Hunter Biden to plead guilty to tax offences: The many scandals of the US president’s son

Hunter Biden, United States president Joe Biden’s son, has agreed to a plea deal with the Justice Department over tax offences and a firearm charge. According to Associated Press (AP), Hunter will plead guilty to two misdemeanour tax crimes and admit to illegally possessing a gun as a drug user.

However, the 53-year-old is expected to avoid jail time as part of the plea agreement. The news of the junior Biden’s plea deal on Tuesday (20 June) garnered strong criticism from Republicans, including Donald Trump. The former US president, who is himself entangled in legal troubles, wrote on his social media site: “Wow! The corrupt Biden DOJ just cleared up hundreds of years of criminal liability by giving Hunter Biden a mere ‘traffic ticket.’ Our system is BROKEN!”

Hunter Biden, who has been a constant target of the House Republicans who accuse him of corruption, has been under federal investigation since 2018.

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Let’s take a closer look at how scandals involving the younger Biden have continued to hit headlines in recent years.

Troubled personal life

Hunter was born to Joe Biden and his first wife Neilia Biden in 1970.

In December 1972, when he was only two years old, his mother and baby sister, Naomi, died in a car crash. Hunter and his elder brother, Beau, who were also in the car, survived but sustained injuries.

Hunter went on to study at Georgetown University and later graduated from Yale Law School in 1996, reported BBC.

It was during his college years that the younger Biden got into a social drinking habit and “occasionally used cocaine”, according to his 2019 interview with The New Yorker.

As per BBC, Hunter, who has worked as a lawyer, lobbyist and investor, has been “in and out” of rehab.

In 2013, he joined the US Navy Reserves in a White House ceremony attended by his father, who was then the US vice president in the Barack Obama-led government.

The then-44-year-old had said at the time that he was “embarrassed that my actions led to my administrative discharge”, reported Insider.

Two years later, his older brother, Beau, died from brain cancer. Hunter told New Yorker that following this tragedy he went on a bender that included drinking excessively and buying crack from homeless people.

“He and Beau were one,” Naomi, Hunter’s daughter with his first wife, Kathleen Buhle, once wrote on Twitter. “One heart, one soul, one mind.”

Hunter opened up about his struggle with addiction in 2019, saying: “You don’t get rid of it. You figure out how to deal with it.”

Relationships and ‘infidelity’

Hunter and Buhle, a lawyer, got married in 1993 and have three children – Naomi, Finnegan and Maisy.

In 2017, the couple split. As per BBC, during a divorce filing that year, Buhle accused Hunter of “spending extravagantly on his own interests (including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations) while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills”.

After his divorce, the Biden family acknowledged Hunter was in a relationship with Hallie Biden, Beau’s widow.

In the New Yorker interview, Hunter said he and Hallie bonded over shared and “very specific grief” of their loss. As per BBC, the pair were together for two years.

In May 2019, reports of Hunter’s wedding to South African filmmaker Melissa Cohen came to light.

In 2019, a DNA test proved that he was “the biological and legal father” of a child of an exotic dancer, Lunden Alexis Roberts. Hunter is currently involved in a lawsuit seeking the reduction of his $20,000 per month child support payments to Lunden.

ALSO READ: Is there any truth to Russia’s claim about Hunter Biden funding Ukrainian bio-labs?

China and Ukraine dealings

Hunter Biden has made headlines for his ties to now-bankrupt Chinese energy giant, CEFC China Energy. As per a 2022 Washington Post, the Chinese company and its executives “paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by” Hunter and his uncle, James Biden.

These transactions reportedly took place in the years after Joe Biden completed the vice presidency and before he announced his candidacy for the White House in 2020.

Hunter was hammering out a deal for Ye Jianming, the founder and chairman of CEFC, to invest in a natural gas project in Louisiana.

However, as per BBC, the Louisiana deal apparently fell through after Ye was detained by Chinese authorities on corruption charges in 2018. The Chinese billionaire later went missing.

Joe Biden’s son also helped in starting the Chinese private equity firm BHR Partners. According to New York Times, Hunter Biden and two other American board members controlled 30 per cent of the firm, while the rest of the company was owned or controlled by Chinese investors, including the state-owned Bank of China.

According to the New Yorker, the younger Biden “did not take an equity stake in BHR Partners until after his father left the White House” in 2017.

Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine have also caused controversy back home.

In 2014, Hunter joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company helmed by Mykola Zlochevsky.

At that time, Joe Biden was helping to lead the US government’s Ukraine policy and was actively involved in anti-corruption work in the European country.

According to BBC, then-Vice-President Biden, along with a bunch of European allies, pressured the Ukrainian government to fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was accused of blocking corruption investigations.

In 2019, then-US president Trump pushed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in a telephone call to “look into” Hunter’s dealings with Burisma. This call led to the first impeachment against Trump.

Hunter is reportedly no longer on the board of both BHR Partners and Burisma Holdings.

The laptop tale

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Trump’s allies claimed they had information from a laptop, which as per them, was abandoned by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop.

New York Post reported on the content that was allegedly on the laptop, some of which concerned Hunter’s dealings with CEFC China and Burisma.

As per Politico, there were also sexually explicit photos of Hunter on the laptop.

Without offering any proof, Joe Biden dubbed the allegations a “smear campaign” by Russian disinformation.
According to Vox, no evidence has emerged so far that the material on the laptop was engineered by Russian disinformation.

The laptop was eventually seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) which examined its content as part of the investigation into Hunter Biden, reported BBC.

According to an NBC News analysis, from 2013-18, Hunter’s firm raked in $11 million through its dealings in Ukraine and China.

The New York Times reported last May that a prominent Hollywood lawyer helped Hunter Biden to pay off $2 million in overdue taxes. Congressional Republicans are looking into the matter.

Despite the controversies, the US president has continued to support his son. “There’s not a single thing that I’ve observed at all that would affect me or the United States relative to my son Hunter,” Biden told “60 Minutes” in September 2022.

In May this year, Joe Biden told MSNBC, “My son has done nothing wrong. I trust him. I have faith in him. It impacts my presidency by making me feel proud of him.”

With inputs from agencies

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