44
The Economist
December 17th 2022
United States
The hunted
E
very
presidential
family is unhappy in its own way. But nev
er have the emanations and consequences of that unhappi
ness—and the question of which is which—been so concentrated
in one person as they are in Joe Biden’s son Hunter: The bereave
ment of the Lincolns, the dealmaking of Jimmy Roosevelt, the ad
dictions of Betty Ford, the renditions of “Mustang Sally” by Roger
Clinton, the nepotistic climbing of the Trump offspring—Hunter
Biden offers his own searing versions of all of these.
And never has such unhappiness been so pointillistically ex
posed. More than 200 gigabytes of data containing Mr Biden’s
texts, photos, videos and financial records fell into the hands of
his father’s political opponents just before the 2020 election. In
addition to such innocent if intimate fare as pictures of his chil
dren and of his dying brother, the trove included images of Hunter
Biden smoking crack and having sex, and emails in which he did
business with Chinese and Ukrainian firms.
Yet this drama has been surprisingly easy to ignore, particular
ly if your politics and media habits lean left or you are the sort of
gentle soul who prefers not to ogle train wrecks. That is about to
change. Once Republicans take control of the House next month
and start their promised investigations, you will be hearing the
name Hunter Biden often. This is a good moment to brush up on
some details, to consider the reasons it has been possible to evade
them, and to ask, when it comes to a president’s relatives, what
should really matter.
Family success and tragedy placed Hunter Biden in the public
eye from infancy. His earliest memory, he has written, dates to
1972, when he woke up in the hospital beside his elder brother
Beau, who was saying to him over and over: “I love you.” The boys
had been gravely injured when a truck hit their car as their mother,
Neilia, was driving them and their baby sister, Naomi, to buy a
Christmas tree. Their mother and sister were dead. Joe Biden, just
elected to the Senate, was sworn in at his sons’ bedside.
While Beau would grow up to be the family’s nonpareil, Hunt
er—his mother’s maiden name—was in and out of trouble, drink
ing too much from an early age. After graduating from Yale Law
School he eventually chose to be a lobbyist, a trade in which his
name, nauseatingly and it may yet prove illegally, helped him
make millions. After Beau died in 2015 of a brain tumour, Hunter’s
life unravelled. In the spring of 2019, as his father was preparing to
run for president, Mr Biden, then living in Los Angeles, gave inter
views over the telephone to the
New Yorker
. The resulting profile
supplied shocking details about his descent into crack, a bleak af
fair with Beau’s widow, and divorce as well as his dealings with Bu
risma, a Ukrainian gas firm.
“I knew what the story would really do: inoculate everybody
else from my personal failings,” Mr Biden wrote in his autobiogra
phy, “Beautiful Things”, published in 2021, after his father was
sworn in. No “opposition press”, he wrote, would be able to upend
the campaign with a scoop about his behaviour. (In fact, as the
autobiography showed, Mr Biden withheld a lot, and the data
breach revealed even more.)
Mr Biden succeeded in making his degradation seem old news
when his data was exposed in the month before the election. Fur
ther, burned by their credulity toward Russian meddling before
the 2016 election, big news organisations and social media plat
forms were primed to suspect such a data dump as fraud. Their
reticence spawned secondary conspiracy theories on the right
about media collusion with the Bidens. Donald Trump is probably
right that the response would have been different had one of his
own children been the focal point. (Fox News, which has obsessed
over Hunter Biden, would then have covered the story differently,
too). But that is not much of a scandal: the initial caution was pru
dent, and the mainstream press, as opposed to the tabloids, gener
ally treads carefully when it comes to a president’s relatives.
Leftish publications did eventually verify some of the data and
elaborate upon the extent of Hunter Biden’s fortunehunting in
Ukraine and China, as it became clear the Justice Department was
stepping up an investigation into whether Mr Biden failed to re
port some foreign income. Nothing has come to light to suggest
that Joe Biden was profiting from or deliberating enabling his
son’s dealings, the kind of link that would torpedo his presidency.