Hunter Biden’s Crack-Fueled Misadventures

H unter Biden interjects two paragraphs into his book explaining what he did to earn those huge paychecks from the Ukrainian gas company Burisma — something about corporate governance and facilitating contacts with folks he says he knew in Mexico — but dozens of pages explaining how he spent the money. Mainly it went to his most assiduously pursued hobby: crack.

Wheeeee! What a story. The gonzo “I’m a crackhead” chapters in the memoir Beautiful Things are a lot more convincing than the half-dozen “I make for a formidable player in any respectable company’s internal oversight mechanism” sentences. Hunter Biden is amazed he’s still alive. I’m amazed, too. At the end of the book I wanted to give him a standing ovation for not being dead. If you didn’t know Hunter himself was telling the story, you’d expect to hear at any moment that some scumbag or other has simply conked him on the head, stolen his stuff, and left the body to cool under a broken streetlight on a forbidding block in Bridgeport or Baltimore. It’s a commonplace to aver that one drug addiction is very much like any other. Untrue! cries Hunter Biden. It turns out that being a crack addict is tremendously unlike being, say, a Riunite devotee or a Lucky Strike fiend.

From what Biden tells us, in the three years before his father announced his presidential candidacy, he spent night after night crawling into the worst neighborhoods in America hundreds of times, probably thousands of times, dealing with the worst characters, flush with money and willing to do almost anything for the next hit. Advantage was taken by certain fellows whose specialty it is to separate crack fiends from their money.

Crack is so elusive (unlike cocaine, Biden informs us, a more gentlemanly pursuit that can be scored fairly easily) that you might have to pay some degenerate skank you met outside 7-Eleven 100 bucks for a promise that he would deliver the good stuff, then watch sweatily as he disappeared, then repeat the process many times with many skanks before actually obtaining the needful thing. As Biden was doing this from one end of the country to the other while he was supposed to be in rehab, he was constantly finding himself in unfamiliar areas with unfamiliar people. He boasts that it is “my superpower” to know which highway exit to use, which turn to take, which scent to follow, to find the absolute sketchiest, scariest, hence crack-iest, locale in any given city.

Many years of cocaine and alcohol abuse started when Hunter was in his early teens, partying in “all of these old du Pont estates” while attending the pricey private schools Wilmington Friends and Archmere Academy. By the time he attended Georgetown University, he was in the habit of arriving for brunch with friends at the Tombs bar, then remaining there to drink until 2 a.m.

He married his first wife, Kathleen, four months after learning she was pregnant, in 1993, but the drinking continued. “I’d stop for thirty days, then binge for three. I couldn’t get control of it.” This was Hunter at his best-behaved. When she finally told him to hit the bricks after more than 20 years of marriage and three daughters together, he retreated to an apartment in Logan Circle in D.C. At one point, a tiny woman whom he met while trying to buy drugs — he refers to her as both “Bicycles” and “Rhea,” sparing us her real name — crashed on a spare mattress in his flat. So he let her stay there for five months. Occasionally she’d say something like, “I found your credit card,” which meant that she was buying stuff on his credit card. He didn’t care. She was a heavy addict going back years (and is still living rough, he surmises), but she was not so ruled by drugs that she lacked the wit to mock his addiction. She noted that she could tell from the hungry way he looked at the floor that he was scanning every inch of it for mislaid flecks of crack. Sometimes he’d floor-dive to come up with precious morsels, attempt to smoke them, and discover that he’d been wasting his time on Parmesan cheese.

Watching Biden’s insane drug odyssey crash across the country against a backdrop of big-time politics recalls the adventures of a previous Hunter, one who was actually sharp and talented. There are even several mentions of ibogaine, the drug Hunter S. Thompson made famous when he fancifully accused a straitlaced presidential candidate, Ed Muskie, of being in its grip in 1972. As for Hunter S. Biden, well, imagine Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as rewritten by a dullard lawyer with a vestigial sense of privileged pompositude and a lot of hurt feelings about his mistreatment by Fox News Channel. Why, how dare they accuse this upstanding citizen of being some sort of icon of corruption? All he did was accept a million bucks a year from a Ukrainian energy firm in exchange for attending two annual meetings, then set out to blow it all on crack and strippers.

Out of nowhere, during one of his binge tales, he brags that he got a 172 on his LSAT (that’s 99th percentile; he graduated from Yale Law School). Biden lies about so much stuff that it’s impossible to know whether this is accurate, but what a strange thing for a degenerate to brag about. Brains well-used, sirrah! In his glove compartment, in case he got in trouble, Biden carried his dead brother’s attorney general of Delaware badge and also the business card of a Secret Service agent. My gosh, why would those jerks at Fox, or anyone else, think Hunter exploited his family connections? At one point he insists, very Biden-ishly, that he did nothing wrong and yet would never do this not-wrong thing again:

Did I make a mistake by taking a seat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company?

No.

Did I display a lack of judgment?

No.

Would I do it again?

No.

I did nothing unethical, and have never been charged with wrongdoing. In our current political environment, I don’t believe it would make any difference if I took that seat or not.

This is a bit like hearing Ted Bundy saying, “I believe I would have been hit with multiple murder charges even if I hadn’t murdered anyone.” An excellent way to not be charged with corruptly using your family name for fun and profit is to . . . not do that. The absolutely effortless lying and dissembling has been a mainstay of Joe Biden’s style going back forever. Hunter simply imbibed it. When a voter on the campaign trail mentioned to Joe Biden, “You, on the other hand, sent your son over there to get a job and work for a gas company that he had no experience for, nothing, in order to get access to the president,” the senior Biden replied to this, “You’re a damn liar, man. That’s not true. And no one has ever said that, and no one has heard that,” then challenged the questioner to a push-up contest or an IQ test.

Hunter Biden is such a shameless scoundrel that he was even smoking crack as he talked on the phone to the New Yorker writer who profiled him in 2019, never telling his dad he was spending hours unburdening himself. He was a plaything of the pipe until (at least) May 2019. He rode the rock from Delaware to Malibu and back again, but he’s all right now. Honest. You can make a judgment for yourself whether he has really changed when you consider how he’s been living his entire adult life, which I’ll get to in my next column.