What About Beau?

The current received narrative of the Biden family as it applies to Hunter's brother Beau is to call for a moment of silence over his death from brain cancer in May 2015 and then, in the spirit of nil nisi bonum. move on. This leaves an impression, intentional or not, that Beau of fond but tragic memory was the Good Son, while the prodigal Hunter, who is still among us, is the Bad Son. It's true that we know much less about Beau and his life as a Biden, but the idea of a Good Son versus a Bad Son strikes me as too reminiscent of dysfunctional family dynamics, and if we know anything about the Bidens, they're dysfunctional.

The whole issue of Beau's widow Hallie and her affair with Hunter after Beau's death (if that in fact is when it started) throws the Good Son-Bad Son narrative under a shadow of uncertainty. The version approved by the Biden family, insofar as it exists, appears in People magazine on April 6, 2021:

In a new interview with CBS Sunday Morning's Tracy Smith to promote his new memoir Beautiful Things, the 51-year-old son of President Joe Biden opened up about the public reaction to him dating Hallie, 46, in 2017, two years after Beau tragically died from brain cancer at age 46.

"I think people were confused by it," said Hunter. "And I understand that. I mean, I really do. To me, it's not something that is difficult to explain. Because it came out of a real overwhelming grief that we both shared. And we were together, and trying to do the right thing. And that grief turned into a hope for a love that maybe could replace what we lost."

So far, Hallie is one of the few Bidens who hasn't already written a tell-all, but even if she were to write one, I suspect it would be, like Hunter's version here, heavily sanitized and leave out far more than it revealed. The version Hunter gives in People is that the affair started in 2017, which might make it sound like that was two years after Beau's death, maybe a decent interval as these things might go, but another version from Hunter himself places its start at least a year earlier:

In a candid New Yorker interview with Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden’s troubled son, the 49-year-old lawyer explained the origins of his affair with brother Beau’s widow, Hallie, and the rock-bottom drug binge that came beforehand.

Hunter — who had already moved out of his marital home with estranged wife Kathleen over his failure to stay sober — says he became close with Hallie after a 2016 trip with her to the Hamptons and began spending most nights at her house while “sharing a very specific grief” over Beau’s 2015 death.

The story goes into detail on this 2016 binge:

He made plans to head to a detox center in Arizona, but got sidetracked during a stopover in Los Angeles, where he soon asked a vagrant where he could buy crack, according to the mag.

Hunter was taken to a downtown LA homeless encampment, where someone pulled a gun on him — but he nevertheless returned several more times that week to buy drugs.

He then got into a fight outside a Hollywood Boulevard nightclub, and a man nicknamed “Baby Down” took pity on him and deposited him at a Hertz car rental office.

Hunter took his rental car to Arizona, where Hertz workers called the cops after finding a crack pipe and a baggie containing a “white powdery substance,” along with a Secret Service business card, Hunter’s driver’s license and a badge from Beau’s time as Delaware attorney general inside.

Local prosecutors declined to pursue the case, citing a lack of evidence that he actually used the pipe, according to the New Yorker.

Hunter, meanwhile, finally spent a week at Grace Grove Lifestyle Center — a local “detox, rejuvenation and healing retreat” — before checking into a resort spa, where Hallie flew to meet him and they decided to become a couple.

So by this version, the affair began after a 2016 crack binge, which ended in Hunter going to detox in Arizona, where Hallie joined him, and they "decided to become a couple". In the interview, he goes on to say they "split up later that year", i.e., 2016, which means according to that version, they split up a year before he told People the affair started in 2017. But Hunter had been spending most nights at her house even before the 2016 LA binge. And most accounts also say the affair lasted until 2019, when Joe was about to announce and insisted Hunter clean up his act. None of Hunter's version is remotely credible.

Whenever the affair started -- for the time being, we'll grant 2016 -- it appears that throughout it, Hallie was doing more than sharing Hunter's grief, and she was remarkably reckless. If we grant that it started in 2016, there were two children from Hallie's marriage to Beau, daughter Natalie Naomi Biden (born 2004), and son Robert Hunter Biden II (born 2006). If the affair started in 2016, Natalie was 12 then, and Robert was 10. During this period, she and Hunter were remarkably open with the extended Biden family about their mutual drug use.

