Hunter Biden was quite possibly the most famous non-candidate on the ballot in an American election in 2020, and that was a hard place to be when your father was the actual candidate running for election to the presidency. The media scrutiny was intense. Minuscule infractions in his private life were magnified to the nth degree to dwarf the more severe offenses of the Trump brood’s conduct in the open. Hunter Biden got unfairly whacked, but in a sense, Hunter Biden’s life had long beckoned this. While Hunter’s father Joe Biden occupied and sought the highest offices in the land, Hunter was a secret drug addict.
Not since Lieutenant Percy Harrison Fawcett walked into the South American jungle in search of El Dorado, never to be seen again, has one man been so besotted by poor choices and unfortunate circumstances as Hunter Biden. Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides might have written Hunter Biden’s story. But they missed out. Unlike Percy Fawcett, Hunter has lived to tell the story, and he has just released his memoirs, “Beautiful Things: A Memoir.”
Hunter Biden lost his mother and baby sister as a child. As an adult, he lost his high-achieving hero brother Beau, to whom he all but played “Fredo” for most of his life. Hunter enlisted in the military and got thrown out in 2014 for cocaine use. After his brother’s death, he hooked up with his brother’s wife for a quick stint before ditching her for the freshness of “jungle girl” – South African Melissa Cohen. Somewhere in between, Hunter also became baby-daddy-in-denial until Arkansas’ Lunden Roberts, 28, called out Maury, and the DNA proved Hunter was indeed the father of the child. In a June 12, 2019 article, The Washington Post summed it best: Hunter Biden’s Messy Personal Life.
For Hunter, that was just a warm-up. The worst was yet to come – in the form of President Donald Trump’s desperate “life or death” bid for a second term in office. Starting in 2019, President Trump made Hunter Biden front and center of a cynical campaign to discredit his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, who was Mr. Trump’s opponent in the matchup.
Hunter’s foreign business activities with Burisma in Ukraine and CEFC China Energy in China ultimately became political fodder for a Trump campaign seeking to derail Joe Biden. Along the path, Trump lackey, Rudy Giuliani, committed the most egregious acts of engaging foreign entities and personalities in a hacking and disinformation campaign against Hunter Biden because they smelled a rat – a story yet to be fully told or prosecuted.
All of this was happening while Hunter Biden was still battling a lifelong addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine.
Hunter Biden – the “Blacksheep?”
It cannot be easy being the son of one of America’s most prolific senators who is a scion of the institution. Following in his footsteps must have been part of the burden for his sons. I grew up seeing Joe Biden on television. Over the years, listening to him talk about any variety of subjects, you got the feeling he’d been in the Senate at the time of signing the “Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.”
Modest and bonhomie, Joe Biden was, nonetheless, a driven and ambitious politician with a trajectory to the Oval Office – where he sits today. I believe his first run for the presidency was 1988 – the same year Hunter admits to first buying crack. Whatever benefits and legacies there are to be accrued to politicians’ children, they seem to have accrued to Hunter’s brother Beau Biden, while Hunter seemed to have borne the burdens.
Joe Biden – the Powerful Father
In an unprecedented March 2021 interview with “ABC News,” addressing Russian meddling in the American elections, President Joe Biden, shockingly, called Russian President Vladimir Putin a killer. It was the condemnation heard around the world – the contours of which must have been pre-discussed between ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos and President Biden’s handlers.
Let’s face it. It is a breach of professional protocol to “lead” a Head-of-State into calling another a killer. In the old days, that was cause for declarations of war. President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the Evil Empire. Still, even he, the dogged conservative hawk, was always affable and diplomatic. This was Reagan at his best, joking while testing a microphone in 1984, “My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” But Ronald Reagan would never have so personalized the vitriol to call a Soviet-era leader a killer.
While the interview focused on Russian election meddling and other issues of democracy, including Russia’s arrest and imprisonment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, thoughtful observers could have seen something else in Biden’s responses: a father’s pain. It was about his son, Hunter Biden.
