Hunter Biden

Robert Hunter Biden (born February 4, 1970) is an American attorney and businessman. Biden has also worked as a hedge fund principal and a venture capital and private equity fund investor. He formerly worked as a banker, a lobbyist, and a legal representative for lobbying firms.

Biden is the second son of U.S. President Joe Biden and his first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden. In 1972, when Biden was two years old, a car crash killed his mother, who was driving, and his one-year-old sister, Naomi, and seriously injured both him and his older brother, Beau. In his memoir, Beautiful Things, Biden wrote of his struggles with drug and alcohol abuse, which escalated after Beau's 2015 death from brain cancer.[1][2] He was discharged from the U.S. Navy Reserve shortly after his commissioning, due to a failed drug test.

Biden was a founding board member of BHR Partners,[3] a Chinese investment company, in 2013. He served on the board of Burisma Holdings, one of the largest private natural gas producers in Ukraine, from 2014 until his term expired in April 2019. Since early 2019, Hunter and his father have been the subjects of allegations of corrupt activities concerning Ukraine. The accusations concern Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine and Joe Biden's anti-corruption efforts there.[4]

The New York Post published an article in October 2020 about a laptop computer that had belonged to Hunter Biden. The laptop contained about 129,000 emails and other materials, but the Post did not provide them to other media outlets to vet and investigate. Other media outlets declined to publish the story because of a lack of access to the Post's material, problems in verifying the laptop's chain of custody, and concerns about aiding suspected Russian interference.[5] The contents of the laptop were subsequently submitted in evidence in Biden's criminal trials. Some of the Bidens' detractors have claimed that the laptop contents exposed corruption by Hunter's father, but no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden has been found.[6]

Biden's tax affairs have been under federal criminal investigation since late 2018.[7] On July 26, 2023, Biden pled not guilty to tax charges for failing to pay US$100,000 in taxes from $1.5 million in income across 2 years.[8][9] This is a reversal of his guilty plea on June 20, 2023.[10] On December 7, 2023, the special counsel indicted Biden on nine additional counts, all tax-related charges including tax evasion.[11] Biden pleaded not guilty to the additional charges.[12][13] He is scheduled to face trial on September 5, 2024, in California for tax charges.[14]

During Biden's initial guilty plea on tax charges, he had also admitted to "illegally owning a gun while a drug user" because he knowingly denied drug use when applying for a gun purchase permit.[15][16] After the plea deal fell through, Biden was indicted by a special counsel in Delaware on three federal firearms-related charges, in particular possessing a gun for about 11 days despite knowing he was a drug user.[17] Biden was convicted of all three felony charges in June 2024.[18][19]