Joe Biden weighed down by the trouble with Hunter

Reports from the White House suggest that Biden, more than ever looking his 81 years, is feeling the pressure over the bullseye on his son.

US President Joe Biden, with son Hunter Biden, right. Picture: AFP

Late-night comedians have been having fun at Hunter Biden’s expense.

“According to the special counsel, Hunter spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills – he’s like the son Donald Trump never had,” quipped Jimmy Kimmel, after President Biden’s son was hit with nine tax charges, including fraud and failing to pay $1.4 million.

Republicans have also been using Hunter as a punchbag, displaying naked images of him during a congressional hearing on claims that the Biden administration tried to frustrate the tax investigation. This was the prologue to something far more serious that is set to loom large during the election campaign – a formal impeachment inquiry into suspicions of corruption by his father, agreed in a Capitol Hill vote last week with Republicans in favour and Democrats against.

Hunter, 53, is all too aware that he is the instrument of Republican pursuit of his father. He was so reluctant to take on his detractors that “Where’s Hunter?” became a familiar Republican meme, fuelling the perception that the Bidens had more to hide than Hunter’s descent into years of drug-fuelled debauchery following the death in 2015, at the age of 46, of his brother, Beau.

Now, after much wrangling in the family, Hunter Biden has decided to come out fighting. “It’s not about me. Deep down, what they are trying to do is try to kill me, knowing that it would be a bigger pain than my father could bear,” Hunter said in a podcast interview with his friend Moby, the American musician, recorded just before the tax charges were announced.

Hunter and Moby met in rehab. “They decided that the only way they could undermine my father’s confidence and his ability to continue to campaign and move forward – particularly after my brother’s death – [was] to think that he might lose the son he had just recovered from almost certain death from addiction,” he said.

Hunter Biden talks to reporters outside the US Capitol last week. Picture: Getty Images

Hunter attacked his tormentors, singling out Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men and the owner of Twitter/X, calling him “the dumbest smart person I think that the world has ever known” and blaming him for spreading misinformation. Hunter was referring to data including emails about his business affairs discovered – along with photos and videos posing with prostitutes – on a now infamous laptop left for repair in 2019 that found its way to Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, when he was working as a lawyer for Trump.

Musk hit back, saying: “Exactly what ‘misinformation’ is he talking about? The dude made so many videos of himself doing crime that he should get an award for cinematography!”

Hunter has also taken the fight to Giuliani, issuing a lawsuit for damages, accusing him of “hacking into, tampering with, manipulating, copying, disseminating” data that was “taken or stolen”, leading to the “total annihilation” of privacy.

Last week, Hunter’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, began an attempt to have charges of illegal gun possession thrown out. His lawsuit claims that David Weiss, the special counsel, “buckled under political pressure” to bring the charges after the collapse of a proposed plea deal in July under which Hunter would have avoided jail.

In another pugilistic move, Hunter refused to obey a Republican subpoena to give evidence in private, saying he would appear only in public because he feared his words would otherwise be selectively leaked and distorted.

Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who served as manager for the Trump impeachment over the riot at the Capitol, said he viewed the constant Republican focus on Hunter Biden and the impeachment process as “distracting and time-consuming” and designed to destroy Joe Biden’s image as a decent family man. “The whole point is to harass and heckle him as long as they can, and to establish a false equivalency with Trump, who faces 91 state and federal charges,” said Raskin.

Like the congressional inquiry built around Hunter’s business dealings in China, Russia and elsewhere, the 56-page tax indictment pins nothing directly on his father. There is detail about Hunter’s wild four-year spending binge when he not only blew his own $7 million in earnings but also an extra $1.2 million he was loaned by a friend. Hunter’s spending from 2016 to 2019 included $1.66 million in cash withdrawals and $683,212 for “payments – various women”.

Hunter Biden defied a subpoena from the House Oversight and Accountability Committee to testify behind closed doors in the Rayburn House Office Building on December 13. Picture: AFP

Three in five Americans believe President Biden “helped and participated” in his son’s business life, despite Joe’s denials, according to a Harris poll last month. Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican pollster, does not see the Republican focus on Hunter playing a big role with US voters, although he believes it is having a “tremendous impact on the president himself”.

Reports from the White House suggest that Biden, more than ever looking his 81 years, feels weighed down by the bullseye on his son. After years helping Hunter to get sober, he was against him being more bold about fighting back but appears to have lost that argument.

The House has heard evidence from Hunter’s former business partner, Devon Archer, that about 20 times over a ten-year period Hunter put his father on the phone to impress guests, sometimes including business associates, and use the Biden “brand” to his advantage.

These morsels are sufficient to keep the Republican dogs on the scent.

However, they have undermined their case by overclaiming about what they have managed to unearth. A press release this month announced “Direct monthly payments to Joe Biden from Hunter Biden’s business entity”. Not in the press release was that the payments were for just $1380 each in September, October and November 2018, which did not feel like a scheme to gouge millions from China.

Hunter’s lawyer said the payments were reimbursements for leasing a vehicle at a time when Hunter had bad credit. Nevertheless James Comer, the Republican chairman of the House oversight committee, which found the cheques after a subpoena of bank records, said: “Payments from Hunter’s business entity to Joe Biden are now part of a pattern revealing Joe Biden knew about, participated in, and benefited from his family’s influence peddling schemes.”

Luntz recalled that the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 led to the Democratic president’s approval rising after Republicans hounded him. He said the same could happen next year with Biden. “It makes Republicans look mean, it refocuses their attention from getting things done to getting a conviction, and that’s not what they should be doing right now. If the public is mad at inflation, focus on inflation.”

The Sunday Times