If the real world were like on TV, we might call on comedy duo “Key & Peele’s” anger translator, Luther, to tell us what Biden was really saying.
George Stephanopoulos: You know Vladimir Putin. You think he’s a killer? President Biden: Mh hmm, I do. Luther: That bastard. He almost killed my son trying to keep his boy Trump in power. George Stephanopoulos: So what price must he pay? President Biden: The price he’s going to pay, well, you’ll see shortly. Luther: I’m gonna kick the sh*t outta him for f*cking with my boy.
Never mind that the cunning Vladster shot back, saying, “It takes one to know one.” Calling President Putin a killer had less to do with Russian-sanctioned killings and more to do with Russian-sanctioned Trump pillaging of Hunter Biden. For President Joe Biden, it is personal with the Russian leader. Don’t look for the usual pleasantries from Washington to Moscow anytime soon.
The way President Biden sees it, President Putin had spent two years all but arming President Trump with pipe, stem, and the substance to destroy Hunter Biden. The crass Donald Trump Jr., who has never missed an opportunity to show the Trump gene-pool degradation, once famously tweeted a picture of a crack pipe – targeting private citizen Hunter Biden.
As President Donald Trump touted Hunter Biden’s drug-related military discharge at campaign rallies, the struggling son must have been further devastated to see his demons threatening to derail father Joe Biden’s ultimate political gambit. It was nothing less than brutal and might have likely triggered further relapses to his drugs and alcohol – his usual refuge. No, President Trump and his surrogates were not Hunter’s dealers, but their actions had plunged a man deep in the throes of battling his addiction even deeper into the abyss.
Hunter Biden’s Demons
Deep down, Hunter Biden’s story is the story of a 1972 car crash that killed his mother and baby sister and injured Hunter and his big brother Beau. The two boys had woken up next to each other in a hospital, and the shared experience of the huge loss then bound a lifetime of closeness as if they were fraternal twins.
The story is also about the sudden 2015 death of his idolized big brother Beau Biden, although it was not always easy being Beau Biden’s little brother. While Beau was popular, smart, and president of his high school class each year, Hunter was changing schools, trying to find his place. He drank and drugged his way through Georgetown University and got into Yale Law School on a second try after adding a poem to his application. But he had also scored a whopping 172 on his LSAT (99th percentile).
The irony here is that, while on the campaign trail, President Trump routinely touted his and his children’s brilliance and high IQs while deriding Hunter Biden as a loser. But there is no evidence in the public record of Mr. Trump’s or his children (barring the young Tiffany) having kind of stellar academic records comparable to Hunter Biden’s.
Where Hunter had struggled with his addictions in Beau’s shadows for years, Beau’s sudden death plunged him into open embrace of the “Fredo” role in the Biden family. Losing his brother Beau – his pillar of support – Hunter lost the strength, and his demons overwhelmed him.
Substance Abuse
I have not yet received my copy of Hunter Biden’s book so the citations here come from the reporting of others who have reviewed it. But as with many across the country, having known my share of 80s-era crack casualties among schoolmates and friends, I immediately identified.
Neuroscientists have pointed us to the reason cocaine is the drug of choice for the masses. In lab rats, it has been shown to light up the reward center of the brain. Rats chose cocaine over food. In brain terms, cocaine usage is Christmas time. I am talking about powdered cocaine here. Crack cocaine, on the other hand, is something entirely different. It turns the brains into a solar power plant, for which it is the sun’s rays.
For Hunter Biden, it’s an addiction that has cost him dearly. On hearing his side of the story, you’re left wondering, Which Hunter are we talking about – Hunter Biden or Hunter Thompson? Forget the “Fear” and drop “Las Vegas.” Hunter Biden’s was just “Loathing in Delaware and D.C.”
At age 18, he bought his first rock of crack cocaine in a public square in downtown Washington. He drank throughout his time in college and law school and started his rehab stint, from the US to Mexico, in his early 30s, which enabled brief periods of sobriety. But with each relapse, his dependency became more pronounced. It’s a familiar story that treatment professionals have heard for decades. Relapses are somewhat of a dependency mutation – they go deeper and are more intense.
