WASHINGTON (AP) — As his father stood in the White House Rose Garden in the fall of 2015 and announced he would not run for president, Hunter Biden was facing its own crossroads.
It was a deeply emotional and traumatic time for Joe Biden and his close-knit family, still reeling from the death of their eldest son, Beau, that spring, while Donald Trump made his unexpected entry into American presidential politics.
In deciding to forgo a White House bid, Biden, then vice president, was preparing to enter private life for the first time in his long political career, potentially teaching or launching a policy center. Hunter, who had recently accepted a lucrative position on the board of directors of The Ukrainian energy group Burismawas working to stay sober, repair her marriage, and rebuild herself after devastating heartbreak.
“As horrible as I feel, I feel like I have a real purpose,” he said after his brother’s funeral.
It wouldn’t last long. Hunter Biden quickly fell into a Christmas relapse in his battle with addiction, his father watched as Democrats handed the White House to Trump after the 2016 election and the family that had built a political legacy in Washington was drifting uneasily toward an uncertain new chapter.
This fragile period – spanning several years of very public missteps and private misfortunes – in the professional, political and personal lives of Hunter Biden and his family is at the center of the long-running, Republican-led impeachment inquiry into Biden by the U.S. House of Representatives.
Hunter Biden is expected to appear behind closed doors Wednesday for a private deposition to the House committees leading the investigation, apparently eager to combat allegations of influence peddling by the family’s “brand” in its business dealings.
It is a highly publicized moment for the president’s son, but also for the impeachment inquiry itself, which found little direct evidence of wrongdoing by the president, despite months of investigation. Even some Republican lawmakers are giving up on impeaching Joe Biden.
This account of Hunter Biden and his family during this period is drawn from publicly available documents, including transcripts of congressional hearing interviews and his memoirs – a page-turning account of a family in turmoil to disorders and the influence of drug addiction.
Sometimes it all reads like a movie: A film crew documented some of Hunter Biden’s visits to Capitol Hill. His lawyer and friend, Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris, said in his interview with House committees that the images were made for legal purposes and that no commercial achievement was intended.
“When I first met Hunter, he was coming out of the lowest point of his life,” Morris testified last month, detailing some $5 million in loans he has made since their meeting in 2019 for help pay rent, car loan, collateral and others. needs of the customer whom he now considers as a brother.
A Yale-trained lawyer, Hunter never expected to practice high-level corporate law. He had met his first wife in college through a Jesuit volunteer program, and only after dealing with $160,000 in student loans, a mortgage, and their growing young family that he realized: “I had to make money.”
But when his father joined Obama’s presidential ticket in 2008, Hunter Biden was forced to abruptly change course, dropping his firm’s lobbying clients for political reasons and launching a consulting firm.
“My world was turned upside down,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I had to find a new job.”
In 2014, Hunter Biden received a tempting offer to serve on the board of directors of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, which offered him constant control at a time when his work was declining as he helped care for Beau. This involved traveling around the world: a board meeting was held in Norway, another in Monte Carlo.
“Did I make a mistake by serving on the board of directors of the Ukrainian gas company? No.” he wrote in his memoirs. “Would I do it again? No.”
Burisma would become a central counterargument to Trump’s first impeachment in 2019 after Trump revealed that summer that he had asked for “a favor” in a phone call with Ukraine’s new president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
House Democrats Trump impeached after showing that his administration refused U.S.-approved military aid to Ukraine, which was needed at the time to counter Russian aggression, while pressuring Zelensky to dig up the dirt on Joe Biden, a political rival in the 2020 election. Trump was acquitted by the Senate.
At the time, Trump’s team led by attorney Rudy Giuliani floated a counter-theory that it was Joe Biden who had been corrupted by actions he took, including firing a prosecutor Ukrainian, allegedly to favor his son’s work on the board of directors of Burisma.
These claims, which became central to the House Republican Party’s decision to investigate the Bidens, collapsed in large part because the Obama administration and other Western countries made no secret that they wanted the prosecutor fired as part of an effort to eliminate corruption in Ukraine.
Burisma’s claims were further shaken this month with the arrest of Alexander Smirnov, an FBI informant who claimed that executives associated with Burisma paid $5 million each to Joe and Hunter Biden during this period. Federal prosecutors say Smirnov’s allegations were a lie.
The charges against Smirnov were filed by Justice Department Special Counsel David Weiss, who separately accused Hunter Biden of firearms and tax offenses.
While Hunter Biden’s five years at Burisma once figured prominently in the House investigation, Republicans have turned their attention to other aspects of his business career, questioning a half-dozen associates, including brother from the president, Jim Biden, for potential ties to Joe Biden.
In the most explicit testimony, Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of Hunter Biden, said two weeks ago that what the Bidens were selling was “the brand,” meaning Joe Biden.
Bobulinksi has made his claims for years, including voluntarily to the FBI and at a press conference before the second Trump-Biden presidential debate in 2020. He produced emails and text messages for the committee that he says confirm his interactions with the Biden family. .
Chief among them is a 2017 email in which another associate suggested a company share split Hunter Biden, Bobulinksi and others were starting with a Chinese energy conglomerate. It proposed that the capital be divided to include 10% “held for H for the big one” – with a question mark at the end – an apparent reference to Joe Biden.
But testifying before committees, another associate involved, Rob Walker, dismissed the proposal as “bullshit”.
“No one responded to this email. I don’t think people took it seriously,” Walker testified. “There’s no point in Joe Biden being a part of what we were doing. »
The deal never happened.
The allegations continue, as committees probe bank statements, wire transfers and other aspects of Hunter Biden’s business dealings for links to his father.
Hunter Biden is now remarried, the father of a young son, Beau, and working on his sobriety and his paintings. Morris, an art enthusiast, said he purchased various pieces for more than $875,000.
The Biden impeachment inquiry is moving slowly, against the backdrop of the 2024 presidential election, in which Biden and Trump are potentially headed for a rematch, and Russia’s continued threat to the U.S. political process.
Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election in favor of Trump, according to the findings of the U.S. intelligence community and the Department of Justice, and did so again in 2020.
While Trump has pushed Republicans to impeach Biden, House Republican leaders have not said whether they will follow through.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said he would “continue to follow the facts” with the intention of “proposing legislation to reform federal ethics laws and determine whether articles indictment are justified.”