Over the last few days, that Bannon deputized him at the time “to get out all the sex pictures.” Burra curated and organized the images, dropping them into a folder entitled “Salacious Pics Package.” With Bannon’s support, Burra told Mother Jones, he shared those files with other misinformation operatives. At the same time, Giuliani and others pushed false claims that the leaked data contained evidence of child pornography.
As Biden pointed out, Fox News hosts to this day reliably include those racy photos as visual aids for stories that have no ostensible connection to his addiction.
“Go back and look at the Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity shows, look at what they’re doing as they’re talking about me and Ukraine, and Romania, and all the other total absolute bullshit that the ‘laptop’ does not prove in any way,” he said. “But in the end, on the split-screen next to them is always a picture of me. Usually shirtless with a cigarette or a crack pipe in my mouth.”
There was a wide selection for Fox to choose from: Biden nude, using crack, frolicking with sex workers, using crack in the nude with sex workers. Some are selfies, and some were taken by sex workers or fellow drug users. Biden cannot recall the circumstances around many or say who took them or why.
By way of example, he pointed to one of the more notorious photos—of him asleep in a bed with a glass pipe in his mouth. “Clearly someone took that picture,” Biden said. But, he added, “that’s actually a meth pipe,” not a crack pipe, and he said he never used meth. That photo, he contends, was staged.
President Joe Biden and Hunter Biden talk with guests during the White House Easter Egg Roll on April 1, 2024.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Biden first opened up about his battle with addiction in his 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things, recounting how he first tried crack as a student at Georgetown University. After a late night of drinking, he headed to a local park with “a fledgling addict’s wrongheaded sense of misadventure” and “decided to see what all the hubbub was about.”
The book says a central factor underlying his addiction was the car crash, when he was 2, that killed his mother, Neilia, and younger sister, Naomi. Biden was seriously injured, along with older brother, Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015.
“Dr. Gabor Maté believes that addiction is a response to trauma,” Biden told The Daily Beast. “But everyone tries to oversimplify addiction in attempting to find an explanation for what appears to be inexplicable behavior.”
“I’ve chosen to focus on a way forward rather than a root cause, and I know what works for me—the principles that I learned through the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and the unflagging support of my family,” he said.
Fox News has political incentives for how they treat Biden’s addiction. And to Biden, those motives are perfectly clear: His father’s political enemies needed to manufacture a predicate to get claims of corruption to stick.
“Whatever you say, the one thing that nobody ever accused my dad of was getting rich off of being a United States senator,” Biden said. “And so what’s the one thing that you need to do? You need to completely dehumanize me. And the easiest way to do that is to show me to be this degenerate crack addict.”
Hunter Biden listens to his attorney, Abbe Lowell, following a surprise appearance at a January 2024 House Oversight Committee meeting to vote on whether to hold him in contempt of Congress.
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Hunter may be clean and sober, but he is still dealing with the fallout of his addiction on multiple fronts. He is staring down a double-barrel of federal criminal trials set to begin in just a few weeks—gun charges in his old home state of Delaware, and tax charges in his new home of California.
In the firearms case, Biden is charged with three felony counts for allegedly lying about his substance use on documentation for a 2018 handgun purchase—an extraordinarily rare charge—after his memoir revealed that he was struggling with addiction at the time. Less than two weeks after Biden bought the revolver, and before he had a chance to fire it, his sister-in-law and then–lover, Hallie Biden, discarded it in a grocery store Dumpster.
The case in California stems from some $1.4 million in unpaid taxes between 2016 and 2019, which Biden has since paid back via loans from a friend, prominent Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris. He faces nine counts, including alleged tax evasion and claiming false business deductions. (Morris, who met Biden at a campaign fundraiser in December 2019, has loaned him millions but confirmed to Politico last week that he can no longer foot the legal bills.)
The indictments were brought by Justice Department Special Counsel David Weiss after the DOJ revoked the non-prosecution agreement it struck with Biden last summer. The cases are slated to go to trial next month, after both jurisdictions rejected Biden’s efforts to have the charges tossed.
The timing is, to say the least, awkward, with Joe Biden in the midst of his re-election campaign against Trump—indicted four times and in the middle of his first criminal trial. While Hunter Biden made clear that he has no role in the campaign, as he told Axios in February, he’s keenly aware of the steep political price that a potential relapse could carry. (Last July, Hunter Biden told a federal judge under oath that he has been sober since June 1, 2019.)
Aides to the president told Politico recently that he is tormented by the idea that his son will be convicted and go to prison. “He worries about Hunter every single day, from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep,” said one. “That will only pick up during a trial.”
Fox will, of course, cover the trials slavishly. The question is whether, after the notice from Hunter’s legal team, they will be beaming the old photos from Biden’s laptop into Americans’ homes.
The network removed the Fox Nation miniseries The Trial of Hunter Biden—which made liberal use of those pictures, without authorization—after receiving the legal threat letter. It has also disappeared from streaming services like Roku and Apple.
Biden says the removal “doesn’t absolve them from any liability,” though it could diminish damages in the event of a trial. An earlier statement from Fox addressed the removal of the miniseries, which stages a mock trial of Biden.
“This program was produced in and has been available since 2022. We are reviewing the concerns that have just been raised and—out of an abundance of caution in the interim—have taken it down,” the statement said.
Biden said that in considering its options, Fox ought to think back to the Dominion lawsuit, which was settled on the eve of trial after damaging internal texts and emails unearthed during the discovery process became public.
If people were aghast at those revelations, he said, “think about five years of a systemic fucking campaign to vilify and dehumanize me” by people like Giuliani and his associates—including foreign nationals referenced in his demand letter.
“If we ever got them, it would make Dominion look like fucking, in my opinion, you know, pattycakes,” Biden said.
