Hunter Biden’s troubles cast shadow over his father’s re-election bid

Four years ago, when Joe Biden was vying for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, Hunter Biden gave an interview to the New Yorker magazine, describing a tumultuous personal life including years of drug addiction and a failed romantic relationship with his dead brother’s widow.

The headline read: “Will Hunter Biden jeopardise his father’s campaign?”

Now the question is being asked again, as the 80-year-old president gears up for a re-election bid in 2024 while his 53-year-old son navigates the professional, personal and legal troubles that have long cast a shadow over the Biden family and his father’s political career.

On Wednesday, allies of Joe Biden hoped the son would draw a line under some of his legal jeopardy, when Hunter Biden attended a Delaware court to fulfil a plea deal stemming from accusations that he failed to pay federal income tax and illegally possessed a firearm.

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Instead, the judge questioned the terms of the agreement, as well as an ongoing Department of Justice investigation into whether Hunter Biden violated US foreign lobbying laws. The plea deal’s dramatic collapse immediately thrust him – and his troubles – back to the centre of another news cycle.

“Hunter Biden is a private citizen and this was a personal matter for him,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters in Washington after the deal collapsed. “The president, the first lady, they love their son and they support him as he continues to rebuild his life.”

For political commentators and Biden-watchers, it was both another moment of personal angst for the Bidens – and another moment of political peril for the father.

Hunter Biden poses a “personal and political challenge” for the president, says Chris Whipple, author of The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House. “It is hard to overstate how close they are and how much this troubles Joe Biden personally. It is painful for him.”

And the political heat on the son and father seems only to be intensifying. Hunter Biden remains the focus of several Republican-led congressional investigations into his overseas business dealings. His complicated personal life has also drawn scrutiny, after he settled a long-running child support dispute involving a four-year-old girl living in Arkansas who he initially denied was his child. The president has been criticised for not acknowledging the girl as his grandchild.

“I am sure that Hunter Biden will be a major part of Republican messaging in 2024 against [Joe] Biden,” says Kyle Kondik of the non-partisan University of Virginia Center for Politics. “It is just a question of: how effective is it? And how serious do the actual facts get for the president?”

Hunter Biden’s foreign lobbying work has been the target of several investigations on Capitol Hill. James Comer, the Republican chair of the House of Representatives oversight committee, has alleged that the Biden family “sold access for profit around the world to the detriment of American interests”. The White House has said repeatedly that Joe Biden had no knowledge of his son’s business dealings.

Comer has also alleged that the justice department interfered in the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax affairs, bolstering the arguments of Donald Trump and fellow Republicans who claim there is a “two-tiered” system of justice in the US.

Trump and his allies argue the former president – who faces dozens of criminal charges in two separate cases in Manhattan and Miami, and is expected to be served more indictments in Washington DC and Fulton county, Georgia, in the coming months – has been treated unfairly, while Hunter Biden was offered a sweetheart deal.

In a public hearing last week, House Republicans heard testimony from two whistleblowers from the Internal Revenue Service who said the justice department slow-walked and stymied the Hunter Biden investigation. The department has denied wrongdoing, and David Weiss, the US attorney who was appointed by Donald Trump to investigate Hunter Biden, has offered to testify later this year to answer questions.

Even so, Kevin McCarthy, the Republican speaker of the House, has suggested that House Republicans are getting ready to launch impeachment proceedings against Joe Biden over Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings. McCarthy told Fox News: “I believe we will follow this all the way to the end, and this is going to rise to an impeachment inquiry.”

Independent observers have questioned whether the Republicans have produced enough evidence to back up the claims or implicate Joe Biden in his son’s problems.

“Republicans have made all of these allegations against Biden, but it is not clear to me that they have the goods on him,” says Kondik. “I can’t sit here and say that they won’t be able to produce that at some point. I just don’t know.”

“Politically, Hunter is a concern because the GOP has turned him into a cudgel with which to pound on the president,” says Whipple. “I think it is obviously something that the Biden campaign has to keep a close eye on, but so far, there is just no ‘there’ there.”

Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, dismissed suggestions that Hunter Biden would damage his father’s electoral prospects, arguing that the Republican focus on the president’s son was evidence of the opposition party’s own political weaknesses.

“The fact that they are now investing so much energy in going after Joe Biden as a man, and not as president, is a sign that they are losing,” said Rosenberg.

An Ipsos poll conducted last month found that when asked whether the president was “being a good father by supporting his son ... even while [he] goes through legal troubles”, 60 per cent of respondents agreed, including almost half of Republicans.

For now, Whipple says the president’s team will likely stay the course with their strategy of deflecting questions relating to Hunter Biden.

“The Biden White House, and the campaign, will do everything they can just to keep their distance, not to comment in any way except the occasional, ‘I love my son’ from the president,” Whipple says. “End of story, they hope.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023