newspaper The Washington Post.
“It is true that many children of influential parents end up with very good jobs. But the Biden case is worrisome. After all, he is a senator who for years has lectured against what he says is the corrupting influence of money in politics,” read a 1998 article by The American Spectator.
What are they referring to? To positions such as senior vice president at the MBNA bank (one of his father’s largest donors at the time), lobbyist in Congress, or member of the board of directors of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings little after his father (then US vice president) offered help to Ukraine to increase its gas production.
Faced with suspicions of influence peddling, father and son have always defended that they do not talk to each other about their jobs.
“That narrative that has been suggested and developed by the right-wing political apparatus is demonstrably false,” Hunter said of the Burisma Holdings case in a statement sent to The Washington Post.
Hunter joined the board of that company, the largest gas production company in Ukraine, in 2014.
In the summer of 2019, a military officer alleged that then-President Donald Trump had pressured his Ukrainian counterpart to cooperate in his attempt to prove that Joe Biden had tried, as vice president, to remove from office a prosecutor who was investigating alleged irregularities committed by his son in this European country, although suspicions of collusion with corruption weighed on the prosecutor in question.
The matter ended up causing the first impeachment (political trial) against Trump, who was accused of having used his position as president to harm a political rival, although the Senate – with a Republican majority – finally exonerated him.
Drugs and alcohol
But Hunter Biden not only generates controversy for his professional life, but also for his personal life.
In the interview with The New Yorkerthe lawyer and businessman spoke openly about the fight against his addiction to drugs and alcohol, a battle that he has been waging for decades.
He’s been in and out of various rehab centers, resorted to yoga and meditation, taken drugs to lessen withdrawal anxiety and drugs that cause nausea every time he consumes alcohol.
He was admitted to a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, which offered treatment with ibogaine, a natural psychoactive substance banned in the US, and even participated in a program that required him to carry a breathalyzer with a built-in camera.
However, he has relapsed many times throughout his life.
In 2013, for example, he managed to get the Navy to admit him despite his age. Within a few months, however, he was expelled: the urine test that was carried out on his first day of service came back positive for cocaine.
Although on that occasion, Hunter denied having used drugs and attributed the results to a cigarette that, he said, was given to him by some South Africans he met on the street.
His addiction to alcohol and drugs like cocaine and crack damaged his relationship with his wife.which finally deteriorated when, in 2015, the conservative news website Breitbart accused him of being a user of Ashley Madison, a dating service for married people.
Hackers had attacked Ashley Madison, revealing the names of many of its users. One of them was Robert Biden, who according to Breitbart, was Hunter’s pseudonym, something he denied.
Another loss and a scandal
In his relapses, Hunter always had the help of one of the most important people in his life: his brother Beau.
Beau was emerging as the successor to Joe Biden in his family’s political legacy. “I was pretty sure Beau could have run for president one day and that with the help of his brother, he could have won,” Joe Biden wrote.
These words were written in his book “Promise me, Dad: a year of hope, difficulties and purpose”, in which the patriarch talks about how hard it was to lose his eldest son.
Beau died in 2015. The previous two years he had undergone all kinds of treatments to try to eliminate a brain tumor until he died when he was withdrawn from respiratory assistance.
As a former White House aide told The New YorkerFor all the mistakes Joe Biden may have made, what “seems to redeem him” to his voters is “how he responds to tragedies and what he learns from them.”
His son Hunter, however, suffered a relapse and was affected by the Ashley Madison scandal shortly after Beau’s death.
No longer with Kathleen, she began to lean on her sister-in-law, Hallie, with whom she shared the loss of Beau.
The following year, they began a relationship that, although they tried to keep it secret due to the scandal that could cause him to be dating his brother’s widow, it ended up coming to light.
Added to this was a bitter divorce proceedings with Kathleen. But her relationship with Hallie did not last long because, according to him, the constant criticism they received.
In May of this year, Hunter married Melissa Cohen, a South African filmmaker whom he had met a few weeks earlier.
as he told The New Yorker: “Look, everyone suffers. Everyone has traumas. In every family, there are addictions. I was in the dark. I was in a tunnel, an endless tunnel. You don’t get rid of it. You look for a way to deal with it.”
If this judicial agreement is successful, Hunter Biden could have the opportunity to start leaving behind an investigation that has hung over his head for the last few years.
However, it does not appear that his father’s Republican rivals are willing to let the matter fall to the ground.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the pro-Trump organization Make America Great Againcriticized the proposed agreement on Tuesday, saying it allows the Justice Department to “turn a blind eye” to corruption.
For his part, Donald Trump, who is emerging as the main contender for the Republican presidential candidacy in 2024, described the agreement as a “simple traffic ticket.”
In any case, for now, what happens with Hunter Biden will depend on the decision made by the judge in the case.
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See original article in BBC