Month: June 2022

The book published on Tuesday by Kathleen Buhle dovetails with details of Hunter Biden’s life laid bare in his own autobiography last year, painting a picture of a troubled man.

A target of scrutiny by the Republican party since the last presidential campaign, Hunter has been under federal investigation over potential violations of tax and money laundering laws since 2018.

Former President Donald Trump and his allies have alleged that the 52-year-old’s foreign business dealings – particularly in China and Ukraine – indicate a pattern of corruption.

While Hunter publicly admits he has done regrettable things, both he and the president have denied he has broken any laws.

The younger Mr Biden does not hold any position in government and the White House has said it will not get involved in what it calls a private legal matter.

And President Biden, who has long said he is “deeply proud” of his son, has stood by him through his public and private struggles.

So who is Hunter Biden?

Born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1970 to President Biden and his first wife Neilia Biden, Hunter was given his mother’s maiden name.

He was only two years old in December 1972 – one week from Christmas and less than six weeks after his father’s election to the US Senate – when a truck rammed into the family car and took the lives of his mother and his sister Naomi.

The accident left him with a fractured skull and his older brother Beau with a broken leg. The elder Mr Biden – who was not in the car – took his oath of office from their hospital room.

Hunter later attended Georgetown University and Yale Law School, graduating in 1996.

Between the two degrees, he joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, a Catholic group that volunteers to serve marginalised communities.

There, he met his first wife, Kathleen Buhle, a lawyer, and they wed in 1993.

They have three children – Naomi, Finnegan and Maisy – but the pair split in 2017.

His father is teetotal, but Hunter started drinking as a teenager and confessed to abusing cocaine as a college student.

He has been in and out of rehab.

In 2013, he signed up for the US Navy Reserves and took the oath of office before his father – then the vice-president – in a White House ceremony. On his very first day at the naval base, he tested positive for cocaine use and was discharged, something he later said he was “embarrassed” of.

According to the New Yorker, he drank excessively after the death of his older brother, Beau, from brain cancer in 2015, sometimes only leaving the house to buy vodka.

“He and Beau were one,” his daughter Naomi once wrote on Twitter. “One heart, one soul, one mind.”

During an acrimonious divorce filing in 2017, Ms Buhle accused Hunter of “spending extravagantly on his own interests (including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations) while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills”.

Breaking her silence this week on how their 24-year marriage unravelled, Ms Buhle told Good Morning America: “He was struggling under a massive drug addiction, and that’s heart-breaking and painful and that wasn’t who I was married to.”

In his 2021 memoir Beautiful Things, Hunter confesses that his infidelity to Ms Buhle was the final straw in their marriage.

A DNA test in 2019 found he was “the biological and legal father” of a child born to an exotic dancer, Lunden Alexis Roberts.

Hunter claimed to have “no recollection” of their encounter in his memoir. But he has settled a paternity suit with Ms Roberts and now pays her child support.

And before his split from Ms Buhle was finalised, Hunter began a relationship with his brother’s widow, Hallie Biden, for two years, bonding over the shared and “very specific grief” of their loss, he told the New Yorker.

Mere weeks later, Hunter wed South African filmmaker Melissa Cohen after a whirlwind six-day romance. They have one son.

Speaking out in 2019 on his struggle with addiction, he said: “You don’t get rid of it. You figure out how to deal with it”.

In Beautiful Things, he credits his survival to his family’s love, recounting an intervention when his father held him in an embrace, saying: “I don’t know what else to do. I’m so scared. Tell me what to do”.

The New York Times reported that he had turned to painting as a form of therapy, quoting him as saying that it “keeps me away from people and places where I shouldn’t be”.

But a 2021 art exhibition to sell his paintings – for up to $50,000 a piece – created an ethics dilemma for the Biden White House.

After graduating from Yale Law, Hunter worked at MBNA America, a bank holding company headquartered in Delaware and later acquired by Bank of America.

However, his father’s close relationship with the bank – one of the largest employers in Delaware and a top contributor to his political campaigns – earned him the unfavourable moniker of “the senator from MBNA”. As the younger Mr Biden rose to the rank of executive vice-president, his father pushed bankruptcy reform legislation favourable to the bank through the Senate.

