Miranda Devine: Hunter Biden’s memoir Beautiful Things misses major details

Hunter Biden’s book misses a lot of details. So I’ve written one to fill in the gaps, writes Miranda Devine

Hunter Biden’s crackhead memoir, incongruously titled “Beautiful Things”, was written for two reasons.

One, of course, is the money. A reported $2 million advance with a ghost writer as sherpa is not something a lifetime grifter would pass up.

Mainly, though, Hunter thought that by revealing details of his long-term crack addiction, the book would inoculate him against the damning material in the laptop he abandoned at a Mac repair shop in his home state of Delaware in April, 2019, just six days before his father, Joe Biden, announced he was running for president.

Mock up of Miranda Devine’s “Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide”.

Judging by the gushing reviews in US media the last few days, he may be right. There is a media protection bubble around the Bidens like you couldn’t imagine.

When asked yesterday on CBS if he had dropped off a laptop to be repaired in Delaware, his answer beggared belief. “No. Not that I remember.”

Please. His signature and phone number are on the repair docket. The owner of the repair shop has testified it was him. His emails, text messages, photographs and business documents are on the laptop and his voice is on the voice memos.

Hunter’s lawyer phoned the repair shop asking for the laptop back on the night before the New York Post published the first story about its contents, which implicated Joe in the Biden family’s lucrative influence peddling schemes around the world.

“You don’t need a laptop,” he told CBS. “You got a book.”

Not so fast.

The Bidens managed to bury the laptop last year, with the help of Big Tech and media which colluded to suppress a story which reflected badly on their preferred candidate less than three weeks before the 2020 presidential election.

US President Joe Biden hugs his son Hunter Biden and US First Lady Jill Biden after being sworn in as the 46th US President in January. Picture: Olivier Douliery/AFP

But the wrongdoing revealed on the laptop is real and raises the prospect that the US President may be comprised by China, at least.

Hunter has left everything out of his memoir except the crack addiction which he is milking for absolution.

Here are a few of the not-so-beautiful things he left out.

DEADBEAT DAD

He writes that he is the father of three daughters and a son. He does not mention his fifth child, a two-year-girl in Arkansas whose mother had to take out a paternity suit against him. He claims he can’t remember Lunden Roberts, a 28-year-old stripper at one of the seedy clubs he frequented in Washington DC.

“I had no recollection of our encounter,” he writes.

The laptop tells a different story. He had known Roberts for at least five months before she became pregnant in November 2018.

He had added her phone numbers to his contacts, and he was smuggling her in the back door of his office building late at night, so often that building management wrote to request he stop.

Hunter wrote back in high dudgeon on September 21 2017, describing Roberts as the “basketball mentor” for his daughter and Sasha Obama, President Barack Obama’s daughter.

“Lunden is in her final semester at George Washington University’s National CSIS Masters Program and ranked #1 in her class,” he wrote.

During this period Hunter was in a relationship with his brother’s widow Hallie and had moved in with her and her children.

Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden. Picture: Democratic National Convention/ AFP

GUN

There is no mention in Hunter’s book of how Hallie threw his new gun away in a garbage bin outside a grocery store in Delaware in October 2018.

But he does admit to chronic drug abuse in the years beforehand. Which means that when he bought the gun he lied on the official Firearms Transaction Record by answering “no” to a question about prior drug use. That’s a felony for which people have been jailed.

The infamous “crack pipe” photo of Hunter asleep with a glass pipe in his mouth had been taken just eight days before he bought the gun.

CHINA

Hunter told CBS his father never got a “nickel” from his business deals. But on the laptop is a 2019 text message in which Hunter complains to his daughter: “unlike Pop (Joe Biden) I won’t make you give me half your salary”.

There also is an email in which Hunters reserves 10 per cent of a Chinese venture for the “Big Guy”, with other emails revealing Joe Biden as the “Big Guy”. Hunter’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinksi, also has confirmed the “Big Guy” was Joe.

Hunter dismisses as “conspiratorial delusions” the claim he “walked out of China with $1.5 billion,” after flying to Beijing on Air Force 2 with his father in 2013.

But board papers on the laptop show that the private-equity fund Hunter and his Chinese state partners formed at that time had assets under management of $2.5 billion by 2019 and he still held a 10 per cent stake as recently as February, according to the White House.

UKRAINE

Hunter downplays as a mere “five figures” the riches he received to sit on the board of the corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, at a time when his father was the Obama administration’s point man in Ukraine

The laptop shows that, in the five years he was on the Burisma teat, to April 2019, he earned at least $4 million in board fees alone.

For the first three years he received $83,333 per month. But less than two months after Joe left office, Hunter’s fee was slashed in half.

“Unfortunately,” writes Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi in an email dated March 19 2017, “[you] and I didn’t get to meet in Washington during my recent visit. However… the remuneration is still the highest in the company and higher than the standard director’s monthly fees.”

What a different tale Hunter tells.

He claims Burisma “wasn’t out of line with compensation given to board members at some Fortune 500 companies”.

Not even close. Board members of similarly sized US companies typically are paid no more than $83,000 for an entire year.

For the coin, his most arduous task was flying first class to twice-yearly board meetings in glamorous European locales, such as Monte Carlo and Paris.

Hunter writes that he saw the Burisma payments as a “wicked sort of funny money” that encouraged him to go on drug and prostitute benders for months on end.

The wrongdoing on the laptop is jaw dropping and his father enabled it all.

That’s why I’m writing a book laying out the evidence for the public record. “Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide” will be published in the US in September.

Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph