Hunter Biden Indicted on Federal Gun Charges

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."

[table-of-contents] stripped

Latest News: Hunter Biden Indicted on Gun Charges

On September 14, Hunter Biden was charged with lying about his drug use in connection with his 2018 purchase of a handgun. He could face a maximum prison sentence of 10 years if convicted. The federal charges come three month after a plea deal with the Justice Department fell apart, which would have resulted in Biden avoiding prison time in exchange for pleading guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges for failing to pay his 2017 and 2018 taxes on time. Prosecutors have yet to file charges against Biden in connection to the his taxes, though they could still do so in the future.

Who Is Hunter Biden?

Hunter Biden is President Joe Biden’s only surviving son. A lawyer by trade, he is also a founder of the investment and advisory firm Rosemont Seneca Partners. In 2014, he was recruited to the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, serving until his term expired in April 2019. His role with Burisma led to an election-year Senate Republican corruption investigation, which eventually cleared him and his father of wrongdoing. Biden, whose decades-long struggle with addiction lead to his discharge from the Navy Reserves, is a father of five and is currently married to his second wife, South African documentarian Melissa Cohen.

Quick Facts

FULL NAME: Robert Hunter Biden
BORN: February 4, 1970
BIRTHPLACE: Wilmington, Delaware
SPOUSES: Kathleen Buhle (1993-2017) and Melissa Cohen (2019-present)
CHILDREN: Naomi, Finnegan, Maisy, Navy, and Beau Jr.
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius

Early Life and Education

Robert Hunter Biden was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on February 4, 1970, to Joe Biden and his first wife, Neilia. His older brother, Joseph “Beau” Biden III, was born just over one year prior, and their sister Naomi “Amy” Biden would be born almost two years later in November 1971.

On December 18, 1972, Hunter was involved in a tragic car accident that claimed the lives of his mother and then 13-month-old sister. Beau was also a passenger in the vehicle that collided with a tractor-trailer at an intersection. Hunter suffered a severe head injury, while Beau sustained several broken bones. Joe, who was in Washington at the time of the accident, chose to be sworn into his first term as a U.S. senator in his sons’ hospital room on January 5, 1973.

After Beau and Hunter urged their father to remarry, Joe married his second wife, Jill Biden, in June 1977. The couple welcomed a daughter, Ashley Biden, in June 1981.

Hunter graduated from the private Catholic high school Archmere Academy in Claymont, Delaware, also his siblings’ and father’s alma mater, before enrolling at Georgetown University in 1988. To help pay for his room and board, Biden worked odd jobs, such as parking cars at events and unloading boxes of frozen beef, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1992.

Despite being accepted into the creative writing program at Syracuse University, where he’d considered getting a joint MFA–law degree, Hunter opted to attend Georgetown Law. After one year, he transferred to Yale Law and completed his law degree in 1996.

Career

Upon graduation, Hunter worked as a Jesuit volunteer at a church in Portland, Oregon, for one year. He returned to Wilmington, Delaware, and his father appointed him the deputy campaign manager for his Senate reelection bid, while he also worked as a lawyer with a Delaware-based banking holding company MBNA America. Biden’s hiring was criticized because his father had supported credit card legislation that MBNA also backed.

After leaving his executive vice president role at MBNA in 1998, he landed a position within President Bill Clinton’s administration as a policy director specializing in the internet economy. Three years later, the government and community relations department at St. Joseph’s University hired Biden to solicit earmarks for one of the university’s student volunteer programs at an underprivileged high school in Philadelphia.

Biden worked as a lobbyist, co-founding the firm of Oldaker, Biden & Belair. Among his many business dealings, Biden purchased the hedge fund Paradigm Global Advisors in 2006. After former President Barack Obama selected Joe as his running mate in 2008, Hunter terminated his lobbying registrations and also resigned from an unpaid seat on the board of Amtrak. In September of that year, he launched Seneca Global Advisors, a boutique consulting firm, and following his father’s election as vice president, he cofounded a second company, Rosemont Seneca Partners, in June 2009.