In the early 2000s, while still receiving consulting fees from the bank, Hunter opened a Washington lobbying practice that – according to Politico Magazine – saw him land “clients with interests that overlapped with [his father’s] committee assignments and legislative priorities”.

The father-son relationship at the time, he told the New Yorker, was that neither would speak to the other about lobbying work. President Biden has maintained this to be true in the case of more recent allegations of wrongdoing as well.

In 2006, with then-Senator Biden set to re-assume chairmanship of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, his son and another relative made an ill-fated purchase of a hedge fund group, Paradigm Global Advisors.

Their tenure at Paradigm extended through Joe Biden’s 2008 run for president and selection as vice-president to President Barack Obama. During this time, the fund was connected with several alleged criminal frauds, including a Texas financier convicted of running one of the largest Ponzi schemes in US history. The Bidens denied any wrongdoing and faced no charges. In 2010, they liquidated the fund and returned money to investors.

Ex-President Trump and the Republican party have argued that foreign business dealings involving President Biden’s son were questionable and had conflicts of interest.

From 2013-16, he held a board seat at the Chinese private equity firm BHR Partners, first as an unpaid member and later owning a 10% equity stake in the fund.

Mr Trump, who has insisted Joe Biden is “China’s puppet”, repeatedly pointed to this position as alleged evidence of his rival’s corruption.

After his father left the White House in 2017, Hunter also partnered with Chinese billionaire Ye Jianming – an oil tycoon – on a natural gas project in Louisiana. The deal appears to have collapsed after Ye was detained by Chinese authorities on corruption charges and subsequently went missing.

But it has been business dealings in Ukraine that have stoked the most controversy.

In 2014, Hunter joined the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, where he was reportedly paid up to $50,000 (£38,000) per month.

At the time, his father was actively engaged in anti-corruption work in Ukraine. Vice-President Biden rallied other Western leaders to call for the firing of the country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who faced criticism for blocking corruption investigations.

Mr Shokin was removed by the Ukrainian parliament in 2016. Mr Trump and some of his allies have claimed he was ousted for investigating Burisma.

Allegations of corruption by the Bidens formed the centrepiece of the campaign to impeach President Trump in 2019, after he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a telephone call to investigate Hunter’s dealings with Burisma.

He has since resigned from the boards of both BHR Partners and Burisma Holdings.

During the 2020 election campaign, it emerged that a laptop the younger Mr Biden abandoned at a repair shop contained a 2015 email in which a Burisma adviser thanked him for the invitation to meet his father, then the US vice-president, in Washington DC.

Without providing evidence, the elder Mr Biden called the allegations a “smear campaign” engineered by Russian disinformation.

And though the email has since been authenticated, his representatives have repeatedly denied such a meeting ever took place, adding that Joe had never discussed going into business with his relatives.

The FBI reportedly seized the laptop from the repair shop and is inspecting its contents as part of the federal investigation into the president’s son.

An NBC News analysis concluded that Hunter’s firm brought in about $11m (£9.2m) through its work in Ukraine and China from 2013-18, including nearly $5m from the Louisiana gas venture alone.

It also reportedly revealed spending of more than $200,000 a month at one point on luxury hotel suites, sports car payments and cash withdrawals, among other expenditures.

Federal investigators in Delaware are now scrutinising his finances and foreign ties, and the first son – who denies any illegal activity – says he is “cooperating completely”.

“I’m absolutely certain, 100 percent certain, that at the end of the investigation, I will be cleared of any wrongdoing,” he told CBS News.

Congressional Republicans are looking into reports that a wealthy Hollywood lawyer has loaned $2m to help Hunter pay off his back taxes, reports CBS News.

Through it all, Hunter’s father has remained supportive, saying he was proud of his son and expected him to “emerge stronger” from the investigation.

It was one of many times President Biden has defended Hunter.

During a presidential debate in the last election, Mr Trump savaged his opponent: “Hunter got thrown out of the military, dishonourably discharged for cocaine use, and he didn’t have a job until you became vice-president”.

An emotional Joe Biden responded: “That is simply not true. My son – like a lot of people – had a drug problem. He’s fixed it and worked on it, and I’m proud of my son”.

