Hunter Biden said in a newly released interview that income from his high-paying board positions, including his role with Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, helped fund his crack cocaine addiction.
Appearing on the “Dopey” podcast, Biden said, “I never went broke,” while recounting a two-month drug binge at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, Calif., where he said he was trying to “go out with a bang.”
Host Dave Manheim pressed Biden on how he managed to “scrape the money together” for cocaine, prostitutes and private bungalows at the famed luxury hotel.
“Well, I still had the residual. Like for instance, I still was on the board of Burisma,” Biden replied.
Biden was paid as much as $1 million a year — $50,000 per month — from 2014 to 2019 for serving on Burisma’s board, despite lacking direct experience in the energy industry.
During Joe Biden’s presidency, Republican lawmakers examined Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma as part of a broader investigation into allegations that members of the Biden family engaged in influence-peddling.
While serving as vice president, Joe Biden backed Ukraine’s natural gas sector after Hunter Biden quietly joined Burisma in April 2014. Emails from Hunter’s abandoned laptop also indicated that his father met with a Burisma executive at a dinner in Washington, DC, the following year.
On “Dopey,” Hunter Biden insisted he was qualified for the Burisma position and rejected the suggestion that he had been “running some kind of international crime syndicate.”
“What people don’t understand about Burisma is that I went on the board of Burisma because I had been on the board of about 14 other major national and international organizations,” he claimed. “I was chairman of the board of the UN World Food Program, which is the largest humanitarian organization in the world — we increased the budget when I was chairman from $1.8 billion to $2.6 billion when I was there.”
Hunter went on and on and on about his cushy board gigs.
“I was the vice chairman of the board of Amtrak, the national passenger rail system. I was chairman of the board of the Center for National Policy, the Truman National Security, you know, project, and on and on and on. And I was a professor at Georgetown in the School of Foreign Service in the Master’s program for four years, in one of the most popular classes at Georgetown, and and I was of counsel to Boies Schiller, which is one of the you know most preeminent law firms in the world — and so it wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, he’s not qualified,’” Hunter argued.
The former first son bragged that his plum Bursima post, in particular, was no problem to manage while in the throes of addiction.
“I took that when my dad was vice president, and then for three years after I was still on the board, and the requirement of the board would be that I would show up for four meetings a year,” he explained.
“Even when I was a crack addict and out of my mind, I could show up for four meetings a year.”
Hunter agreed with Manheim that people can underestimate drug addicts, arguing that they “can do a lot of cool stuff.”
