Hunter Biden acknowledged in a new interview that his lucrative board appointments, including one at Ukrainian energy company Burisma, helped finance his crack cocaine addiction.
“I never went broke,” Biden boasted on the “Dopey” podcast, after describing a two-month-long bender at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, Calif., where the former first son said he tried to “go out with a bang.”
“Dopey” host Dave Manheim asked Biden how he was able to “scrape the money together” for the cocaine and prostitutes and private bungalows at the luxurious Chateau Marmont.
“Well, I still had the residual. Like for instance, I still was on the board of Burisma,” Biden explained.
Biden earned up to $1 million per year ($50,000 per month) from 2014 to 2019 to serve on the Burisma board, despite having no relevant energy industry experience.
During Joe Biden’s presidency, Republican lawmakers probed the first son’s involvement with Burisma as part of a sprawling investigation into an alleged Biden family influence-peddling operation.
As vice president, Joe Biden supported Ukraine’s natural gas industry after Hunter quietly joined Burisma in April 2014. Hunter’s infamous abandoned laptop also showed that his father met with a Burisma executive at a Washington, DC, dinner a year later.
On the “Dopey” podcast, Hunter was adamant that he was qualified for the Burisma job and said he wasn’t “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.”
