He endured “Where’s Hunter?” chants during the 2020 campaign, and looked on as he became a focal point of presidential debates. He saw a member of Congress display nude photos of him during a congressional hearing. In a courtroom, he listened to testimony from ex-lovers as they recounted his various misdeeds.
Now Hunter Biden hopes the worst of it is behind him.
“Let’s move on,” his lawyer Abbe Lowell said Thursday afternoon, summing up the sentiment of Hunter and those close to him.
Hunter Biden has spent years in the spotlight, the subject of mocking tabloid headlines and humiliating cable news coverage. His personal and legal problems have cast a shadow over the presidency of his father, Joe Biden. Now that the president has ended his reelection bid and Hunter has sidestepped a second trial, a persistent subplot of the Biden era is nearing its end, although sentencing and a possible pardon remain.
Part of Hunter Biden’s recovery from his serious drug addiction has involved admitting past faults and attempting to make amends to those he has wronged. Thursday marked a culmination of that process when nine charges related to his failure to pay his taxes on time were read aloud in federal court and he was asked how he pleaded.
“Guilty,” he said. “Guilty.” “Guilty.” “Guilty.” “Guilty.” “Guilty.” “Guilty.” “Guilty.” “Guilty.”
It was a dramatic conclusion to years of legal problems that Hunter Biden has attempted to resolve in myriad ways. In June 2023, he settled a long-standing child support dispute with an Arkansas woman who is the mother of one of his children. Two months later he entered a plea agreement with federal prosecutors, only to see it collapse under questioning from a judge. He would have avoided jail time under that agreement, but when it dissolved federal prosecutors pursued two criminal cases against him.
In the first, Hunter Biden was found guilty. In the second, he pleaded guilty this week.
He is now facing the possibility of significant jail time for each conviction. Even as the White House has repeatedly said it is off the table, there will be looming questions over whether the president will reverse course and pardon his son during his remaining months in office.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has said multiple times that Biden will not pardon Hunter, and it is a point of pride with the president that he has not interfered in the justice system. But Biden is also fiercely protective of his son, and many in the Bidens’ circle believe prosecutors would never have gone after Hunter so aggressively if his father were not the president.
The complex relationship between father and son has been one of the consistent through lines of Biden’s presidency. When the former vice president announced he was running, in May 2019, Hunter was in the depths of his addiction. During the campaign, Hunter was often seen as a liability and became a frequent way that Donald Trump attacked his opponent.
When Biden entered the White House, Hunter initially kept a low profile, hesitant to fuel Republican attacks. He later wrote a book about his addiction and eventually adopted a more combative role, even appearing outside the U.S. Capitol to chide Republicans for their investigation into his family.
Since those early months, Hunter has become a more frequent presence at the White House, traveling with his father to Ireland, standing on the balcony during July Fourth fireworks and attending state dinners. He also played a vital role in the aftermath of the June 27 presidential debate, when the president’s poor performance prompted calls for him to exit the race. Hunter vociferously defended his father’s initial decision to stay in the race — then stood in the background as he delivered an Oval Office address explaining his decision to withdraw.
During that turbulent period, Hunter was preparing for his second trial, on tax evasion charges, that was scheduled to start Sept. 5.
Those close to Hunter Biden say his team gradually came to the conclusion that he should plead guilty as they saw indications that a trial was unlikely to go their way. The judge had already ruled that defense lawyers could not tell the jury that Hunter eventually did pay his taxes, albeit late. The judge also nixed defense plans to discuss what it said were the root causes of Hunter Biden’s addiction, such as the early death of his mother.
Overall, the defense lawyers concluded that their ability to humanize him in front of a jury had been sharply curtailed, while the prosecutors would be free to emphasize Hunter’s spending on drugs, prostitutes, and high-end hotels while he was not paying taxes.
But the chief motivation for his guilty plea may have been the toll a trial would take on his family. “How can I end this?” he would ask, according to a person close to him, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. “I have to be able to move on, and protect my family.”
His June trial in Delaware for lying on a gun-purchase form was more traumatic than he had realized it would be, Hunter said in a statement. During that trial, his legal team called his daughter Naomi to testify about reconciling with him, but when prosecutors cross-examined her she struggled under withering questions about her father’s neglect, his drug use and even whether Naomi herself had used drugs. She wiped a tear from her eye as she left the witness stand.
Prosecutors had indicated that Naomi and other members of the Biden family could be called to testify again in the California tax evasion trial.
“I will not subject my family to more pain, more invasions of privacy and needless embarrassment,” Hunter said in the statement. “For all I have put them through over the years, I can spare them this, and so I have decided to plead guilty.”
In Hunter Biden’s past, it has often been others who have sacrificed or paid for his behavior. His father helped stage an intervention of sorts, only to be turned away. His uncle flew to Los Angeles to pull him out of a hotel room and check him into rehab. His daughters found evidence that he was cheating on their mother with their aunt.
This time was a rare occurrence when Hunter could be the protector. He could prevent a trial from unfolding in the final months of his father’s half-century political career. He could spare his family the testimony in a courtroom about the darkest chapters of his life.
“I have been clean and sober for more than five years now because I have had the love and support of my family,” he said in the statement. “I can never repay them for showing up for me and helping me through my worst moments. But I can protect them from being publicly humiliated for my failures.”
The closeness of the Biden family, and the bond between father and son, is one reason some close to Hunter are hopeful the president will pardon him. “My dad used to have an expression,” Joe Biden said during the Democratic National Convention last month, as Hunter looked on from backstage. “He’d say, ‘Joey, family is the beginning, the middle and the end.’”
While a pardon would mark a significant reversal, it could come during a lame-duck period when the president’s political career would be concluding. Hunter Biden’s sentencing for the Delaware conviction is scheduled for Nov. 13, a week after Election Day. The sentencing for the California case is slated for Dec. 16, five weeks before Joe Biden leaves office.
White House officials declined to comment about Hunter Biden’s guilty plea. “He is a private citizen. This is his decision to make,” Jean-Pierre told reporters on Friday. “I’m just not going to comment on the last 24 hours.”
She also would not discuss how the president reacted to the plea, although in the past he has attempted to quickly put problematic issues behind him.
When news broke years ago that Hunter had been discharged from the Navy Reserve because of cocaine use, for example, his father responded with a quick message to his family. “Good as it could be,” Joe Biden wrote in an email verified by The Washington Post. “Time to move on. Love Dad.”
Hunter Biden himself has mused in the past on the added pressures faced by a president’s family.
“Every presidents family is held to a higher standard [and] is a target. It’s the price of being the most powerful group of people in the world,” he wrote in 2019 to Devon Archer, a friend and business associate upset that he was not being protected by the Bidens from legal trouble. “It’s why our democracy remains viable. It’s unfair at times but in the end the system of justice usually works and like you we are redeemed and the truth prevails. The unfairness to us allows for the greater good.”
Among those on Hunter’s team, there was a sense of relief after the court proceedings Thursday when he left holding hands with his wife, Melissa.
“This was him taking accountability for actions during his addiction that he’s tried to make amends on over and over,” said one person close to him, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private sentiments. “It’s moving on from having to relive this, to listen to this in court or have it play on Fox News, and constantly having to relive these moments in his life. There is a closure to all of those pieces.”