Hunter writes that “I’ve been so desperate for a drink that I couldn’t make the one-block walk between a liquor store and my apartment without uncapping the bottle to take a swig… I could always drink five times as much as anyone.”
He lost his wife and custody of his children. He became the albatross lodged at the neck of his aging and political father. The son of one of the most senior United States politicians and statesmen (who would become president) descended the dark paths of Los Angeles among criminals, addicts, and drug dealers to satisfy his bourgeoning cocaine desires.
In the last few years, his cocaine indulging took him from D.C. to Hollywood even while his father was either vice president or a candidate for president, and his conduct reflected it. Driving while drunk or high was routine. The binge conduct while out of his mind became par for the course. After disputing fathering a child (with good reason), DNA evidence proved that he was the father. But here is the kicker: Hunter Biden says that he does not even remember having met the mother.
I’ll give you the ten-thousand-feet gist of the possibilities here. It’s the usual insult of the century back in college – by both men and women, but primarily by women: He was so bad in bed, I don’t even recall having sex with him. But in reality, a neurological malfunction driven by trauma or substance does indeed trigger episodic memory loss.
In aggregate, there are two types of memory – implicit (getting in your vehicle and driving it) and explicit (describing to someone your first experience driving a car or the fun you had telling off an asshole in the streets last month).
According to Dr. Daniel Siegel, neurologist, and author of “Mindsight,” our brains treat these two types of memories differently for our everyday functioning. The brain area that looks like a seahorse, ridiculously named the hippocampus, actually tags memory for later recollection into our awareness and stores it as explicit memory.
But implicit memory is experienced in our consciousness, reactivated contemporaneously. It is not tagged and stored by the strange-looking seahorse part of our brain because it needs no recall. It’s just activated each time we get into the car and drive like Mario Andretti. A driver’s license road test is an implicit memory test. The written test you do to get your permit is an explicit memory test.
How is this relevant to the accidental parent, Hunter Biden? Well, it’s usually called a blackout, but more extensively, it can be a complete “whiteout.” The hippocampus shuts down, and his explicit memory (episode and time of the engagement) was not tagged and appropriately stored.
Alcohol and drugs are atop the list of things that trigger hippocampus malfunction – thus a “whiteout” of entire episodes in our lives. Anger, rage, and the shock of traumatic experiences (military theatre) are other causes, but this often leads to a mixed bag where untagged explicit memory gets jumbled into implicit – the general source of PTSD.
That Hunter has no recollection of meeting and sleeping with his child’s mother, TV and print personalities might have a field day with this – believing that he is lying. But he may be telling the truth. This is part and parcel of the complicated life of the unfortunate Hunter Biden.
“Beautiful Things: A Memoir”
Ron Elving over at NPR Book Reviews describes it this way: “Readers who make it all the way through may feel they have completed something of a 12-step rehab program themselves. The details at times make one feel exposed to something like degradation porn.”
Well, “degradation porn” is the language of redundancy, and who can deny that Hunter Biden has in many ways been America’s Mr. Redundant man? The marketers at the publishing house likely pushed him for candidness (and salaciousness). Apparently, Hunter even wrote about cooking powdered cocaine into crack form in the kitchen – a thing I have witnessed at parties of friends in the mid-1980s. Some are dead, others in jail, and others are now successful members of the professional class. The latter, though, would hardly write a book about it because no one tells you about the porn they watch.
Discussing his book with “CBS This Morning,” Hunter told correspondent Anthony Mason of a tense confrontation at his father Joe Biden’s Wilmington home during the 2020 presidential campaign. After storming out of the house, only to be chased down the driveway by the 77-year-old presidential candidate, he said, “I tried to go to my car, and my girls literally blocked the door to my car and said: ‘Dad, Dad, please. You can’t. No, no.’ This was the hardest part of the book to write,” he said.
Dad “grabbed me — gave a bear hug, and he said — and just cried, and said — ‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. Please.'” On hearing his father’s pleas, he said, “I thought: ‘I need to figure out a way to tell him that I’m gonna do something so that I can go take another hit.’ It’s the only thing I could think. Literally. That’s how powerful. I don’t know of a force more powerful than my family’s love,” Hunter says, “except addiction.”