The Marco Polo site copies a February 24, 2018 e-mail from Joe's daughter Ashley to Hallie's sister Liz Secundy complaining about Hallie's use of cocaine with Hunter, in which she calls both of them "addicts". It says, ". . . they are beyond messy! They left all their drug paraphernalia for my parents [Joe and Jill] to see." It reproduces on the same page a September 24, 2018 text message in which Hunter says to a friend, "If I told you just one truth out of a hundred that I've come to know about her, Robi, you would be hard pressed to not go and take the kids from her imnmediately".

Another entry contains a transcript of an August 23, 2018 phone call backed up on the laptop between Hallie and Hunter, in which Hallie begs Hunter for cocaine:

Hallie: Please just get it [crack cocaine] for me.

Hunter: You're going to tell me your way if I told you I got it [crack cocaine] for you? But now you're saying you don't have a way.

Hallie: I told you --

Hunter: And now you're telling me you don't trust me? I mean, how am I supposed to trust you? What, you're going to make up something?

Hallie: I told you I would. . .

Hunter: What?

Hallie: I told you I would call Lisa.

Hunter: Hallie, there is no way in hell . . . [do] you think that Lisa doesn't know you've been in and out of rehab [and] all the struggles you're going through and is going to get you [crack] cocaine . . . Hallie?

In fact, Hallie and Hunter were in and out of rehab throughout the course of their affair, and Hunter appears to have paid for her stays in at least two luxury rehab centers. The Marco Polo site lists, first, an October 2017 stay at the Passages Malibu luxury rehab center that cost $57,000, paid for in part via wire transfers from Ye Jianming's companies, and another $45,000 January 2018 stay at Caron, a Delray Beach, FL rehab center where Ashley Biden had also stayed, and where Caroline Biden, Joe's niece, had stayed in 2014 following an arrest in New York.

So the sanitized version of the Hunter-Hallie affair is that it was a perhaps excusable lapse caused by their mutual grief a year or two after Beau's death. The actuality is that we really don't know when it began, but by at least 2016 it had merged seamlessly into Hunter's cocaine-filled lifestyle, with both of them in and out of luxury rehab throughout its course. This raises a question for me: how was it so easy for Hallie to slip into this? She had two kids, pre-teens, but apparently made little effort to conceal her affair with Hunter or her addiction from them -- and the family appears to have enabled this.

Wikipedia says of her career,

Biden worked as an admissions counselor at her alma mater, the Tatnall School, and as a guidance counselor at Archmere Academy. She serves as the Chairwoman of the Board of Directors for the Beau Biden Foundation For the Protection of Children.

The protection of children! Whew! I'm with Hunter, it doesn't sound like she should ever have been allowed anywhere near children, although this probably goes for the whole Biden family. For the rest, it sounds like if she ever worked at all, it was at no-show jobs that she held as Beau's wife, and again, this seems to be standard practice for Bidenworld.

If you want my theory, we just don't know when her affair with Hunter began, and I don't rule out that it was going on at some level even before Beau's death. That Hunter would also have had an affair with Hallie's sister Liz Secundy at the same time as the one with Hallie seems not to have been any sort of problem. Every indication is that by the time her affair with Hunter was well under way, she was already addicted to drugs, and she was just continuing that lifestyle. For Bidenworld, this was nothing new.

UPDATE: This site refers to an e-mail on Hunter's laptop quoted here in the UK Daily Mail but not on the Marco Polo site that appears to carry a quote from Hunter's ex-wife, Kathleen, with an accusation from one of their children that "Dad and Aunt Hallie (K's words exactly to me tonight on phone with girls in room) were F***ING the day after Uncle Beau died.”

In fact, her marriage to Beau was her free pass to Bidenworld, and Beau's death ended that pass -- so she took up with Hunter, or maybe just continued with him. But by 2019, when the Bidens put a lid on Hunter's lifestyle, even this couldn't go on. Wikipedia notes,

In March 2019, The Key School filed a lawsuit against Biden, stating that she failed to pay $55,740 in tuition for her two children for the 2018–2019 school year.

I wonder how she's doing on Beau's insurance and maybe pension payments from his job as Delaware attorney general. No more no-show baksheesh, anyhow, except maybe the gig with the Beau Biden Foundation, but that doesn't seem to cover tuition for the kids. Bidenworld at this point doesn't seem to have the money to keep her comfortable and quiet. I wonder if she'll do her own tell-all -- but Bidenworld probably does still have the juice to keep that from happening.