Hunter Biden’s interview with CBS This Morning aired on Monday
Hunter Biden said he was smoking crack ‘around the clock’ and drinking a quart of vodka every day at the lowest points of his drug addiction which he says stems from the death of his mother and sister when he was two.
The President’s son discussed his drug addiction with CBS This Morning as part of a long, two-part interview to promote his new memoir, Beautiful Things. The most recent portion of the interview aired on Monday morning.
He also spoke about his controversial affair with his late brother Beau’s widow, Hallie, and how the pair of them thought their shared love and grief would ‘bring him back’ but that it ‘didn’t work’.
Hunter, 51, also described meeting his current wife, Melissa, and marrying her within seven days of their first date. He says she is a ‘miracle’ and that she saved his life.
He claims to have been sober for seven years, from 2008 until 2015, after battling drug and alcohol addiction his entire life. His brother Beau’s death in 2015, he says, sent him hurtling back into addiction.
It all comes from an unresolved feeling of ‘not fitting in’, he said, that he thinks is from the trauma of losing his mom, Neilia, and sister Naomi, in a car crash when he was two in 1972. Hunter and Beau both survived the accident.
‘I am more convinced now that trauma is at the center of it. I don’t know why I had such a hard time ever admitting that. There’s a lot of research that points to the idea that addicts who suffer from addiction suffered from trauma.
‘Beau and I never grieved the loss of our mother and sister. We talked about my mom all the time, but the accident no. The darkness that I know my dad suffered isn’t something we talked about until much later. This is why I don’t want to admit… we probably should have. I think they were trying to protect us,’ he said.
As a young adult, he said he slipped into a period that was a ‘blur of complete debauchery’.
‘Drinking a quart of vodka a day by yourself is absolutely completely debilitating… smoking crack around the clock, drinking insanely lethal amounts of alcohol,’ he said.
Photos of Hunter that were discovered on the laptop that was handed into a Delaware computer repair store last year. He says he was so hooked on drugs and alcohol at the time that he doesn’t know if the laptop is even his
Photos of Hunter that were discovered on the laptop that was handed into a Delaware computer repair store last year. He says he was so hooked on drugs and alcohol at the time that he doesn’t know if the laptop is even his
He said becoming a laughing stock of the Trump campaign and liability to his father’s campaign did nothing to stop his addiction.
‘It didn’t change my behavior – I still needed to get high and hide and fill that hole,’ he said.
Last year, his father and stepmother, Jill, staged an intervention. Jill pretended that Joe was desperate to see him, he said, and called him to the family home in Wilmington.
‘My mom said he missed me, “dad really needs you.” I walk in and there are my three girls, niece and nephew, mom and dad and two counselors from a rehab center I have been to before. I looked and said not a chance. I exploded. I literally began to run up the driveway.’
In a previously teased clip of the interview, Hunter said Joe chased him, grabbed him into a bear hug, and begged him to stay.
Hunter was just two when his mother Neilia and baby sister Naomi died in a car crash in 1972. He is shown, far left, with his family. The crash happened later that year
Hunter with his sister Ashley and brother Beau in 2012. He says the pair never dealt with the grief and trauma of losing their mom and sister
Hunter and his brother’s widow Hallie had a two year affair after Beau’s death
In the interview, Hunter also talked about his controversial relationship with his brother Beau’s widow, Hallie. The pair dated for two years, after Hunter’s marriage to his wife Kathleen broke down.
It ended around the same time he met Melissa, his current wife, and after he impregnated a stripper in Arkansas, with whom he now has a baby son.
‘Both of us had gone through the most incredibly painful loss and it was out of love. I thought maybe that love would bring my brother back. It didn’t work,’ he said.
Asked how he told his children about the relationship with Hallie, he said: ‘It was hard. It was really hard.’
‘The hardest amends to make was to my brother. I made a promise to him that I would be OK,’ he said.
He met Melissa on a blind date and married her seven days later. He said he told her within an hour that he was a crack addict and that she put a stop to it.
‘I told her an hour later, I’m a crack addict. She said well that ends now. I knew it was my last chance,’ he said.
They now have a baby son, Beau Biden Jr.
Hunter said that he was so addicted to drugs that he was not ‘keeping tabs on possessions’ like the laptop that was handed in to a computer repair store in Wilmington, Delaware, last year and contained incriminating photos of him drunk and high.
It also contained emails between him and a Ukrainian businessman that suggested Joe had met the businessman when he was Vice President.
‘You don’t need the laptop, you’ve got a book it’s all in the book – the serious answer is i don’t know not that i remember. Whether or not somebody has my laptop, mine was hacked, exists a laptop at all – I truly don’t know.
‘Read the book and you’ll realize I wasn’t keeping tabs on possessions very well for the last four years or so,’ he said.
In 2018, while dating Hallie and hooked on drugs, Hallie confiscate a gun he’d bought and threw it in a trash can outside a grocery store in Wilmington.
The Secret Service got involved in trying to retrieve it, and they even asked owner of the gun store where Hunter had bought it for the deed which proved his ownership of it, according to Politico.
Hunter said Hallie was trying to make sure he didn’t hurt himself.
‘It’s a concern that I would hurt myself or do something. She was just concerned about me.
‘Again, the period of my life that was difficult, I don’t know. Hallie’s intent was to make certain that I didn’t do anything to hurt myself. We knew the gun was lost, Hallie had thrown it into a trash can I told her you can’t do that… someone had gone through the trash.
‘That was the end of the story. I had no idea [that the Secret Service was involved] why they would be – I don’t think that’s true,’ he said.
He added that he will cooperate ‘fully’ with an ongoing investigation into his taxes and that while he never did anything wrong by serving on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma, he wouldn’t do it again.
He added that he never gave his father a ‘nickel’ from his foreign business dealings and that he underestimated the extent to which the Trumps would criticize them.
