Hunter Biden - A Memoir

For my family

the curious feeling

swam through him

that everything

was

beautiful

there,

that it would always

stay beautiful

there.

FROM NIRVANA,

BY CHARLES BUKOWSKI

A s I began writing this book from the relative calm of my home office, in November 2019, I sat in the center of a political firestorm, the consequences of which could change the course of history.

The president of the United States was smearing me almost daily from the South Lawn of the White House. He invoked my name at rallies to incite his base. Wheres Hunter? replaced Lock her up! as his go-to hype line. If you wanted, you could even buy a WHERES HUNTER? T-shirt directly from his campaign websitetwenty-five dollars, sizes small to 3XL.

Not long after that call to arms became part of his stock repertoire, supporters sporting blood-red MAGA caps appeared outside the driveway gate of the private house I was renting in Los Angeles with my wife, Melissa, then five months pregnant. They snarled through bullhorns and waved posters depicting me as the titular character from Wheres Waldo? Red hats and photographers followed us in cars. We called the police, as did some of our neighbors, to shoo them away. Yet threatsincluding an anonymous text to one of my daughters at school, warning her that they knew where I livedforced us to seek a safer address. Melissa was scared to deathfor her, for us, for our baby.

I became a proxy for Donald Trumps fear that he wouldnt be reelected. He pushed debunked conspiracy theories about work I did in Ukraine and China, even as his own children had pocketed millions in China and Russia and his former campaign manager sat in a jail cell for laundering millions more from Ukraine. He did all this while his shadow foreign policy, led by his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, unraveled in plain sight.

It was a predictable enough tactic, straight from the playbook of his dark-arts mentor, Roy Cohn, the grand wizard of McCarthyism. I expected the president to get far more personal far earlier to exploit the demons and addictions Ive dealt with for years. Early on, at least, he ceded that tactic to his trolls. One morning as I was working on the book, I looked up at a TV screen to see Matt Gaetz, a Florida congressman and Trump henchman, read a magazine excerpt that detailed my addiction straight into the record of the House Judiciary Committees hearing on articles of impeachment.

I dont want to make light of anybodys substance abuse issues Gaetz said, snickering for the cameras as he made light of my substance abuse issues.

Again, Im not casting any judgment on any challenges someone goes through in their personal life, Gaetz continued, as he cast judgment on my personal life.

This from someone once arrested for driving under the influence in his daddys BMW, and who later had the charges mysteriously dropped. Anything to keep the reality-TV narrative running.

None of that matters in an up-is-down, Orwellian political climate. Trump believed that if he could destroy me, and by extension my father, he could dispatch any candidate of decency from either partyall while diverting attention from his own corrupt behavior.

Wheres Hunter?

Im right here. Ive faced and survived worse. Ive known the extremes of success and ruin. With my mother and baby sister killed in a car accident when I was two, my father suffering a life-threatening brain aneurysm and embolism in his forties, and my brother dying way too young from a horrible brain cancer, I come from a family forged by tragedies and bound by a remarkable, unbreakable love.

Im not going anywhere. Im not a curio or sideshow to a moment in history, as all the cartoonish attacks try to paint me. Im not Billy Carter or Roger Clinton, God bless them. I am not Eric Trump or Donald Trump Jr.Ive worked for someone other than my father, rose and fell on my own. This book will establish that.

For the record:

Im a fifty-one-year-old father who helped raise three beautiful daughters, two in college and one who graduated last year from law school, and now a year-old son. I earned degrees from Yale Law and Georgetown, where Ive also taught in the masters program of the School of Foreign Service.

Ive been a senior executive at one of the countrys largest financial institutions (since acquired by Bank of America), founded my own multinational firms, and worked as counsel for Boies Schiller Flexner, which represents many of the largest and most sophisticated organizations in the world.

Ive served on the board of directors at Amtrak (appointed by Republican president George W. Bush) and chaired the board of the nonprofit World Food Program USA, part of the largest hunger-relief mission on the planet. As part of my voluntary position for the WFP, I traveled to refugee camps and areas devastated by natural disasters around the globeSyria, Kenya, the Philippines. Ive sat with traumatized families inside homes fashioned out of aluminum shipping containers, then briefed members of Congress, or talked directly with heads of state, about how best to provide swift, life-saving relief.

Before that, I lobbied for Jesuit universities. I helped secure funding for mobile dental clinics in underserved Detroit, after-school training programs for teachers in lower-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia, and a mental health facility for underprivileged and disabled veterans in Cincinnati.

My point: Ive done serious work for serious people. Theres no question that my last name has opened doors, but my qualifications and accomplishments speak for themselves. That those accomplishments sometimes crossed my fathers spheres of influence during his two terms as vice presidenthow could they not? What I did misjudge, however, was the notion that Trump would become president and, once in office, act with impunity and vengeance for his political gain.

Thats on me. Thats on all of us.

Then there is this:

Im also an alcoholic and a drug addict. Ive bought crack cocaine on the streets of Washington, DC, and cooked up my own inside a hotel bungalow in Los Angeles. Ive been so desperate for a drink that I couldnt make the one-block walk between a liquor store and my apartment without uncapping the bottle to take a swig. In the last five years alone, my two-decades-long marriage has dissolved, guns have been put in my face, and at one point I dropped clean off the grid, living in $59-a-night Super 8 motels off I-95 while scaring my family even more than myself.

That deep descent came not long after I hugged my brother, Beau, the best friend Ive ever had and the person I loved most in the world, as he took his last breath. Beau and I talked virtually every day of our lives. While we argued as adults almost as much as we laughed, we never ended a conversation without one of us saying, I love you, and the other responding, I love you, too.

After Beau died, I never felt more alone. I lost hope.

I ve since pulled out of that dark, bleak hole. Its an outcome that was unthinkable in early 2019. My recovery never could have happened without the unconditional love of my father and the everlasting love of my brother, which has carried on after his death.

The love between me and my father and Beauthe most profound love Ive ever knownis at the heart of this memoir. Its a love that allowed me to continue these last five years in the midst of both personal demons and pressure from the outside world writ large, including a presidents unhinged fury.