Joe Biden was a divisive figure once he became president, but he wasn’t that divisive before then. As a veteran politician of many decades, he was generally seen as a straight-laced, religious, and respectable guy. The kind of person who doesn’t have too many scandals. Unfortunately, the former president has one major scandal that just won’t go away: Hunter Biden.
Whereas Joe’s son Beau (who tragically died of brain cancer in 2015) was an upstanding citizen who served as Delaware’s Attorney General, Beau Biden has always been a bad boy. Unfortunately, he kept getting into greater and greater scandals even as Joe Biden tried to attain more political power. And now, even though Joe is out of the White House and has finally left politics altogether, the many scandals (including drug abuse, firearms, indictments, and more) of his surviving son threaten to taint his legacy.
Just what scandals are we talking about, and where did everything go wrong with Hunter Biden? Keep reading to find out!
Hunter Biden’s childhood trauma
If you’re trying to figure out where Hunter Biden’s life went off the rails, it arguably goes back to a childhood tragedy. Back in December 1972, a mere six weeks after Joe Biden had been elected to the Senate, his family car was hit by another driver. Joe wasn’t in the car, but his first wife was killed as well as his baby daughter, Nomi.
Both Beau and Hunter Biden were in the car when it was hit. Fortunately, they both survived, with Beau getting a broken leg and Hunter getting a fractured skull. Their famous father actually took the oath of office by their hospital bedside and was just grateful his boys survived. For Hunter, though, this was merely the beginning of a lifetime of tragedy.
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The beginning of his addiction
Even if you don’t know much about Hunter Biden, you likely know that he has struggled with drug addiction. Sadly, this habit goes back to his teenage years when he began drinking alcohol. It didn’t take very long for things to escalate, and Hunter later admitted to abusing cocaine when he was attending college. The drug use proved to be a problem when Hunter joined the US Navy reserves and then got discharged for testing positive for cocaine on his first day at the naval base.
Later, after Beau Biden’s death, Hunter reportedly drank very heavily. And after his divorce from Kathleen Buhl, she told the world that Hunter had a major drug addiction that resulted in him spending large sums of money on prostitutes, exotic dancers, and more. This came to a head in 2019 when a DNA test revealed that he had, in fact, fathered a child with an Arkansas exotic dancer named Lunden Alexis Roberts. While Hunter now pays child support, he later admitted in his memoir that he has no recollection of his romantic encounter with the dancer, which seemingly confirms the depths of his addiction to alcohol and drugs.
Hunter Biden’s gun scandal
As you can tell, Hunter Biden was already surrounded by major scandals involving drugs, alcohol, and infidelity. That would have been bad enough, but another scandal surfaced after Hunter became romantically involved with Hallie Biden, the widow of his deceased brother, Beau. She later took the stand at Hunter’s trial and told the world that she watched him purchase illegal drugs and that he had introduced her to crack cocaine.
This resulted in Hunter attending rehab, and two months after he got out, he purchased a handgun. Prosecutors would later claim that Hunter lied on his firearm application by not revealing that he was a drug addict. Hallie Biden later found the gun (along with illegal drugs) and threw it away because she was afraid that Hunter would hurt himself with it.
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Hunter Biden’s international scandals
Believe it or not, there were other scandals that came to define Hunter Biden’s life. This included the time he worked at MBNA America, a Delaware-based financial institution, where he was eventually promoted to executive vice president. This became scandalous because Joe Biden had received numerous contributions from MBNA and even pushed legislation that would help the bank while his son worked there. When Hunter left the bank, he became a Washington lobbyist, a position many saw as unethical because of his father’s political connections and possible insider info about matters pertaining to Hunter’s new job.
While this created another domestic scandal, he created an international scandal when he became a founding board member of the Chinese private equity firm BHR. Joe Biden was Vice President at the time and Hunter even brought him out to meet BHR’s chief executive. Later, Hunter tried to partner with Chinese oil tycoon Ye Jianming on a Louisiana natural gas project, but the other man got busted on corruption charges and later turned up missing.
Later, there was more scandal when Hunter Biden joined the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings, where he sometimes earned as much as $1.2 million a year. Joe Biden would later agitate for the removal of the Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, an anti-corruption specialist who had been investigating (you guessed it!) Burisma. While the claims that Hunter had received $5 million in payment for Shokin getting removed were later debunked, the whole thing remains scandalous because it looks like Joe Biden used his political power to help his son avoid yet another investigation, this time on the other side of the world.