How much of a mess is Hunter Biden’s life? His former gig on the board of Burisma Holdings, which may have spurred the entire impeachment investigation consuming the capital, isn’t remotely the worst of his problems.
Like many political progenies, former Vice President Joe Biden’s second son has built his entire career around his last name. Hunter started his career working for one of his dad’s largest donors (surely he got that on pure merit) and later was given a spot on Amtrak’s board because, as Democratic Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware testified, Hunter “has spent a lot of time on Amtrak trains.”
Hunter’s appointment to the board of the pro-Putin Burisma Holdings may have been an extreme case of Beltway corruption, but there’s nothing new about a politician’s son leveraging his last name to make tens of thousands of dollars a month for doing literally nothing. Hunter surely used abysmal judgment in accepting the Burisma job while his father was combating corruption in Ukraine, and his advisers had warned him. But since there’s no evidence that Joe Biden himself took Burisma’s bait, Hunter’s gig at the oil company would’ve been nothing but a footnote in a biography if President Trump hadn’t turned it into electoral fodder.
But if Hunter’s professional life is just casually corrupt, his personal life is a disaster and one that could seriously hamper his father’s presidential campaign.
Over the summer, Hunter gave the New Yorker unprecedented access to his new life in California. He conceded that he struggled for decades with drug and alcohol abuse and claimed that after his wife, Kathleen, forced him out of the house to get sober, he started dating Hallie, the widow of his brother Beau.
He categorically denied ever having sexual relations with a woman named Lunden Alexis Roberts, who claimed he had impregnated her. He also denied cheating on Kathleen with either Hallie or prostitutes, a claim made by Kathleen during their later divorce. He claimed that he and Hallie split up at some point between late 2017 and early 2018. He then he moved to Los Angeles, where he married a virtual stranger in the hopes of finally achieving a new life of domestic bliss.
Seeing as Hunter’s childhood was all but built on the trauma of losing his mother and sister in one day, this reads as a fairly sympathetic story.
Too bad it’s largely a lie.
It’s unclear whether Hunter cheated on Kathleen. But what is absolutely clear is that Hunter then cheated on Hallie with Roberts — the woman he swore he never slept with. He can’t lie his way out of that one because it’s finally been proven by paternity test: She had his child.
Roberts had her baby in August 2018 — seven full months and some number of days into that year. Hunter and Hallie rented an Annapolis home together in August 2017. According to the New Yorker, they didn’t split up until “several months later,” and he only moved to California in “early 2018.” Unless they split up in November and he remained in the family home for another two months, then he not only lied about parenting a child and forced Roberts to publicly take him to court to get financial support, but he also did so after cheating on his dead brother’s wife.
Hunter’s substance-abuse struggles are obviously sad, and his Burisma role was unquestionably bad. But far worse for his father’s campaign are all of his lies, compounded by his adultery, and the fact that the mother of his child had to go public to get support from the deadbeat. Hunter has shredded his credibility. If the Burisma attack on his dad sticks, the son will have a lot of explaining to do.