Detective Eduardo Fontes said the man, Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira, took investigators to a site where human remains were dug up.

He said police would work with Interpol to confirm the bodies’ identities.

Mr Phillips, 57, and Mr Pereira, 41, disappeared in a remote part of the Amazon rainforest on 5 June.

Two suspects, brothers Amarildo and Oseney da Costa de Oliveira, have been arrested in connection with the case.

Detective Fontes told journalists the “first suspect” – Amarildo – had “recounted in detail the crime that was committed and indicated the place where he buried the bodies”. His brother denies any involvement.

Police said they expect to carry out further arrests, and the motive for the killings is under investigation.

Detective Eduardo Fontes said the suspect “pointed out the place where he buried the bodies”.

Mr Phillips’ wife, Alessandra Sampaio, said in a statement: “Although we are still awaiting definitive confirmations, this tragic outcome puts an end to the anguish of not knowing Dom and Bruno’s whereabouts. Now we can bring them home and say goodbye with love.

“Today, we also begin our quest for justice. I hope that the investigations exhaust all possibilities and bring definitive answers on all relevant details as soon as possible.”

She expressed her thanks to everyone involved in the search for her husband and Mr Pereira, “especially the indigenous peoples and Univaja”.

Univaja, the region’s indigenous association, was the first to alert authorities when the pair went missing.

The group expressed its “deep sadness” following the news conference.

It said of the men’s deaths: “Univaja understands their murder is a political crime, they were both human rights defenders and died doing work to look after us indigenous people from Vale do Javari.”

It was a hastily-organised press conference – after another day of rumours that the bodies had been found.

The federal police officer in charge of the investigation showed a map to the waiting media – explaining that the bodies were found 3.1km (1.9 miles) from the river, in the middle of the jungle – and that involved a huge amount of work to get to the location that the suspect had indicated.

There was a great deal of praise for the joined-up efforts of all the armed forces – patting themselves on the back after a huge amount of criticism at the start that they hadn’t mobilised quickly enough.

They also initially failed to praise the work of the indigenous communities who have been out searching since the men disappeared, and helped lead authorities to some of the their belongings found in the water. When asked by the BBC why there was no mention of the local communities helping, they admitted their support in working with the armed forces, with the head of the army in Amazonas explaining that many troops are indigenous in the force and that was crucial.

It might sound like a minor omission, but it reveals the divide between the bosses at the top here in the city – and the people living in these remote, difficult places.

Briton Mr Phillips had been living in Brazil for more than a decade and was a long-time contributor to the Guardian newspaper. He was working on a book about the Amazon.

Mr Pereira, a Brazilian who was on leave from his post with the government’s indigenous affairs agency Funai, was an expert on isolated tribes.

Days before Mr Phillips and Mr Pereira went missing, indigenous groups say Mr Pereira was threatened for campaigning against illegal fishing in the area.

Some of their belongings, including clothes and a laptop, were found on Sunday.

Angus Robertson said MSPs would be given a “route map to the referendum which we intend to hold next October” in the coming weeks.

It comes the day after the Scottish government published a paper setting out a “fresh” case for independence.

The UK government has said now is not the time for another vote.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has previously only said that she wants a referendum to be held before the end of next year – with a date in the autumn widely believed to be the most likely.

But Mr Robertson went further when he told the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland programme that the plan was to hold it in October 2023.

He insisted the timescale was realistic despite the government having not yet passed the legislation that would be needed.

It has also not yet formally asked the UK government to grant consent through what is known as a Section 30 order, or set out what it will do if that request is refused.

Mr Robertson said: “The first minister made clear yesterday she intends to make an announcement to the Scottish parliament in the forthcoming weeks about a route map towards a referendum, which we intend to hold next October.

“I am fully content with the prospectus beginning to be rolled out, with the announcements that will follow on the route map, about how that is going to be achieved, that we have a perfectly adequate window of opportunity both for legislation to be passed, for the opportunity for the people to scrutinise the prospectus the Scottish government will publish and also hold opponents to account.”

The Scottish government struck an agreement with the UK government ahead of the 2014 referendum which temporarily transferred the powers to hold the vote to Holyrood.

