WASHINGTON ― Hunter Biden said in a podcast interview published Friday that Republicans and the right-wing media are trying to destroy him in order to bring down his father’s presidency.
“What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to kill me, knowing that it will be a pain greater than my father could be able to handle, and so therefore destroying a presidency in that way,” Hunter Biden said in a podcast interview with the musician Moby.
Biden and Moby met while both were recovering from addiction, according to a press release announcing the rare interview with the president’s son on the Moby Pod podcast. (Moby was one of several big-name guests at a Hunter Biden art show in 2021.)
Republicans have launched an impeachment inquiry against US President Joe Biden over dubious allegations that he and his son sold out the US government in order to make themselves rich.
Since publishing a memoir in 2021, Hunter Biden has mostly kept a low profile as reporters, Republicans and federal investigators have sifted through every aspect of his life, including the entire contents of his phone, computer and email account, in search of high crimes and misdemeanours. He also faces a host of federal criminal charges, including nine tax counts filed against him in California this week.
In his most detailed remarks about his predicament in years, Hunter Biden told Moby he felt sorry for his political antagonists, mentioning US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who displayed compromising photos of him with escorts during a committee hearing over the summer.
“I realised that it’s not about me. And then the second thing that I realised is that these people are just sad, very, very sick people that have most likely just faced traumas in their lives,” Biden said. “They’ve decided that they are going to turn into an evil that they decide that they’re going to inflict on the rest of the world.”
Letting go of his resentment, Biden said, was important for him to avoid relapsing. He wrote in his book, “Beautiful Things,” that his brother Beau’s cancer death in 2015 supercharged his addictions to alcohol and crack cocaine, and that he was smoking crack as often as every 15 minutes until he sobered up after meeting his now-wife in 2019. He said he now tries to focus on things in front of him in order not to respond to stimulus from the “engine of constant hate” churning against him.
“If you can find the compassion for the Paul Gosars and Lauren Boberts and Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Kari Lakes of the world, you are a far better person than I,” Moby said, referring to Republican politicians.
Beau’s death contributed to Joe Biden’s decision not to run for president in 2016 after having served two terms as vice president under Barack Obama. It wasn’t Biden’s first public grieving; he took the senatorial oath of office in 1973 from the hospital where Hunter and Beau recovered from a car wreck that killed their mother and sister. Hunter Biden has said he and his brother and father had an unusually strong bond, and Joe Biden wrote in his 2017 memoir that “as long as I have Hunt, I have Beau.”
This week the elder Biden denounced Republican accusations against him as “lies.”
As part of their impeachment inquiry, House Republicans have demanded that Hunter Biden sit for a closed deposition on Capitol Hill this month, but he has said he will only appear for public testimony, arguing that Republicans would take advantage of the closed-door interview to later cast their own spin on what occurred. Republicans have threatened to hold him in contempt of Congress if he doesn’t show for the deposition.
The main corruption allegation concerns Hunter Biden’s work for a Ukrainian gas company while his father served as the face of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy. State Department officials have said the arrangement created the appearance of a conflict of interest but that it did not actually affect policy.
Hunter Biden has maintained he never did anything seriously wrong, insisting his foreign business deals were ethical and suggesting his legal problems stemmed from bad behaviour caused by grief and drug addiction. (The indictment filed against him this week says he refused to pay taxes even after he sobered up and continued living an “extravagant” lifestyle.)
But Biden’s appearance on Moby’s podcast reflects a more aggressive legal and media strategy, which has included his demand for public testimony as well as lawsuits against the Republican operatives who distributed the contents of a laptop hard drive.
“There was a point where the advice from the smart people in the room was that this was nothing more than a distraction as related to what really matters to the American people and adding my voice to it would only add fuel to the fire,” Biden said. “Now that thesis has been completely blown out of the water because it’s not possible that the fire could be any hotter.”