WASHINGTON – Disgraced first son Hunter Biden lived off and on at the Delaware home where classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as vice president were found last month — giving him unrestricted access to America’s secrets while he was addicted to drugs, hammering out shady foreign business deals and under federal investigation.
The now-52-year-old began listing the Wilmington home as his address following his 2017 divorce from ex-wife Kathleen Buhle — even falsely claiming he owned the property on a July 2018 background check form as part of a rental application.
Hunter also listed the home as the billing address for his personal credit card and Apple account in 2018 and 2019, respectively, Fox News Digital reported Friday after reviewing emails from his abandoned laptop.
During the same period, the now-first son was in the grip of a crack cocaine addiction costing thousands of dollars. At one point in August 2018, Hunter was recorded begging his sister-in-law-turned-lover, Hallie Biden, to let him use his credit card points to pay for a stay in rehab.
Another former girlfriend of Hunter’s, Zoe Kestan, testified to a federal grand jury in February of last year that the couple stayed for a month in 2018 at the notorious Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles, where — the younger Biden wrote in his 2021 memoir — he “learned how to cook crack” before being “blacklisted” from the property over complaints tied to his drug use.
Hunter also frequented prostitutes during this time, dropping more than $30,000 on sex workers between November 2018 and March 2019 alone — making him a possible target for blackmail.
The latest on President Biden’s classified docs scandal
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- Hunter Biden’s shady biz partner handled transfer of Joe’s Senate papers to Delaware
- National Archives blocked from revealing Biden classified docs find by WH or DOJ: source
On Thursday, President Biden confirmed that sensitive papers had been found in the locked garage of the home, where he also keeps his vintage 1967 Corvette Stingray.
“My Corvette is in a locked garage, OK? So it’s not like they’re sitting out on the street,” the defensive president told reporters when asked about the discovery.
On Monday, the White House disclosed an initial batch of classified documents had been uncovered on Nov. 2 by the president’s personal lawyers while clearing Biden’s former office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington.
It’s unclear whether the documents found in Wilmington on Dec. 20 were shipped directly to Biden’s home upon his leaving the vice presidency in January 2017 or if they were initially stored elsewhere rather than given to the National Archives as required by federal law.
On May 13, 2017, weeks after Hunter’s divorce was finalized, the now-first son was looped in on an email from business partner James Gilliar about a venture with Chinese state-backed energy firm CEFC China Energy. Gilliar’s email said that he, Hunter, and two other business partners would get 20% shares in the new business, with 10% going to Hunter’s uncle James Biden and the remaining 10% “held by H for the big guy.”
Another former Hunter business partner, Tony Bobulinski, alleges that he met with Joe Biden to discuss the CEFC venture on May 2, 2017, and that the president was the “big guy” referenced in Gilliar’s email. Gilliar himself also identified Joe Biden as the “big guy” in a communication retrieved from the laptop.
The following year, federal investigators began looking into whether Hunter and his business associates violated tax and money laundering laws during their dealings in China and other countries. Emails and other records related to the deals were found on the laptop, which Hunter dropped off at a Delaware repair shop in 2019 and never reclaimed.
Text messages recovered from the device indicated that Hunter frequently covered his family’s expenses — and gave as much as 50% of his earnings to his father.
“I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years,” Hunter raged to his daughter Naomi in January 2019. “It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.”
The laptop doesn’t contain any direct evidence of such money transfers but shows Hunter was routinely on the hook for household expenses — including repairs to the Wilmington home.
In December 2020, weeks after his father was elected president, Hunter Biden announced that his “tax affairs” were being investigated by federal authorities in Delaware, and said he was “confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately.”
Recent reports have indicated investigators believe they have enough evidence to charge the first son with tax crimes — as well as with lying about his drug abuse on a federal form so he could buy a gun in 2018.
On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed former Maryland US Attorney Robert Hur as a special counsel to investigate how the classified documents ended up in the Penn Biden Center office and the president’s Delaware home.
While Joe Biden has repeatedly insisted that he has “never spoken” with his son Hunter about “his overseas business dealings,” a survey of Biden’s activities while vice president suggests that was not the case.
Photos and emails uncovered by The Post indicate Joe Biden attended a 2015 dinner with a group of his son’s associates, including Vadym Pozharskyi — an executive at Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma, where Hunter Biden was hired to serve on the board despite having no experience in the energy industry.
Another email revealed that Hunter also invited Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, ex-Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov. Baturina is Russia’s richest woman and a 2020 report from Republican-led Senate committees alleges that in 2014, she paid $3.5 million to a firm associated with Hunter Biden. She has so far avoided US sanctions levied against other oligarchs in connection with Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Additional reporting by Jon Levine and Steven Nelson