The UK government has repeatedly made clear that it will not do so again any time soon, with Ms Sturgeon saying on Tuesday she would soon make a “significant” announcement on what she will do if this stance does not change.

The SNP published an 11 point plan last year which said it could pass a bill in the Scottish Parliament even if it did not have an agreement with the UK government.

This would likely result in a legal battle between the two governments, with judges being asked to rule on whether or not Holyrood has the power to hold a legal referendum.

Even if the courts were to find in the Scottish government’s favour, opponents of independence could potentially boycott any referendum.

The SNP won the 2021 Holyrood election after making a promise to hold another referendum once the Covid crisis had abated in its manifesto.

Mr Robertson accused the UK government of “democracy denial”, and said he could see no reason for the UK government to deny a section 30 order, which he described as the “gold standard of holding a recognised, agreed, constitutional referendum.”

Mr Robertson added: “I’m not going to get into speculation of what happens a number of steps down the road, we still have the opportunity to secure a section 30 order.

“Scottish politics has a long history of UK governments going ‘no, no, no, yes’. That is what happened in the run-up to the referendum in 2014 and I still think we should work on the basis of the gold standard of democracy.”

Mr Robertson had been due to give a statement on the “benefits of independence” in the Scottish Parliament on Tuesday.

But the presiding officer refused to let him do so after accusing the Scottish government of disrespecting the parliament by giving details of its plans to the media before it had told MSPs.

A spokeswoman for the UK government said on Tuesday that “now is not the time to be talking about another referendum.”

She said the public expected both the Scottish and UK governments to work together to tackle the cost of living, protect energy security, and lead the international response against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

And Scottish Conservative MSP Craig Hoy said that the referendum could potentially be an “illegal vote”, if it was held without a section 30 order.

Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross told Channel 4 News on Tuesday that he would urge voters to boycott any “illegal referendum”.

The party’s chairman, Craig Hoy, told Good Morning Scotland that the vote would be illegal if it was held without a section 30 order.

He said: “This reckless push for another referendum will damage Scotland when all the focus should be on Covid recovery and the global cost-of-living crisis.

“The SNP are distracted by their obsession with independence once again. They’re focusing on the wrong priorities and setting back Scotland’s economy and public services as a result.”

He went on to state it was “a shameful dereliction of duty by the SNP government to focus on holding a referendum that the vast majority of Scottish people don’t want”.

Scottish Labour MSP Sarah Boyack accused Angus Robertson of “pie in the sky posturing”, and said the SNP was “plucking dates out of a hat for another divisive referendum” while some Scots faced the choice between heating and eating.

Meanwhile, a former advisor to both Nicola Sturgeon and her predecessor, Alex Salmond, has cast doubt on whether it would be possible to hold a referendum in the timescale put forward by Mr Robertson.

Campbell Gunn said: “We’re now 15, 16 months from when the referendum is likely to be held, we don’t have a section 30 order, it will probably end up in the courts.

“I just don’t see the timescale working for the SNP.”

The Scottish Parliament has already passed a Referendums Bill setting out some of the practicalities – like who can vote, how the count should be conducted and how the campaigns are regulated.

But a short bill setting out specific regulations, including the referendum date and question, would still need to be approved by MSPs.

The SNP has previously said it would like a six month gap between legislation passing and the vote taking place, so in theory there’s enough time for that.

The presiding officer of the Scottish Parliament has to rule on whether any legislation that’s brought forward is within Holyrood’s competence.

But there’s nothing to stop MSPs ignoring that ruling and debating and passing the legislation anyway.

However, any such bill would inevitably end up being challenged in the courts, taking the timetable out of the hands of politicians.

That didn’t happen last time because of the Edinburgh agreement, signed by then First Minister, Alex Salmond, and the then Prime Minister, David Cameron.

It granted a section 30 order, which temporarily transferred the powers to hold a referendum to the Scottish Parliament, putting the legality of the vote beyond doubt.

Any formal request for another section 30 order seems likely to be given short shrift by the UK government, which continues to argue that “now is not the time” for another referendum.

How the First Minister intends to navigate around that obstacle should become clear soon.

The SNP’s 11 point plan published last year suggested passing a bill and then vigorously opposing any legal challenge.

