Hunter Biden’s Crack-Fueled Misadventures

The hair-raising tale of how a future president’s son burned his Burisma millions on a desperate, three-year, coast-to-coast drug binge

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Hunter Biden attends his father Joe Biden’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., January 20, 2021.

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Hunter 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.

Kyle Smith

About the Author

Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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