President Joe Biden's lone surviving son, Hunter Biden, is garnering attention once more.
According to court documents, he has agreed to admit to having a gun illegally while using drugs and to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax crimes.
Since 2018, there has been a federal investigation into the younger Mr. Biden, who has long been the subject of criticism from Republicans.
But his critics remain unabated despite the plea deal. Former president Donald Trump referred to the accusations as "a mere traffic ticket" and proclaimed that "our system is BROKEN" on his Truth Social network.
The 52-year-old has long been accused of widespread corruption, particularly in his international business dealings in China and Ukraine, by Mr. Trump and his allies.
While he has struggled in both public and private, President Biden has supported him.
The President and First Lady love their son and support him as he continues to rebuild his life, the White House said in a brief statement in response to the agreement. No more commentary is forthcoming. ".
Hunter Biden would avoid jail time under the terms of the agreement, which are expected to include drug monitoring and treatment.
Since his father assumed office in the White House, the younger Biden's well-known personal struggles—including a public divorce and drug addiction—have bled into politics.
What else do we know about Hunter Biden, though?
President Biden and his first wife Neilia Biden welcomed their son Hunter in 1970, and he was given his mother's maiden name as his first name.
When a truck struck the family car in December 1972, killing his mother and his infant sister Naomi, he was only two years old. This happened less than six weeks after his father was elected to the US Senate.
He suffered a skull fracture as a result of the collision, while his older brother Beau suffered a broken leg. From their hospital room, the senior Mr. Biden, who was not in the car, took the oath of office.
After graduating in 1996, Hunter continued his education at Yale Law School and Georgetown University.
He joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, a Catholic organization that recruits volunteers to help out in underserved areas, in between earning his two degrees.
He met his first wife there; she was a lawyer named Kathleen Buhle; they were married in 1993.
They divorced in 2017, leaving behind their three children, Naomi, Finnegan, and Maisy.
Hunter admitted to drinking as a teenager and using cocaine as a college student, even though his father is a nondrinker.
In and out of rehab, he has been.
In 2013, he enlisted in the US Navy Reserves and took the oath of office in front of his father, who was the vice president at the time, during a ceremony at the White House. But he was discharged from the naval base on his very first day there after testing positive for cocaine use; he later claimed to be "embarrassed" by this.
The New Yorker claims that after the 2015 death of his older brother Beau from brain cancer, he binge-drunk excessively, occasionally only leaving the house to buy vodka.
His daughter Naomi once stated on Twitter that "He and Beau were one.". "One soul, one mind, one heart. ".
In a bitter divorce petition filed in 2017, Ms. Buhle charged Hunter with "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.".
He was struggling with a serious drug addiction, which is heartbreaking and painful and wasn't who I was married to, Ms. Buhle revealed last year when she finally spoke out about how their 24-year marriage fell apart. ".
Hunter acknowledges that his adultery with Ms. Buhle was the breaking point in their marriage in his memoir Beautiful Things from 2021.
He was "the biological and legal father," according to a DNA test conducted in 2019, of a child born to exotic dancer Lunden Alexis Roberts.
In his memoir, Hunter insisted that he had "no memory" of their interaction. He now pays Ms. Roberts' child support after settling a paternity lawsuit with her.
In addition, before his divorce from Ms. Buhle was finalized, Hunter started dating Hallie Biden, the widow of his late brother, for two years. The two connected over their "very specific grief" for their loss, Hunter told The New Yorker.
After a brief six-day romance, just a few weeks later, Hunter married South African filmmaker Melissa Cohen. They have a single son.
He admitted to having a problem with addiction in 2019 and said: "You don't get rid of it. You decide on a strategy for handling it. ".
In Beautiful Things, he recounts how his father held him in an embrace and said, "I don't know what else to do. I don't know what else to do. I'm so afraid. Give me instructions. ".
He was reportedly using painting as therapy, and the New York Times quoted him as saying that it "keeps me away from people and places where I shouldn't be.".
But the Biden White House faced an ethical conundrum when he sold his paintings at a 2021 art exhibition for up to $50,000 each.
After earning his law degree from Yale, Hunter worked for MBNA America, a Delaware-based bank holding company that was later purchased by Bank of America.
