How his father's support helped Hunter Biden recover from addiction

“When I fell down this deep, dark well of addiction, my Dad was always at the top trying to shine a light to guide me back,” says the son of former US president Joe Biden.

When Hunter Biden was at his lowest, his father, former US president Joe Biden, never closed the door.

But his father never gave up on him, Biden told RNZ’s Afternoons.

“Central to me making it back out of the absolute hell that I had found myself in was that when I fell down this deep, dark well of addiction, my Dad was always at the top trying to shine a light to guide me back,” Biden says.

Biden has been taking ownership of his story recently, appearing on podcasts and TV shows talking about the shame of addiction and the possibility of recovery which he says he hopes can reach people across the political divides.

Joe Biden’s resolute support for him is as important a part of his legacy as his decades in public life, Biden says.

“I think that that's the way in which my Dad and his legacy will be remembered as being apart from the other 45 men that came before him, is his deep, deep empathy for everyday people.

“I know at least that where it is most important - with his children, with his sons, with his grandchildren, with his great grandchild now - is that his legacy is 100 percent secure.”

“The radiation and hormone therapy has abated it. He's hopefully going to live a long time, but he's going to live with cancer.”

It’s hard to watch his father go through the discomfort of treatment, he says.

“Not hard to watch in the sense I shy away from it, but somebody that you love that much, and like I said again, we all, I think, have experienced this. It's frightening, it's frightening because you start to think about the inevitable end, and that can be a really frightening thing.”

His father has not, he insists, been diagnosed with dementia.

“His only diagnosis is the cancer.”

He believes his father’s decision to not run for a second term in 2024 and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris was courageous. It followed a disastrous televised debate and speculation about the President’s ability to carry on in high office.

“It was disastrous in the sense that he was always such a great debater that it really shocked people to see him fall flat the way that he did on that night.”

“And I think he made an incredibly courageous decision that no one in his position has ever made before, which was to step aside.

“And then we can debate whether or not 107 days and US$2 billion in the bank was enough for Kamala Harris to complete a campaign - but that's not for me to decide.”

The scrutiny his father faced contrasts with that which 80-year-old President Trump receives, Biden says.

“What people saw was someone that was losing a step, by the way, not losing a step in the way that Donald Trump is falling asleep on a daily basis in the Oval Office in front of our eyes, but losing a step literally in terms of the way that he walked, his gait, the tone of his speech.

“But there's never a moment in time in which I question whether my dad had the capacity to effectively execute the job of president. And I don't think that there's anyone on the record that worked directly with him that has questioned that either”.

In 2020 a laptop belonging to Biden that he left in a repair shop mired him and his father in accusations of corruption and brought to the world’s attention to his addiction problems.

Biden says the laptop story is the exact opposite of the narrative that people have been sold.

“I challenge anyone, it's all available to you online still to this day, amazingly so, because it's still the greatest violation of privacy of anyone that I've ever known, but 20 years of my digital life, and there is not a single email, they have them all, there’s not a single text message, they have them all, including the ones that were erased.

“Not a single communication including all my voice mails, all erased voicemails that they had going back a decade in which there was an instance in which I communicated to anyone, or anyone communicated to me, that I was going to get my Dad to do something on behalf of someone I was getting paid by - not one.”

His accusers themselves are now incarcerated, he says.

“Alexander Smirnov, the genesis of the whole bribery accusation, was convicted of lying to the FBI and linked to the GRU and Russian intelligence, and he's serving six years in prison right now - under the Trump administration.

“The people who promulgated those lies have all been convicted of treason inside Ukraine and they all were sanctioned by the Trump administration as being Russian assets.”

The laptop story is one “everybody knows, they think they know the story, and in fact, they don't know any of the story", Biden says.

Biden’s decision to be an “open book” about his past and his recovery has shown him we have more in common than that which divides us, he says.

“One of the things that connects us all, I have found, is our pain, our pain in the addiction that we face, our pain in the recovery that someone we love is struggling with, our pain in the knowledge that we have someone that we love is experiencing cancer or we just lost someone.

“In that, I have been able to find common ground with people you would not suspect that I would not be able to find common ground with... I hope we can begin to see the humanity in each other again.”