Nicola Sturgeon has said she will reveal a lawful way forward before Parliament’s summer recess.

There will be much interest in what she has to say.

Lord Geidt did not give a reason for leaving the role he took in April, but said it was the “right thing” to do.

His predecessor, Sir Alex Allan, quit in 2020 after Mr Johnson overruled him over a report into alleged bullying by Home Secretary Priti Patel.

The government said it was “surprised” by Lord Geidt’s decision.

“Whilst we are disappointed, we thank Lord Geidt for his public service,” a spokesperson added.

The spokesperson gave no reason for the resignation but said Lord Geidt had been asked this week “to provide advice on a commercially sensitive matter in the national interest, which has previously had cross-party support. No decision had been taken pending that advice”.

No 10 did not make it clear what these comments referred to.

A Downing Street source told the BBC that Lord Geidt’s resignation had been a “total surprise and a mystery” to the prime minister, adding: “Only on Monday Lord Geidt asked if he could stay on for six months.”

Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner said: “The prime minister has now driven both of his own handpicked ethics advisers to resign in despair.

“If even they can’t defend his conduct in office, how can anyone believe he is fit to govern?”

Liberal Democrat chief whip Wendy Chamberlain said: “When both of Boris Johnson’s own ethics advisers have quit, it is obvious that he is the one who needs to go.”

Former cabinet secretary Lord Turnbull said of Mr Johnson: “The pattern of behaviour is that anyone who has the power to criticise, obstruct or force him to change, he will try to reduce their power, suborn them or in the last resort wave them aside.”

But he told BBC Newsnight that “the charge sheet of Boris Johnson’s conduct is now so long that one accusation isn’t going to make any difference”, adding the prime minister would only leave office if he was removed as Tory leader by MPs.

It was reported that Lord Geidt had threatened to quit last month after the publication of the Sue Gray report into lockdown breaches in Downing Street unless Mr Johnson issued a public explanation for his conduct.

Appearing before a committee of MPs on Tuesday, Lord Geidt said: “Resignation is one of the rather blunt but few tools available to the adviser. I am glad that my frustrations were addressed in the way that they were.”

But, in a brief written statement on Wednesday, he said: “With regret, I feel that it is right that I am resigning from my post as independent adviser on ministers’ interests.”

On Wednesday evening, Lord Geidt phoned the prime minister’s principal private secretary to tell him he was resigning. Mr Johnson was informed of the decision at about 18:30 BST, shortly after finishing a phone call with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

But while the particular timing has surprised some in Downing Street, Lord Geidt’s discomfort in the job has been evident for a while.

Just last month he had said in a report that it was a legitimate question to ask if Boris Johnson had breached the ministerial code by breaking Covid laws.

Lord Geidt also spelled out in the report that he didn’t like the terms of his job – “the prevailing arrangements still remained insufficiently independent to be able to command the confidence of the public” as he put it.

But the truth is we don’t yet know definitively why Lord Geidt resigned, as his resignation letter has not been published – which itself is unconventional.

The prime minister is expected to write back to Lord Geidt on Thursday morning, and that reply may well be made public.

Mr Johnson was fined in April over a surprise birthday party in his honour that he attended in Downing Street in June 2020.

Writing to Lord Geidt afterwards, he said there had been “no intent” to break Covid regulations”, and that he had been “fully accountable to Parliament and the British people”.

The ministerial code, which outlines the rules government ministers must follow, says there is an “overarching duty” on them to comply with the law.

If the code is broken, the convention in Westminster is for a minister to resign.

In his annual report on ministers’ interests, published on 1 June, Lord Geidt said questions around Mr Johnson’s behaviour had led to an “impression… the prime minister may be unwilling to have his own conduct judged against” the ministerial code.

He said that, when it came to the Partygate fine, “a legitimate question has arisen as to whether those facts alone might have constituted a breach of the overarching duty within the ministerial code of complying with the law”.

Following Lord Geidt’s resignation, Tory MP William Wragg, whose Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee questioned the adviser on Tuesday, described him as “a person of great integrity, motivated by the highest ideals of public service”.

Mr Wragg, a critic of Mr Johnson, added: “For the PM to lose one adviser on ministers’ interests may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness.”