Now, imagine Joe Biden’s 2020 anguish. During a brutal political campaign amid the worst pandemic America has seen in nearly a century, the near-octogenarian had to worry not only about protecting his own health from Covid-19 but also his son’s – from alcohol and crack cocaine. Joe Biden had Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on his left, Trump on his right, and Hunter in the middle.
2020’s Most Non-Candidate
President Donald Trump ran an entire presidential campaign against Hunter Biden, at times activating crowds at his rallies to the call of, “Where’s Hunter?” Mr. Trump then blackmailed the Ukrainian government into digging up or inventing dirt on Hunter Biden at the pain of depriving desperately needed congressionally appropriated aid. For this, congress impeached the president – the first of two impeachments in his single term in office.
At the same time, President Trump’s lackey – former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani – was busy violating all notions of decency (and likely a plethora of federal laws) for the same purpose. He was inducing an odd lot of shady, discredited, and self-serving characters from Kyiv to Moscow and even Florida’s own “Lev” and “Igor” (Parnass and Fruman, respectively) to find dirt on Hunter Biden to sink Joe Biden.
Newspaper reporting of the plots, involvement, and investigations of the United States Justice Department and the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York involved a motley crew of Russian and Russian-backed Ukrainians leading Giuliani on the most fantastic voyage since Phileas Fogg. While Trump stayed home, his Jean Passepartout, Rudy Giuliani, traveled around Ukraine in under eighty days. Joe Biden was supposedly corrupt – because his son Hunter Biden worked for Burisma, and Rudy Giuliani would find the evidence to prove it.
Then in the weeks leading up to the election, there was the infamous case of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In October 2020, a laptop computer alleged to be Hunter’s found its way into the hands of Trump’s Passepartout. Supposedly, in April 2019, Hunter had dropped off the damaged Mac at The Mac Shop (repair shop) to recover information from the hard drive. He neither returned to the Mac Shop to retrieve his hard drive nor paid his invoice.
The laptop then mysteriously made its way from owner John Paul Mac Isaac’s shop to Rudy Giuliani’s hands. Rudy then took its contents to Fox News – America’s version of Stalin’s revisionist propaganda platform, for the right. But Fox News, whose primary defense against libel and defamation has, of late, been that its sirens are entertainers who no one in their right mind could believe, wouldn’t touch it – thought the laptop story too hot a potato. They demurred, so three weeks before the 2020 election, Rudy Giuliani took the story to the New York Post, where the story was published – by a writer who refused to put his name to the byline.
The laptop issue remains under investigation. Earlier this year, CNN reported that “federal authorities are now actively investigating the business dealings of Hunter Biden, a person with knowledge of the probe said. Federal prosecutors in Delaware, working with the IRS Criminal Investigation agency and the FBI, are taking overt steps such as issuing subpoenas and seeking interviews, the person with knowledge said.” Apparent they are investing whether “Hunter Biden and his associates violated tax and money laundering laws in business dealings in foreign countries, principally China.”
Hunter Biden then issued a statement acknowledging the probe. “I learned yesterday for the first time that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware advised my legal counsel, also yesterday, that they are investigating my tax affairs. I take this matter very seriously, but I am confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately, including with the benefit of professional tax advisors.”
Fast forward six months, and Hunter is on a media tour to promote his book, “Beautiful Things: A Memoir.” This week, in an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning,” he danced around the laptop issue, telling newswoman Tracy Smith, “There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was the — that it was Russian intelligence.”
Regardless of the laptop’s outcome, the 2020 story was that of the unnamed candidate – Hunter Biden. At no time was Hunter Biden a candidate for any elective office in the United States. Yet, the Trump campaign was determined to put him on the ballot.
