What are the allegations against Hunter Biden?

Editor’s note (October 3rd 2023): This story was updated after Hunter Biden was arraigned on gun charges in Delaware.

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In October 2020, less than a month before America’s presidential election, the New York Post introduced the world to the contents of a MacBook Pro. The laptop belonged to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. The Post alleged that an email on its hard drive indicated that in 2015 Hunter had introduced a Ukrainian energy executive to Mr Biden, then vice-president. That, the paper claimed, suggested that Hunter’s business dealings had improperly influenced American policy.

Right-wing media seized on the story. The mainstream press, unable to confirm that the hard drive came from Hunter’s laptop, gave it less coverage. Journalists worried that the emails could be a Russian fabrication. There was a degree of political bias, too. Twitter and Facebook rushed to limit the story’s spread on their platforms, offering flimsy justifications. This provoked right-wing outrage and the spread of unfounded theories of collusion between the Bidens and the media.

Now Hunter is back in the spotlight. On October 3rd he was arraigned in federal court in Delaware. He pleaded not guilty to charges of lying on a federal firearms form and owning a gun illegally. More charges, relating to unpaid taxes, may follow later. What are the credible allegations against Hunter? And how big a problem might they pose to the Biden administration?As recently as July, the case was expected to wrap up in a plea deal. But the arrangement collapsed in court: prosecutors and Hunter’s lawyers were apparently split on whether the deal would shield Hunter from future charges. Hunter instead pleaded not guilty to the tax charges (neither the gun nor tax charges implicated Joe Biden). In August David Weiss, the federal prosecutor who had been overseeing the investigation since it began in 2018, was appointed special counsel. That gives him greater independence within the Justice Department (whose boss is nominated by the president). On the same day that he became special counsel, Mr Weiss filed court papers seeking to dismiss the tax charges in Delaware in order to move them to a different jurisdiction, so that the case could be brought to trial.

This turn of events has been catnip to Republicans in the House, who launched an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden in September. They claim that Hunter’s foreign business dealings enriched his father. Theirs has been much wider-ranging than the federal investigation so far; their allegations stem from activities that date back nearly a decade. Between 2014 and 2019 Hunter was a paid board member of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural-gas company. The firm’s owner was investigated for corruption by the country’s top prosecutor, who was later fired. Mr Biden, then vice-president, had been overseeing an American effort to help Ukraine crack down on corruption, and had called for the prosecutor to be removed because he was ineffective. There is no evidence to suggest that Mr Biden’s stance was linked to the Burisma investigation.

Allegations that Mr Biden had intervened in Ukrainian affairs to help his son first surfaced in 2018 and led indirectly to the first impeachment of Donald Trump. In 2019 Mr Trump ordered that military aid be withheld from Ukraine as a way of pressing its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Burisma. Mr Trump apparently hoped to uncover information that would compromise Mr Biden, then a potential Democratic presidential candidate. The House of Representatives impeached Mr Trump for abusing his power to boost his chances of re-election, but the Senate acquitted him.

Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine were investigated by the Senate in 2020. But lawmakers found no evidence that he had improperly influenced American policy through his father. The Post’s story purported to offer new evidence. It suggested that in 2015 Hunter had arranged a meeting between Mr Biden and a Burisma adviser. The president’s aides and Hunter’s lawyers deny that any such meeting took place. There is no record of it on Mr Biden’s schedule.

The impeachment inquiry will probably focus on another set of business deals. Between 2017 and 2018 CEFC, a Chinese oil-and-gas conglomerate, paid Hunter and his uncle, James Biden, nearly $5m. One of Hunter’s jobs was to negotiate a liquefied-natural-gas project in America (which was ultimately never built). Emails from Hunter’s laptop have been read by some as suggesting that he was planning a separate venture between several associates, including James Biden and CEFC. One email from the firm said that a 10% stake would go to “the big guy”. Mr Comer claims that “Joe Biden is the ‘big guy’.” Separately, Mr Comer told The Economist that he believed that Hunter had “compromised” the president. Joe Biden’s representatives deny any involvement.

This is a big claim—and one that Republicans have yet to back up. Hunter may have exploited his family connections to get cushy jobs, but there is no hard evidence that his father was aware of his work with CEFC—in short, no evidence that Hunter’s clients influenced American policy. Yet no presidential candidate can relish the prospect of defending allegations against a family member on the campaign trail—particularly when more than 60% of Americans, according to a poll published in September, are convinced that Joe Biden was somehow mixed up in Hunter’s seemingly unseemly affairs.

© 2023, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on www.economist.com

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