Hunter Biden Opens Up About His Biggest Controversies

Controversy seems to follow President Joe Biden's son Hunter, and this was especially true during the campaign which led to the Nov. 3 presidential election. But Hunter came clean and revealed all when he sat down with CBS News to talk about his book Beautiful Things. One of the things he addressed during the interview involved his head-turning involvement with Ukranian energy firm Burisma, which gave then-President Donald Trump plenty of ammunition against his father. Hunter Biden told CBS that he had "made a lot of decisions that I probably shouldn't have made. There was a lot more compassion and understanding from the people that knew me."

Hunter didn't believe he had made a mistake by accepting a position on the board of Burisma, but he admitted he "made a mistake in terms of underestimating the way in which it would be used against me." When pressed to explain how he couldn't tell that the optics could potentially be harmful, he told CBS, "All I know is that not one investigative body, not one serious journalist, have ever accused, has ever come to the conclusion that I did anything wrong, or that my father did anything wrong."

Hunter Biden was a member of the board of Burisma from 2014 to April 2019, which is when he opted to step down. During that time, it had been suggested by the New York Post that he had set up a meeting between his father, who was then vice president, and Burisma representative Vadym Pozharskyi in 2015. That meeting came to light because of an email purportedly sent to Hunter, which thanked him for setting up the meeting. The chat would have been controversial because his father was in charge of U.S.-Ukrainian relations during the Obama administration (via BBC News). A Biden campaign spokesman, Andrew Bates, later told Politico that "we have reviewed Joe Biden's official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place."

Investigations launched by the GOP showed that Biden didn't engage in any wrongdoing, and that, as Bates said: "Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath."

Allegations of wrongdoing against Hunter Biden didn't end there. Shortly before the elections, the New York Post returned with allegations that the now-president's son was involved in something underhanded that was happening in Ukraine, and that the specifics were discovered in a laptop computer that he reportedly left in a Delaware repair shop in 2019. While Hunter said he didn't know "for real" whether the laptop was his or not, he also told CBS News: "There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was Russian intelligence. It could be that it was stolen from me." He also had no recollection of dropping off a laptop to be serviced in his father's home state.

The discovery of the laptop had triggered worries that the Russians were trying to launch a disinformation campaign against the Bidens, because Moscow was seen to be trying to influence the November election results. Intelligence officials also said at the time that there were those in the Trump camp, including his then-personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who were being used to try and undermine Joe Biden's presidential campaign (via The New York Times).