L’Affaire Burisma
Hunter Biden is an attorney who has worked for MBNA, at the United States Department of Commerce, and as a lobbyist. In 2006, Republican president George W. Bush appointed him to the board of directors of Amtrak. He resigned in February 2009 after the inauguration of his father Joe Biden as vice president. Hunter resumed lobbying and was counsel at the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner LLP before joining the board of directors for the Ukrainian oil and gas firm Burisma Holdings, where he received a five-figure monthly salary.
Hunter Biden says that after vetting Burisma Holdings with a reputable U.S. law firm, he worked to help them comply with anti-corruption laws and related transparency demands from the U.S. and the European Union. While there, he worked on “transparency, corporate governance, international expansion, and other priorities.”
As this was while his father, Joe Biden, was vice president of the United States, the optics were terrible. During the first Trump impeachment, State Department staffers testified that some Obama administration officials had taken a dim view of Hunter’s Burisma employment. Clearly, for Hunter, it was an opportunity to make some big money. Where others might have quickly seen and jumped at the chance to pay-to-play, the crack-alcohol-infused Hunter Biden was the last to see the potential impact on his very public father.
Because Hunter Biden had no prior experience in the energy sector, it is also evident that Burisma had hired him because his father was the United States Vice President. In his book, Hunter even accepts that “There’s no question my last name was a coveted credential. That has always been the case. Do you think if any of the Trump children ever tried to get a job outside their father’s business that his name wouldn’t figure into the calculation? My response has always been to work harder so that my accomplishments stand on their own.”
But this is nothing new in D.C. or in any other major center of power like London or Brussels. Your paycheck and profile depend on who you know, not necessarily your resume. President Trump’s children are perfect examples. Their paychecks skyrocketed while their father was president.
Trump’s False Flag Operation
Hunter Biden’s dealings with Burisma and China became front and center of the narrative to link and paint then-presidential candidate Joe Biden as corrupt. In fact, From D.C. to Beijing to Kyiv, a business partner convicted for fraud (Devon Archer) formed part of President Trump’s narrative of corrupt citizen Hunter, and therefore, his father, Joe. A desperate Trump campaign used others as pawns (Tony Bobulinski) – parading them on FOX News, trying to link Joe Biden to various fraud schemes. This, despite Republican-led Senate committees and Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department having debunked the Joe-Biden-Is-Corrupt narrative.
A crucial part of President Trump’s stump speech floated between inflating Hunter’s pay and questioning his credentials to sit on Burisma’s board. Yet neither Donald Jr., Ivanka, nor Eric Trump possesses any discernible professional qualification, beyond the last name Trump, to have occupied the public stage they dominated during their father’s presidency.
During his administration, President Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner enjoyed positions, privileges, and national security access that Trump’s own Chief of Staff, John Kelley, and the national security apparatus had opposed (rejection of security clearance). But as Mary Trump explains of her uncle; his best offense is projection. He is quick to attack others with his weaknesses.
And who can forget the national embarrassment of Ivanka Trump’s craven appearance at the July 2017 G20 session in Hamburg? Lacking all diplomatic credentials and required qualifications, she sat around the table with China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Germany’s Angela Merkel, and Britain’s Theresa May during a meeting on African migration and health. One official at the session told the Bloomberg news agency she had taken her father’s place on at least two occasions on the Saturday sessions but had not spoken. The world laughed in disgust at the president and his daughter for their nepotism, ineptitude, and lack of decorum.
So, in seeking to discredit his opponent Joe Biden, President Trump and his campaign set their eyes on Hunter Biden’s work in previous years. Official campaign platform morphed into running against Hunter Biden, not his father, Joe. Hunter loomed even larger than his father in the first presidential debate, prompting Joe Biden to remind President Trump that “I’m the one here.” Joe was the one Trump was running against, not Hunter.
In the end, Congress first impeached President Trump for his obsession with Hunter Biden. Trump was then kicked out of office and impeached a second time for his efforts to deny Joe Biden’s certification as the victor in the 2020 election.
After all of this, there has been no evidence to suggest that Joe Biden intervened to protect his son Hunter or leveraged his official position to enrich his son. But Hunter Biden’s weakness was evident, and President Trump and Rudy Giuliani had smelled blood in the streets. So both went shopping for Hunter real estate.
