Too close to the son: could Hunter Biden cost Joe the election?

Joe Biden has always presented himself as the “loving patriarch” of a close-knit family, said The New York Times, one that has endured more than its share of tragedy, including the deaths of Biden’s first wife and infant daughter in a car crash in 1972, and of his older son Beau from cancer in 2015.

But there was a crack in this picture. In recent years, Biden had made much of his devotion to his six grandchildren. Yet he had failed to acknowledge in public the existence of a seventh: a girl named Navy, who was born in 2018, the product of a brief liaison between Joe’s son Hunter, now 53, and a woman named Lunden Roberts, when Hunter was at the peak of his well-documented battle with drug addiction.

Last week, however, Navy, now four, finally got a mention from her grandfather, who said that he and the First Lady only wanted what was best for all their grandkids, including her. Biden had been heavily criticised for refusing to welcome Navy into the fold; his statement should put a stop to that. But alas for him, questions about his troubled youngest son are, if anything, only intensifying.

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‘Trump-phobic media have protected his shady business affairs’

Earlier in the week, Hunter had appeared at a court in Delaware, said The Independent, where he had been hoping to draw a line under criminal charges he is facing: that he had neglected to pay his taxes, and lied about his drug use when he bought a gun. But the judge took the unusual step of rejecting the plea deal Hunter had made with prosecutors. Quite rightly, said Jeffrey Blehar in National Review. The basic terms of the deal, under which Biden was due to plead guilty to the misdemeanour tax charges and admit the felony gun charge in exchange for a mere slap on the wrist, already looked unduly lenient. Worse was what emerged in court: that Biden had seemingly been offered immunity from any future charges relating to his controversial overseas consulting work.

Has there ever been a First Son as notorious as Hunter Biden, wondered Douglas Murray in The Sunday Telegraph. The stories about his private life – the crack smoking, the prostitutes – are merely titillating; but there is something shocking about the way the Trump-phobic media have protected his shady business affairs from scrutiny. When, in 2020, the New York Post obtained compromising data from a laptop that Hunter had abandoned at a repair shop, the Post’s reporting was suppressed on social media as fake news, Russian disinformation.

Yet we now know that the laptop was Hunter’s – and that documents on it raised legitimate questions about his business dealings, and what his father knew of them. At the very least, one is entitled to ask how Hunter – with no expertise in this area – had slipped onto the board of a Ukrainian energy giant when his father was vice president, a gig that paid him a reported $1m a year.

‘Taste of their own poison’

It’s clear that Hunter has made a lot of money by trading on his father’s name, but the real question, said William McGurn in The Wall Street Journal, is whether Joe Biden was in on it. The president has insisted he had nothing to do with his son’s deal-making, but Hunter’s ex-business partner testified to Congress this week that Biden Snr had had several phone calls with Hunter’s clients; and two IRS whistle-blowers have testified that the Justice Department tried to limit an inquiry into Hunter’s affairs. Last week, speaker Kevin McCarthy hinted that Republicans might soon start impeachment proceedings. That would be a mistake, because for all the Republicans’ frenzied talk, there is not a shred of firm evidence linking Joe Biden to wrongdoing, said Tori Otten in The New Republic. There is a swirl of rumour, conjecture and unverified allegations designed for consumption in right-wing “echo chambers”, but there is no smoking gun.

It is not even clear that prosecutors had intended to give Hunter immunity from charges that might arise from his dealings with firms in Ukraine, China and elsewhere, said Gabriel Gatehouse in The Times. It was a dispute about the scope of the deal that caused it to collapse. You can’t blame Hunter for seeking immunity, given that Donald Trump has vowed that if he is re-elected, he’ll get a prosecutor to go after “the entire Biden crime family”. But in Trumpworld, Trump is the victim. He and his associates have been targeted by countless lawsuits. To them, the Bidens are just getting a “taste of their own poison”.

The problem for Joe Biden is that even if he has broken no laws, he is not in the clear, said Molly Olmstead on Slate. That he failed to put up dividers between himself and his errant son speaks ill of him; and his son cashing in on his status erodes trust in government. It is a very bad look (even if Trump’s children enriched themselves far more). And the questions about Hunter keep coming: the latest surround his paintings, and whether people are paying hundreds of thousands for his art to gain favour with his dad. All this may not cost Joe Biden the election, but it will make a difference.