His father was a close friend of the bank, which was one of Delaware's largest employers and a major supporter of his political campaigns, but this earned him the unfavorable nickname "the senator from MBNA.". Father of the younger Mr. Biden pushed bank-friendly bankruptcy reform legislation through the Senate as the younger Mr. Biden advanced to the position of executive vice-president.
In the early 2000s, Hunter opened a lobbying firm in Washington while still receiving consulting fees from the bank. According to Politico Magazine, this allowed him to attract "clients with interests that overlapped with [his father's] committee assignments and legislative priorities.".
The father-son dynamic at the time, according to him, was that neither would discuss lobbying with the other. In the case of more recent accusations of wrongdoing, too, President Biden has argued that this is accurate.
When then-Senator Biden was about to take over again as chairman of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee in 2006, his son and another relative made the disastrous decision to purchase the hedge fund company Paradigm Global Advisors.
Joe Biden's presidential campaign in 2008 and appointment as President Barack Obama's vice president occurred during their time at Paradigm. During this time, the fund was linked to a number of alleged criminal scams, including one involving a Texas financier who was found guilty of operating one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in US history. The Bidens had no legal issues and were not accused of anything. In 2010, they closed the fund and paid investors their money back.
Ex-President Trump and the Republican party have argued that President Biden's son's international business dealings were dubious and conflicted.
He served on the board of BHR Partners, a Chinese private equity firm, from 2013 to 2016, initially as an unpaid member and later as a shareholder with a 10% equity interest in the fund.
Mr. Trump frequently cited this position as alleged proof of his rival's corruption, claiming Joe Biden is "China's puppet.".
Hunter collaborated with Chinese oil tycoon Ye Jianming on a Louisiana natural gas project after his father left the White House in 2017. Following Ye's arrest by Chinese authorities on suspicion of corruption and subsequent disappearance, the deal appears to have fallen through.
But the biggest source of controversy has been business dealings in Ukraine.
Apparently receiving up to $50,000 (£38,000) per month, Hunter joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas company, in 2014.
His father was working hard to fight corruption at the time in Ukraine. Viktor Shokin, the nation's top prosecutor, was criticized for obstructing corruption investigations, and Vice President Biden rallied other Western leaders to demand his dismissal.
In 2016, the Ukrainian parliament ousted Mr. Shokin. Mr. Trump and a few of his allies claim he was fired for looking into Burisma.
House Republicans claim that Joe and Hunter Biden each received $5 million from Burisma executives as payment for ousting Mr. Shokin.
They have used an FBI form called an FD-1023, which agents use to record tips from private sources, as the basis for these allegations. The allegations are "a load of malarkey," said President Biden. ".
Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a phone call to look into Hunter's dealings with Burisma, which became the focal point of the impeachment campaign in 2019. The allegations of corruption made by the Bidens served as this.
Since then, he has stepped down from the boards of BHR Partners and Burisma Holdings.
A laptop that the younger Mr. Biden left at a repair shop in 2015 was discovered to contain an email from a Burisma adviser thanking him for the invitation to meet his father, who was the US vice president at the time, in Washington, DC, during the 2020 election campaign.
The elder Mr. Biden characterized the accusations as a "smear campaign" orchestrated by Russian disinformation without offering any supporting data.
Although the email has since been verified, Joe Biden's representatives have consistently denied that such a meeting ever happened, adding that Joe Biden had never brought up doing business with his kin.
According to reports, the FBI took the laptop from the repair shop and looked through it as part of the federal investigation into Hunter Biden.
According to an analysis by NBC News, from 2013 to 2018, Hunter's company worked in China and Ukraine and earned about $11 million (£9 point 2 million), including almost $5 million from the Louisiana gas project alone.
Additionally, it reportedly showed spending more than $200,000 per month at one point on expenses like payments for sports cars, cash withdrawals, and luxury hotel suites.
As CBS reported this year, congressional Republicans are also looking into claims that a wealthy Hollywood attorney has lent Hunter $2 million to cover back taxes.
Hunter has received numerous times of President Biden's defense.
Trump attacked his rival during a presidential debate during the most recent election, saying, "Hunter got kicked out of the military, dishonorably discharged for cocaine use, and he didn't have a job until you became vice president. ".
"That is just not true," a visibly upset Joe Biden retorted. Like many other people, my son battled a drug addiction. I'm pleased with my son because he worked hard to fix it.
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