Incorruptible Joe Biden
There were reports around the time of Beau Biden’s 2015 death that Vice President Biden had revealed that President Obama had offered to lend him money to help out with expenses driven by medical costs. Ignore for a moment the evident irony of the “benign” duo atop the leadership pyramid reacting to medical costs that were crippling one – an unthinkable situation in any other developed western country.
It is testament to Joe Biden’s then over four decades as a true public servant living off his congressional paycheck. Joe wasn’t in it for the money. He didn’t spend his time in congress building a stock portfolio on privileged information. Further, it has been reported that Joe, aware of problem drinkers in his family lineage, steered clear of drinking. In other words, the man has spent his entire life as a “cool square.”
That didn’t stop the Trump campaign from alleging that as vice president (2008-2016), Joe Biden withheld loan guarantees to Ukraine to pressure its president into firing a prosecutor who was conducting a corruption investigation into Burisma. In order words, then-Vice President Biden brought the weight of the United States government down on a struggling democracy to his son Hunter.
Corruptible Prosecutor-General
The precise opposite was true. Vice President Joe Biden had indeed conditioned the release of $1 billion in US government aid on a requirement that Ukraine fires its prosecutor general. But this was the official and bipartisan United States government policy in conjunction with the European Union, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.
Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin, a loyalist of then-Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, was seen as corrupt and ineffective. Many believed he was too lenient in investigating corruption. He had failed to launch a serious investigation into the country’s corrupt oligarchs’ affairs, including Burisma’s founder Mykola Zlochevsky. After an investigation into extortion of another company found associates in possession of diamonds, cash, other valuables, and documents, including Shokin’s passports, the Ukrainian Parliament voted overwhelmingly for his ouster in March 2016.
President Trump’s claims, long suspected to be Russian-sponsored disinformation, was finally confirmed as such in a March 2021 United States intelligence assessment. According to the report, Russian intelligence proxies laundered misleading and unsubstantiated stories about the Bidens to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration. The latter ran with it and was impeached for it.
Weaponization of the Disfavored
In America, the ruling class codifies the disfavored (poor, minority classes – race, gender, religion, sex, and so forth) out of society with laws that weaponize their condition against them. So, politicians of all stripes – left and right, black and white – often seek election and re-election on strong “law and order” or “tough on crime” bona fides.
Drug use – the scourge of the black community – was weaponized through the criminalization and degradation of black America. Then came the opioid crisis of the last two decades that crushed white America and society had a change of heart. Now, it rightfully views addiction as an illness with varying levels of social empathy and sensitivities accorded.
1994 Clinton Crime Bill
The “1994 Clinton Crime Bill” was one such example. The face of crime shown on TV was largely poor and black. Democrats, trying to usurp Republican ownership of the “tough on crime” narrative, were largely indifferent to the bulldozer they were about to drive through black America.
Among the Crime Bill’s goodies were the “Violence Against Women Act,” the 10-year assault weapons ban, and firearm background checks. But more widely, the legislation decimated communities of color, where crack cocaine use – Hunter Biden’s bête noir – was prevalent.
It militarized police departments across the land that viewed the “war on drugs” literally, targeting minority communities as enemy combatants in the streets of America. Its “three-strikes” provision mandated up to life sentences for repeat offenders – even for minor offenses. This escalated prison population and activists now assert that it codified mass incarceration as political policy in America.
Writer Michelle Alexander wrote a book, “The New Jim Crow” detailing the Crime Bill’s horror unleashed on black America. Black men and women (parents, spouses, breadwinners and heads of families, caretakers, and so on) permanently disappeared from communities – as if they had never existed in the first place.
Hunter Biden’s father, Senator Joseph R. Biden had drafted the Senate version of the Crime Bill in cooperation with the National Association of Police Officers.