Military Service

With a letter of recommendation from former military intelligence officer Greg Keeley, the Navy granted Biden an age waiver, and his father swore him into the Navy Reserves at a small, private ceremony at the White House in May 2013.

Biden was assigned to a reserve unit at Naval Station Norfolk, and after a few months, he received notice that a urine sample that had been taken his first day on duty detected cocaine in his system. Under Navy rules, a positive drug test typically triggers a discharge, according to The New Yorker. Hunter claimed he didn’t know how the drug got into his system, suggesting that a cigarette he’d been given by strangers outside a bar in Washington could have been laced with cocaine.

Eventually deciding not to appeal the decision, Hunter was discharged on February 18, 2014, according to Navy records obtained by The New Yorker.

Burisma Holdings Scandal

Hunter took a paid position on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings Limited in April 2014, later acknowledging that he most likely got the high-paying job because his father was overseeing U.S. policy in the country at the time, according to The New York Times. His role came under intense scrutiny during the 2020 presidential election, following Donald Trump’s unsupported accusation that Joe improperly tried to leverage his elected office to help Hunter’s business interests.

Trump claimed that Joe demanded the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor general, whom he believed had been investigating Hunter for corruption. Trump was ultimately impeached in 2019 on accusations that he broke the law by pressuring Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up damaging information on the Bidens, shortly after Trump had blocked the release of military aid to Ukraine.

Hunter announced his departure from Burisma’s board when his term expired in April 2019. A September 2020 Senate Republican investigation into corruption allegations against Joe and Hunter found no evidence of improper influence or wrongdoing by the former vice president, though they believed Hunter had “cashed in” on his father’s position.

Laptop Scandal

In October 2020, the New York Post reported it had received a copy of a laptop that Biden left at a Delaware computer repair shop and never retrieved. The newspaper claimed that the hard drive—which it obtained from Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Guiliani—contained an email describing a meeting between Joe Biden and Burisma advisor Vadym Pozharskyi. Biden denied that any such meeting occurred, though he didn’t rule out the possibility of a brief, informal interaction.

The veracity of the story was strongly questioned by other mainstream media outlets due to the laptop’s origins, as well as Trump’s and Guiliani’s involvement with the story shortly before the 2020 presidential election. Former intelligence officials speculated it was part of a disinformation campaign against Joe Biden by Russian intelligence, though no such evidence of this emerged. In June 2021, PolitiFact reported that while the hard drive did appear to belong to Biden, “Nothing from the laptop has revealed illegal or unethical behavior by Joe Biden as vice president with regard to his son’s tenure as a director for Burisma.”

Justice Department Investigation

In December 2020, Biden announced he had been served a subpoena as part of a U.S. Justice Department inquiry into his taxes. The subpoena sought information about a variety of his business dealings, including those with Burisma Holdings. U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a Trump appointee, led the investigation, and Merrick Garland, the attorney general under President Biden, vowed not to interfere in the investigation.

At the conclusion of a five-year investigation, Hunter announced on June 20, 2023, that he had agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges for failing to pay his 2017 and 2018 taxes on time. In doing so, he would admit to failing to pay more than $100,000 in taxes on more than $1.5 million in income in 2017 and 2018, all of which he later paid. The plea would come with two years of probation, meaning Biden would avoid jail time. As part of the plea, Biden would also avoid charges in connection with his purchase of a handgun in October 2018, which was illegal for him to possess as a drug user.

Republicans have criticized the agreement as a “sweetheart deal” for the president’s son, and Gary Shapley, a whistleblower from inside the Internal Revenue Service, claims aspects of the probe into Biden were “slow-walked” by the Justice Department.

The plea agreement was placed on hold in July 2023 after a federal judge expressed concerns about linking the tax plea agreement to the felony gun charge. As a result of that hearing, Biden pleaded not guilty as both sides planned to file additional briefs explaining the plea deal’s legal structuring. In a court filing on August 13, Biden’s attorneys said prosecutors reneged on the plea deal they had previously agreed upon.

