How Hunter Biden Helped Derail His Father’s Reelection

By Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf

Joe Biden’s debate against Donald Trump was supposed to prove the aging president’s stamina. But in the weeks leading up to it he was devastated—and distracted—by his son’s legal travails.

June 2024 was going to be a momentous month for Joe Biden’s presidency: trips to France and Italy, a star-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles with Barack Obama, George Clooney and Julia Roberts, and the first debate against Donald Trump. But there was another matter at the top of the president’s mind. As Biden confided to a close friend, “The only thing I care about is that my son is not convicted.”

On June 3, Hunter Biden reported to a federal courthouse in Wilmington, Del., to face three felony charges for lying on a federal firearms application and possessing a gun while abusing drugs. Beyond the danger to Hunter’s liberty, the trial was sure to embarrass the Biden family, airing sordid secrets from the painful years after Hunter’s brother Beau Biden died of cancer.

Much of the public was unaware of the depths of turmoil within the Biden family—affairs, addiction, alcoholism—and now it would all spill out, five months before the election. To prove Hunter Biden was abusing drugs

This article is adapted from the authors’ new book “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America,” which will be published on July 8 by Penguin Press.

--when he purchased the gun, prosecutors planned to call three star witnesses: his ex-girlfriend, whom he met when she was a stripper; his exwife, the mother of three of his daughters; and Beau’s widow, with whom he started a romantic relationship after his brother’s death.

The trial was just one of Hunter Biden’s legal travails. Republicans in Congress were examining his overseas business dealings in Ukraine, China and other countries, for what would later turn into an impeachment inquiry. He was involved in a child-support case over a child he fathered with an Arkansas woman. And ethical questions lingered about sales of his paintings, which a New York gallerist was listing for $75,000 to $500,000 apiece—prices that critics said the works would never fetch without the artist’s surname.

With Hunter’s paintings as his main source of income, the family was growing concerned about how he could continue to afford pricey Washington lawyers like Abbe Lowell. At one point, the family asked senior White House aides to consider whether Biden could help his son raise money for legal bills. The question became more urgent amid concerns that Lowell might drop Hunter as a client if bills weren’t paid.

Hunter found out the Democratic National Committee was paying President Biden’s legal fees arising from an investigation into his handling of classified documents, taken over by a special counsel, Robert Hur. Hunter asked why the DNC could not pay his too. Lawyers ultimately decided the president should not be involved in fundraising for Hunter, and the DNC could not justify picking up Hunter’s tab.

Republicans made Hunter a centerpiece of attacks on the president. When Biden’s top aides reviewed word clouds put together by outside pollsters to see what was animating voters, Hunter Biden’s name almost always appeared. But inside the White House, he was largely a forbidden subject. The president felt deep guilt about his only surviving son’s struggles and largely refused to talk about them. (This account of Hunter Biden’s impact on his father’s presidency is based on interviews with more than a dozen prominent Democrats involved in the Biden campaign and White House.)

For Joe Biden, his son’s trial was devastating. He was convinced that Republicans’ goal was to break Hunter psychologically so that he would relapse and start using drugs and alcohol again. Biden wished he could have attended the trial; he went to Wilmington a few times, but never entered the courtroom. First Lady Jill Biden showed up almost every day. Most senior aides had no idea she planned to attend the trial until she arrived on the first day, accompanied by aides, family and friends. It happened to be her 73rd birthday, and Hunter greeted her: “Happy birthday. I got you a special event.”

As the prosecutors put on their case, they presented photographs of Hunter with drug paraphernalia, sometimes shirtless or partly censored for nudity. They displayed messages between Hunter Biden and his drug dealers, while his ex-lovers, one by one, confirmed his regular use of drugs. Joe Biden was at the White House when the verdict came in on June 11: Guilty on all counts. An aide, Annie Tomasini, gave the president the bad news. In a few hours he was scheduled to speak at the Washington Hilton, and his aides worried about him appearing publicly. “You don’t have to do this,” Anita Dunn told him. “You can go home to Wilmington. Everyone will understand.” Vice President Kamala Harris offered to speak in his place. Biden refused: “I want to do it,” he said.

The verdict came at a critical time for the president, when he needed to prove his vigor to voters who were drifting away. Some closest to Biden feared that the ordeal of Hunter’s trial would make it harder to muster the necessary stamina. Their worst fears played out on the debate stage in Atlanta on June 27, when Biden struggled to put together sentences.

