Mr Biden succeeded in making his degradation seem old news when his data was exposed in the month before the election. (In fact, as the autobiography showed, Mr Biden withheld a lot, and the data breach revealed even more.) No “opposition press”, he wrote, would be able to up-end the campaign with a scoop about his behaviour. “I knew what the story would really do: inoculate everybody else from my personal failings,” Mr Biden wrote in his autobiography, “Beautiful Things”, published in 2021, after his father was sworn in. The resulting profile supplied shocking details about his descent into crack, a bleak affair with Beau’s widow, and divorce as well as his dealings with Burisma, a Ukrainian gas firm. In the spring of 2019, as his father was preparing to run for president, Mr Biden, then living in Los Angeles, gave interviews over the telephone to the New Yorker. After Beau died in 2015 of a brain tumour, Hunter’s life unravelled. 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. While Beau would grow up to be the family’s nonpareil, Hunter-his mother’s maiden name-was in and out of trouble, drinking too much from an early age. Joe Biden, just elected to the Senate, was sworn in at his sons’ bedside. 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. 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.įamily success and tragedy placed Hunter Biden in the public eye from infancy. Once Republicans take control of the House next month and start their promised investigations, you will be hearing the name Hunter Biden often. Yet this drama has been surprisingly easy to ignore, particularly if your politics and media habits lean left or you are the sort of gentle soul who prefers not to ogle train wrecks. In addition to such innocent if intimate fare as pictures of his children 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. 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. And never has such unhappiness been so pointillistically exposed.
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