On September 14, prosecutors for the Justice Department charged Biden with lying about his drug use in connection with his 2018 handgun purchase, which could result in a maximum prison sentence of 10 years if he’s convicted. Prosecutors didn’t file charges relaxed to Biden’s taxes, though they could still do so in the future.

Addiction Struggles

In a July 2019 profile in The New Yorker, Hunter described his decades-long struggle with alcohol addiction and drug abuse. He admitted himself to Crossroads Centre Antigua for a month in September 2003, and his brother, Beau, accompanied him to his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting upon his return. After seven years of sobriety, he suffered his first relapse in November 2010 when he drank three Bloody Marys on a flight home from a business trip to Madrid.

Hunter relapsed with alcohol, prescription medications, and cocaine, which he says was only exacerbated following Beau’s death from brain cancer in 2015. “There’s addiction in every family. I was in that darkness. I was in that tunnel—it’s a never-ending tunnel,” he told The New Yorker. “You don’t get rid of it. You figure out how to deal with it.”

During Joe’s first presidential debate in September 2020, Trump called out Hunter’s addiction problems. “My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem,” the president replied. “He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him.”

In April 2021, Hunter released a memoir called Beautiful Things, in which he described his struggles with addiction and drug abuse, his romantic relationships, and other aspects of his personal life. The Guardian described the book as “a confession and an act of contrition,” and noted that Biden’s narrative is “mostly grim and squalid.” Entertainment Weekly called Biden’s reflections upon addiction as “harrowing, raw, and quite generously honest.”

Wife and Children

While working as a Jesuit volunteer in Portland, Oregon, Biden met Kathleen Buhle. She got pregnant after three months of dating, and the pair married in July 1993. They have three daughters: Naomi, born in December 1993; Finnegan, born in September 1998; and Maisy, born in 2000.

Biden’s struggles with alcoholism put a strain on the marriage, and during a couple’s therapy session, they reached an agreement that if he started drinking again, he would have to move out of the family home. Just after their 22^nd anniversary, Biden left a therapy session, drank a bottle of vodka, and moved out. Two months after Breitbart published a report that Biden had a profile on Ashley Madison, a dating service for married people, under the name Robert Biden (he has denied the claims), he and Kathleen agreed to formally separate in October 2016.

Kathleen filed for divorce in December 2016, and in February 2017, she filed a motion in D.C. Superior Court seeking to freeze Hunter’s assets, alleging that he “created financial concerns for the family by spending extravagantly on his own interests (including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations), while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills.”

The motion also revealed that Hunter was romantically involved with his late brother Beau’s widow, Hallie Olivere Biden. “We were sharing a very specific grief,” Hunter recalled to The New Yorker. “I started to think of Hallie as the only person in my life who understood my loss.” The New York Post broke the news in 2017, leading Joe to release a statement to the paper saying that the family was “lucky that Hunter and Hallie found each other as they were putting their lives together again after such sadness” and that they had his and Jill’s full support. He and Hallie split in August 2017, with Hunter citing intense public scrutiny of their relationship and lack of privacy.

In 2019, an Arkansas woman named Lunden Alexis Roberts sued Biden for child support in a paternity case, claiming he is the father of her daughter Navy. He denied having sexual relations with the woman, but a November 2019 paternity test found “with scientific certainty” that Biden is the child’s biological father. In March 2020, an Arkansas judge approved a final settlement requiring Biden to pay an undisclosed monthly amount of child support and health insurance premiums.

In early May 2019, Biden met a South African filmmaker named Melissa Cohen, and, less than a week after they met, he proposed. The pair married the following day, on May 16, 2019, in Los Angeles. Their son, Beau, was born in March 2020.

..

You Might Also Like

• Nicole Richie’s Surprising Adoption Story

• The Story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Her Mother

• Queen Camilla's Life in Photos