President Biden’s son Hunter Biden said Republicans are trying to use him to destroy his father’s presidency while speaking out during an interview about the attacks against him.
The younger Biden spoke to musician Moby on his podcast, “Moby Pod,” for an interview that came out just a day after he was charged with tax crimes in California in his second indictment.
“What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to kill me, knowing that it will be a pain greater than my father could be able to handle, and so therefore destroying a presidency in that way,” Hunter Biden said in the interview published Friday.
“I realized that, that it’s not about me. And then the second thing that I realized is that these people are just sad, very, very sick people that have most likely just faced traumas in their lives that they’ve decided that they are going to turn into an evil that they decide that they’re going to inflict on the rest of the world,” he added.
When Moby asked why he doesn’t defend himself more publicly, Hunter Biden said he was told it would only add fuel to the fire and to keep a low profile while he’s under investigation.
Now, he said, he’s speaking out to help people struggling with addiction.
The younger Biden also said “we’re definitely not in the aftermath yet” of the attacks against him as his father is still in office and running for a second term at the White House.
“I’ve stopped hoping for an end to this because as long as my dad is president of the United States, they’re not going to stop,” he said. He called it “a struggle” to maintain a “well ordered life” when he’s attacked daily.
He said right-wing media has “harassed” him and parked outside his family home in the past, including during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic when his son, Beau, was just 1 year old. Beau, named for his deceased uncle, is now 3 years old.
“We became prisoners by virtue of that,” Biden said.
Moby said at the top of his interview that Hunter is a “friend” and that they met through recovery.
President Biden’s son, in his second indictment from special counsel David Weiss, will face three felony tax charges in relation to tax evasion and filing a false return, as well as six misdemeanor charges for failure to pay taxes between 2016 and 2019.
The charges come as Biden is facing congressional scrutiny over his business dealings and a subpoena for a deposition next week in connection with their impeachment inquiry. The House Oversight Committee has demanded his testimony in a Dec. 13 closed session, but the younger Biden has offered to testify only in a public setting.
Earlier this year, Biden was set to plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges of willful failure to pay taxes as well as enter a diversion program in connection with a gun crime but the plea deal fell apart.
The House is preparing to take a vote next week to formalize its impeachment inquiry into the president and part of its probe reviews Weiss’s investigation of his son, following claims from two IRS whistleblowers that the special counsel’s team mismanaged the prosecution and slow-walked the case.
Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma is at the center of the House GOP’s impeachment probe, based on allegations that Biden as vice president deliberately used government policy to benefit his son’s work. Republicans have probed whether the president benefited from his son’s foreign policy dealings, an accusation that the White House has repeatedly denied.