We can take them at their word when many politicians tell us that they could not have imagined the Crime Bill’s wider impact on black America because among the bill’s supporters were many African-American Democrats. But in launching his presidential bid in 2008, Senator Biden was still enough toned deaf to pain his bill had caused that he touted the 1994 Crime Bill on his campaign website as the “Biden Crime Law.” He bragged that it encouraged states to effectively increase their prison sentences by paying them to build more prisons.
And this is where Hunter Biden’s story gets interesting.
“100-to-One” Sentencing Disparity
In 1986, the infamous “100-to-One” sentencing disparity became law. It treated crack cocaine (used by blacks) 100 times as seriously as the same amount of powdered cocaine (used by affluent whites). The 1994 Crime Bill had instructed the US Sentencing Commission to study the subject and adjust federal sentencing guidelines as it saw fit.
The Sentencing Commission recommended against the “100-to-One” standard, citing, “The 100-to-One crack cocaine to powder cocaine quantity ratio is a primary cause of the growing disparity between sentences for black and white federal defendants.” But by the time of the report, Newt Gingrich and his merry Republicans had swept into power. They passed a bill explicitly overturning the Sentencing Commission’s decision, codifying the “100-to-One” disparity in federal law. They sent it to President Bill Clinton to sign.
As the bill went through Congress, President Bill Clinton gave a “heartfelt” speech deploring the mass incarceration of black Americans. “Blacks are right to think something is terribly wrong,” he said, “… when there are more African American men in our correction system than in our colleges; when almost one in three African American men, in their twenties, are either in jail, on parole, or otherwise under the supervision of the criminal system. Nearly one in three.”
Living up to his reputation as “Slick Willy,” President Clinton signed the “100-to-One” crack versus powdered cocaine sentencing disparity into federal law two weeks later. It was now part of the wholesome “1994 Clinton Crime Bill.” Crack users, predominantly African Americans (and whites like Hunter Biden), would be sentenced a hundred times more severely than affluent, primarily white, users of powdered cocaine.
The “At-Risk Son”
In the movie Traffic,” Michael Douglas’ character, conservative and ambitious Ohio judge Robert Wakefield was appointed to head the President’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, with the title drug czar. His predecessor and others warned him that the War on Drugs was unwinnable. Still, judge Wakefield was undaunted – that is… until he discovered his honors student teenage daughter Caroline was a junkie.
In the years that Hunter Biden struggled with his crack addiction, his father’s legislative efforts had sent tens of thousands of Americans – primarily black and brown – away to prison for the same affliction as Hunter. Like the fictional judge Wakefield, Joe Biden remained proud and resolute for his legislation that, unknowingly, had placed his son Hunter in the crosshairs of the “100-to-One” sentencing disparity. This could have sent Hunter Biden away for life or for long stretches in jail for his relapses and repeated crack cocaine use.
Who can disbelieve Joe Biden now when he apologizes for the detrimental parts of the 1994 Clinton Crime Bill?
New Beginnings
It is a new beginning for Hunter. Father Joe Biden has triumphed his opponents’ politicization of his son’s illness, and he now sits in the White House. This likely brought Hunter some solace or at least removed the guilt that could have triggered yet another relapse.
If we are to believe Hunter Biden, it seems that love conquers all – that of his family and his new wife. In the spring of 2019, Hunter met his current wife Melissa, a South African filmmaker and activist. She helped him get it together – to get his life under control. The man who drank and smoked crack since his late teens stopped doing both. He and his wife share a son, Beau Biden II – named after his brother, who died of a brain tumor in 2015.
In the end, Hunter has found a way to keep Beau alive, but Hunter Biden will now have to make do with Hunter Biden – the consequences of an adulthood spent in addiction. In a second act, as the keeper of Beau, as the reluctant prince of clan Biden, the awkward inheritor of the legacy, and keeper of the promise to his wife, challenges still lie ahead. Quitting drugs and alcohol is the first step – a prospective one. Reversing or even mitigating the damage done to health over the years is quite another.
Note: I deliberately use the term "junkie" here because I have lost friends to crack cocaine and prior to death, that is precisely what they had become. I think it's inappropriate to apply politically correct euphemisms that reduce the impact of describing what a hard drug like crack cocaine does to do people.
