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 supposedly contained about 129,000 emails and other materials, but the Post provided no evidence of the chain of custody or authenticity of the device. Other media outlets declined to publish the story, because of that lack of provenance.[5] In March 2022, The New York Times and The Washington Post reported that some of the emails found on the computer were authentic.[6] Some of the Bidens' detractors have said that the laptop contents exposed corruption by Hunter's father, but no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden has been found.[7]

Biden's tax affairs have been under federal criminal investigation since late 2018.[8] On July 26, 2023, Biden pled not guilty to tax charges for filing two years of his tax returns late.[9] This is a reversal of his prior, guilty plea on June 20, 2023.[10] At that time, 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.[11][12] On September 14, 2023, Biden was indicted by a special counsel in Delaware on three federal firearms-related charges, in particular possessing an unloaded pistol for 11 days.[13] On December 7, 2023, the special counsel indicted Biden on nine additional counts, all tax-related charges including tax evasion.[14] On January 11, 2024, Biden pleaded not guilty to all tax evasion charges in a Los Angeles federal courthouse.[15] He is scheduled to face trial on June 20, 2024.[16]