Hunter Biden Confirms Addiction to Crack Near Time of Background Check to Purchase Gun
Books don’t appear overnight, no matter how fast your ghostwriters may work, so I’m assuming Hunter Biden’s memoir of loss and addiction has been in the works for a while. It couldn’t come at a worse time, however.
Ordinarily, there would only be two groups of people who would care about the tome, “Beautiful Things” — which, according to USA Today, is a “candid chronicle of his drug- and alcohol-fueled binges and relationship with Beau’s widow, Hallie Biden.”
If you’re emotionally invested in Biden family drama, I’m sure you were eagerly awaiting it. Also, the perennial success of the addiction memoir genre, much like the serial killer podcast series, is proof there’s a hefty contingent of media consumers who love the pornography of real-life human misery.
Now, one suspects conservatives — as well as investigators — might be looking a bit closer at it, all because of the timing.
On March 25, Politico reported on a strange incident purportedly involving Hunter Biden, Hallie Biden and the Secret Service back in October of 2018. According to the outlet, Hunter had purchased a gun which Hallie had thrown in a dumpster in the back of an upscale Wilmington, Delaware, grocery store. She reportedly told Hunter what she’d done and gone back to look for the firearm. Then police got involved and shenanigans proceeded apace.
The tale of Hunter, Hallie, Hunter’s gun and the police is another matter entirely and one that’s worthy of your reading, if you haven’t been catching up; between Hunter’s bizarre behavior when questioned by law enforcement and the fact he cast suspicion on “Mexican males” who were “prolly illegal” (his words), it’s a telling piece.
However, there’s one important thing to take away from the interaction: When a police officer asked if Hunter had called his father about the gun incident, he responded, “I have never called my dad for anything.”
Meanwhile, as the questioning of Hunter and Hallie Biden was ongoing, Politico reported that the Secret Service showed up at StarQuest Shooters & Survival Supply, the Wilmington store where Hunter had purchased the .38 revolver. The agents reportedly wanted the Firearms Transaction Record Hunter Biden had filled out when buying the gun.
The owner refused, according to the outlet, noting that the records fall under the aegis of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, not the Secret Service. The owner would eventually turn the papers over to the ATF, but Politico was able to obtain a copy of the form.
And here’s where it becomes problematic. There’s a question on the form that says, “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?” Hunter Biden answered “no.”
Generally speaking, this would be suspect; Hunter Biden has certainly been an addict to various substances over the years, although he could technically have been sober at the time. If you were knowingly answering that question falsely — which is a crime — it depends on how you define addiction and how recently you were addicted (or using) an illegal substance you were addicted to.
And that’s why “Beautiful Things” isn’t coming out at the best of times.
Here’s how USA Today described it: “In the spring of 2018, he used his ‘superpower — finding crack anytime, anywhere’ — in Los Angeles. At one point, a dealer pointed a gun at his head before he realized Biden was looking for drugs,” the outlet reported Wednesday.
“He later learned how to cook drugs and spent a lot of time with thieves, addicts and con artists. ‘I never slept. There was no clock. Day bled into night and night into day,’ he writes.
“The situation grew out of control. ‘I was smoking crack every 15 minutes,’ he writes.”
He came back to the East Coast in autumn of that year; while he was supposed to seek help, that apparently didn’t take. His family staged an intervention, which didn’t work either.
“It wasn’t until he met now-wife Melissa Cohen in Los Angeles — whom he married after only a week of knowing — that he got sober again,” USA Today reported. “They told each other they loved each other on their first date; she had the same eyes as Beau, he writes. She championed his sobriety and dumped out his crack.”
The problem is that they met in May of 2019, according to the Wilmington, Delaware, News Journal. Unless Hunter Biden is pulling a James Frey and lying to us about the details of his debauchery, that means when he filled out the paperwork for the .38, he was, by his own admission, addicted to crack.
Hunter Biden normally shouldn’t be worried. In yet another sign of how wonderfully effective national background checks are, consider the fact that, as Washington Post columnist Joe Davidson pointed out back in 2018, only 0.09 percent of cases where the ATF launched an investigation into background check denials ended with some sort of criminal charge in 2017.
When only 12 out of 12,700 cases were prosecuted, Hunter Biden normally wouldn’t be sweating having done something that was “prolly illegal.”
There’s a question of what happens when you bring the Secret Service into the mix, however. For the record, the agency denies its agents ever visited the gun store where Hunter Biden bought the weapon: “U.S. Secret Service records confirm that the agency did not provide protection to any member of the Biden family in 2018, and that the Secret Service had no involvement in this alleged incident,” the agency said in a statement to Politico.
Anonymous reports being what they are, that might be true; Politico’s sources were someone with firsthand knowledge of the alleged incident and someone who was briefed on it by a Secret Service agent after it happened. Whatever the case, no one has yet bothered to put the issue to bed or look into it.
There is one person who was willing to say the Secret Service was involved, though, and that’s Hunter Biden.
In texts that were reportedly found on his infamous laptop, Biden said in a 2019 text message that federal authorities were involved after Hallie threw the gun in the trash, according to the New York Post.
“She stole the gun out of my trunk lock box and threw it in a garbage can full to the top at [the supermarket]. Then told me it was my problem to deal with,” Hunter wrote, according to the report.
“Then when the police the FBI the secret service came on the scene she said she took it from me because she was scared I would harm myself due to my drug and alcohol problem and our volatile relationship and that she was afraid for the kids.”
One doesn’t wish to belabor Hunter Biden’s addiction. It’s something that’s hopefully in his past — and if meretriciously cataloging the details of it in “Beautiful Things” helps him finance his continued sobriety, so much better.
He remains responsible for what he did while he was an addict, however, which includes allegedly lying on a background check to get a firearm, if his book is accurate. Furthermore, there are serious questions that need to be answered about what happened at StarQuest Shooters & Survival Supply while Hunter and Hallie Biden were talking to the police.
If there’s any truth to the Politico report, that responsibility could go well beyond Hunter Biden.
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