Never Forget Hunter Biden Was Kicked Out of the Navy for Cocaine Use
Let’s say you want to sit on the board of a major corporation. I know, that’s a pretty significant goal, but what do you think you should have on your résumé?
Significant corporate experience in the sector? Glowing recommendations from people in the field? A recent ejection from the Navy Reserve for testing positive for cocaine?
As the folks on “Sesame Street” might say, one of those things is not like the others. But if you have the last one on your résumé — and even if you don’t have the first two — you should be fine. So long as your dad’s the vice president, there should be no problem.
Lest we’ve forgotten, Hunter Biden got kicked out of the Navy because he failed a drug test. This wasn’t a youthful indiscretion that happened in the 1990s, either. It was in 2014, the same year when the ne’er-do-well son of the nominal Democratic presidential front-runner was appointed to the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
To be fair, he failed the drug test back in 2013, so there’s that.
Biden tested positive for the drug just a month after he was commissioned as an ensign in May 2013. At the time, he was serving as a public relations officer in Norfolk, Virginia, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“It was the honor of my life to serve in the U.S. Navy, and I deeply regret and am embarrassed that my actions led to my administrative discharge. I respect the Navy’s decision,” he told CNN. “With the love and support of my family, I’m moving forward.”
It’s worth noting that Biden both got an age waiver (he was 43, or 3 years over the normal age limit of 40 for a commission) and reportedly received a second waiver for a drug-related incident when he was younger.
This didn’t sit well with political cartoonist Jack Ohman, who tried and failed to get an age waiver in 2002 and was denied despite a sterling record and plenty of connections.
“A direct commission is a little-known entry point to get into the military. It’s a way for experienced professionals to serve; it’s mostly done for doctors, nurses and dentists. But age 40 is pretty much the brick wall for those outside of those disciplines,” he wrote in The Sacramento Bee shortly after Hunter Biden’s discharge.
Ohman said “when I read Ensign Hunter Biden, USNR, got in at 43, and then blew it, literally, on cocaine, I guess I have to admit I was a little mad. I can only surmise how he got it. I doubt his father even had to make a call. They can read.”
So can Ukrainian conglomerates, it seems. In the spring of 2014, shortly after his discharge from the Navy, he was appointed to the board of Burisma.
This was before the discharge was reported on by the media. After it was reported, however, Biden remained on the board.
By the way, in case you hadn’t guessed, Hunter Biden’s account of what happened with the failed drug test isn’t terribly convincing.
According to a New Yorker profile in July, which more or less took Hunter’s account of himself at face value without significant pushback, “the night before Hunter’s first weekend of Reserve duty, he stopped at a bar a few blocks from the White House. Outside, Hunter said, he bummed a cigarette from two men who told him that they were from South Africa. He felt ‘amped up’ as he was driving down to Norfolk, and then ‘incredibly exhausted.’ He told me that he called Beau and said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on.’ Beau drove from Delaware to meet Hunter at a hotel near the naval station. “He got me shipshape and drove me into the base,’ he said. On his first day, Hunter had a urine sample taken for testing.”
Lo and behold, it was positive for cocaine. Those perfidious South Africans! As believable excuses for a positive urinalysis result go, this is right up there with Ben Johnson’s.
This wasn’t the end of Hunter Biden’s dalliances with the white lady, either.
In 2016, while in Monte Carlo on Burisma business, Biden admitted to snorting cocaine in the bathroom of a hotel nightclub after being offered the drug by a stranger.
Later on that year, would wreck one rental car and return another one with a crack pipe and “a line of white-powder residue” during a crack binge.
At least he cops to doing all of that voluntarily, however. There weren’t vacationing South Africans following him and putting drug paraphernalia in the glovebox of his rental. No one from Johannesburg was hanging around Monaco night clubs, waiting for Biden so they could shovel some cocaine up his nose.
Even after all of this, which was done with some level of public attention, Biden remained on the board of Burisma. He didn’t leave until 2019, when his term expired.
As conservatives, we ought to keep all of this in mind when we’re told that Hunter Biden didn’t just get jobs because of his father’s name and the power attached to it.
Common sense ought to tell us otherwise. Joe Biden’s son found himself in plenty of positions he wouldn’t have been in if his father wasn’t vice president.
The Navy Reserve was one of them — and he managed to blow it within a month.
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