Hunter watched the debate from his home in Los Angeles, and his reaction was “What the f—?” He had never seen his father so out of it, and worried about his well-being. A few days later, when Hunter arrived at Camp David for a visit, he told his father, “I love you” and “Get some sleep.”

By the next morning, Hunter’s concerns had softened. He thought Biden had just been exhausted during the debate. For a family that had weathered tragedy, addiction and defeat, this was just another challenge. No one discussed Biden dropping out of the presidential race.

The next morning, on July 1, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump could claim presidential immunity from prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election result. Biden and aides had long refrained from commenting directly on Trump’s legal cases; they didn’t want to lend any credence to Trump’s accusations that Biden was behind the prosecutions. But Biden believed this Supreme Court decision was too historically consequential to ignore.

Jeff Zients, the White House chief of staff, convened a video call with top aides and Biden joined from Camp David. The discussion centered on whether Biden would re--lease a statement in writing or talk on camera. The president decided he wanted to return to the White House to speak, and the staff on the call began to work out details.

Suddenly an unidentified voice piped up from Biden’s screen and recommended an Oval Office address. At first, some aides had no idea who was speaking. It soon became clear the voice belonged to Hunter Biden, who the White House staff had not known was on the call. White House Counsel Ed Siskel expressed some concern about Biden speaking from the Oval Office. Hunter snapped back: “This is one of the most consequential decisions the Supreme Court has ever made.” He said his father had every right to use the powerful imagery of the Oval Office to deliver that message. (They later settled on the Cross Hall, the long hallway on the first floor of the White House.) After the call ended, Siskel told colleagues Hunter’s presence was inappropriate. A few weeks later, Biden was holed up in Rehoboth Beach, Del., sick with Covid and holding meetings to determine his political future. Hunter called in from Los Angeles and made clear that he supported whatever decision his father made. But he told him, “I sure would love having you back.” What Hunter meant was that being president took up all his father’s time. He often told people that he had more of an interest in his father abandoning his campaign than anyone.

Hunter would come to believe that taking a break to recover from Covid allowed his father to reflect for the first time—to see that, even if he could win re-election, his candidacy was tearing the Democratic Party apart. The next day, Biden announced he was dropping out of the presidential race.

A few days before Thanksgiving, Hunter Biden arrived in Washington ahead of the family’s annual trip to Nantucket. At the White House, Hunter told his father that his legal team had prepared a 52-page document titled “The Political Prosecutions of Hunter Biden.” They planned to release it publicly ahead of Hunter’s sentencing hearings the following month. The document included a timeline of the investigations and argued that Hunter would not have faced the charges if he were not the president’s son. It also warned that Trump’s election posed an even graver threat to Hunter.

Until now, Biden had repeatedly ruled out pardoning his son. Hunter told friends that he never discussed the prospect with his father, and still believed he would win his cases on appeal. But Trump’s victory, and especially his nomination of Kash Patel to run the FBI, changed the calculus, Hunter told friends. Joe Biden had already lost one son to cancer, and close allies could not imagine he would allow his other son to serve a day behind bars—especially on charges they thought were largely bogus.

On Nantucket over Thanksgiving, Biden reached his decision: He would grant Hunter a full and unconditional pardon. No staff were involved in the process. When the president returned to Washington on Saturday, he announced the pardon with a blistering statement he wrote personally, referring to “an effort to break Hunter” with “unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution.”

“Enough is enough,” he said. But that wasn’t enough for Biden. He then turned his ire on the Justice Department: “I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”

Top officials at the Justice Department were shocked. Even some of the president’s staunchest defenders were appalled. Biden had spent the last several years pushing back against Trump’s attempts to delegitimize federal prosecutions by saying they were politicized. Now Biden was agreeing. On Jan. 20, as his last act in office, he preemptively pardoned his own three siblings and two of their spouses.

Biden was convinced that Republicans’ goal was to break Hunter psychologically so that he would start using drugs and alcohol again.

Above: President Biden embraces Hunter on June 11, 2024, after his conviction on federal gun charges. Left: Hunter Biden leaves court in Wilmington, Del., accompanied by his stepmother Jill Biden (left) and wife Melissa Cohen Biden (right).