Almost a year to the day since his father dropped out of the 2024 presidential primary, Hunter Biden has embarked on a no-holds-barred interview tour that is loaded with criticism of the Democratic Party.
In a more than three-hour-long interview with independent journalist and social media personality Andrew Callaghan of Channel 5, Biden dove into his anger over Democrats’ treatment of his father during the 2024 primary; his struggles with addiction, trauma, and grief; and his views on the first months of the Trump administration.
The former president has remained out of the spotlight since President Donald Trump defeated former Vice President Kamala Harris in November, as Democrats and the media continue a convoluted post-mortem on the election loss that ushered Trump into a second term.
Where the former president is maintaining a strategic silence, his colorful son is speaking out on everything from George Clooney to the chemical nuances of crack cocaine. Here are 5 stand out moments from Hunter Biden’s Channel 5 interview on Monday.
Unloading on Dems for undermining his father
President Biden didn’t bother pretending that he was anything less than resentful over his involuntarily voluntary exit from the 2024 Democratic primary, and it seems the sentiment is shared by his son.
Hunter dedicated several extended monologues during the interview to bashing longtime Democratic party strategists, officials, and celebrities over the public efforts to pressure his father out of the race.
“The intelligentsia of the Democratic Party with 2020 hindsight, believes that Joe Biden should have considered not running again because of their perception that he was too old,” Biden said. “Speaker Emeritus Pelosi did not give a full-throated endorsement, which allowed everybody else to kind of go OK. Except who came out [in support of Biden]? Full-throated progressives. AOC, Bernie, the entire progressive ring. Ro Khanna. The entirety of the progressive side of the Democratic Party, said, ‘Joe Biden has got more of our agenda accomplished in four years than any president in history.’”
Biden also criticized George Clooney over a New York Times op-ed in which the actor called on President Biden to drop out of the Democratic primary. “Fuck him and everybody around him,” Biden said. “George Clooney is not a fucking an actor — I don’t know what he is, he’s a brand.”
“What right do you have to step on a man who’s given 52 years of his fucking life to the service of this country and decide that you, George Clooney, are going to take out, basically, a full-page ad in the fucking New York Times to undermine the president?”
Biden torched Clooney’s association with former President Barack Obama, and the role other prominent Obama-era politicos had in the public debate around his father’s age. He called former Obama Campaign Strategist David Axelrod a one-hit wonder who “had one success in his political life and that was Barack Obama and that was because of Barack Obama,” and referred to the hosts of Pod Save America — a political podcast founded by former Obama staffers Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, Jon Lovett, and Dan Pfeiffer — as “junior fucking speech writers on Barack Obama’s Senate staff who have been dining out on the relationship with him” for over a decade.
Explaining the difference between crack and cocaine
Biden has been very open about his past addiction to drugs and alcohol, and in his conversation with Callaghan denied conspiracy theories that a bag of cocaine found in a White House cubby last year belonged to him.
“I have been clean and sober since June 2019. I have not touched a drop of alcohol or a drug, and I’m incredibly proud of that,” he said, going on to discuss the Republican obsession with his addiction and the actual differences between cocaine and crack cocaine.
Biden said that he felt his addiction to crack was “an added bonus for [the media] that they could, they could say ‘crack addict,’ and everybody would go, ‘Oh, my God, he’s a monster.’”
“The only difference between crack cocaine, and cocaine is sodium hydrocarbonate, water, and heat,” he said. “I don’t want to tell people how to make crack cocaine, but it literally is a mayonnaise jar, cocaine, and baking soda.”
“Alcohol is the most destructive drug not just to your body, but it puts you in more danger than any other drug I’ve ever experienced,” Biden said. “And then you add on top of that the amount of crack I was using at the time, and crack cocaine in terms of your physical health is not as dangerous as the situation you put yourself in to be able to obtain it.”
Biden added that if any good has come from the media’s treatment of him was that it forced him to confront the darkest and most “embarrassing” episodes of his addiction. “The favor that they did for me is that I don’t have any more secrets,” he said. “Now, not everything they say about me is true, but the things that people would be very embarrassed about, I’ve been very open about.”
Saying Biden was on Ambien during his disaster 2020 debate
Biden’s disastrous debate against President Donald Trump marked a point of no return for many Democrats and voters skeptical of Biden’s ability to handle a second term. In the aftermath, the White House said Biden had been suffering from a cold, but the younger Biden claimed in this week’s interview that the president had been affected by the prescription sleep aid Ambien.
“I know exactly what happened in that debate. He flew around the world, basically the mileage that he could have flown around the world three times,” Biden said of his father’s travel schedule ahead of the debate. “He’s 81 years old. He’s tired as shit. You give him Ambien to be able to sleep. He gets up on the stage, and he looks like he’s a deer in the headlights, and it feeds into every fucking story that anybody wants to tell?”
Calling Trump a “dictator thug”
Biden laid into the deportation policies of the Trump administration, and the Gestapo tactics being implemented by masked ICE agents rounding up undocumented migrants.
“If you think the prison in El Salvador [that migrants are being sent to] is not a fucking concentration camp, you’re out of your fucking mind,” Biden said of the Terrorism Confinement Cednter (CEDCOT), the maximum security propaganda prison where the United States has dissappeared over 200 Venezuelan migrant men.
“I’ll tell you what, if I became president in two years from now — or four years from now, or three years from now — I would pick up the phone and call the fucking president in El Salvador and say, ‘You either fucking send them back or I’m gonna fucking invade.’ It’s a fucking crime what they’re doing. He’s a fucking dictator thug,” Biden said.
“Bukele or Trump?” Callaghan asked.
“Both,” he replied.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele responded with a dig at Biden’s past addiction on social media. “Is Hunter Biden sniffing powdered milk?” He wrote.
Saying his “scandals” are nothing compared to the open corruption of the Trump family
For years now, the former president’s son has been the target of conspiracies and conjecture promoted by Republicans: from unproven allegations of corrupt business dealings with Ukraine, to the obsession over his laptop.
Biden finds it a bit ironic — but not surprising — that given the Republican fixation on his every financial transaction, the party is perfectly comfortable watching the Trump family openly profiteer off of the presidency.
“These motherfuckers, they’re selling gold telephones and sneakers and $2 billion investments in golf courses, and selling tickets to the White House for investment into their meme coin,” Biden said, adding that “if you believe the worst possible thing that they’ve ever said about,” him, it doesn’t hold a candle to what the Trumps “are openly doing, and nobody’s batting an eye.”
“I don’t get why people don’t understand that. It is the biggest grift that there is,” he continued. “Just look over here. Look at Hunter Biden, the crack addict, look at him. Laptop, laptop.”
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