Amid the brouhaha over President Joe Biden’s improper retention of classified documents and concerns that his son, Hunter Biden, had access to them, a 2018 form on which Hunter Biden claims to have spent nearly $50,000 a month on rent surfaced from the presidential son’s abandoned laptop.
On it, Hunter Biden lists his father’s Wilmington house as his address, raising questions about whether he was using rent payments to pass money to his father. The money, $49,910, was actually a reference to rental payment for a Washington, D.C., office space used by Hunter Biden. But the story of the document is more absurd, involving Biden family favor trading, scorned relatives, and an ultimately failed effort to get Hunter Biden’s troubled cousin a new probation officer.
The Washington Free Beacon traced the origin of the document to an attachment in a July 27, 2018, email from Hunter Biden to a luxury apartment complex in Los Angeles. The background check document was part of a rental application, and—though his communications with the building’s property manager indicated the apartment would be for him—text messages and emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop reveal it was in fact for his down-on-her-luck cousin, Caroline Biden, the daughter of Joe Biden’s brother Jim and his wife, Sara.
The president’s niece pleaded guilty in 2017 to buying more than $100,000 worth of makeup with a stolen credit card. While she managed to skirt a grand larceny charge and the prison sentence it carried, she was sentenced to two years of probation—time she wanted to serve in Los Angeles.
She texted Hunter Biden on July 26, 2018, from a New York City probation office, telling him she urgently needed a California address so her lawyer could transfer her probation there.
Keeping Caroline Biden out of prison was a Biden family affair and Hunter Biden was at the center of the effort. He moved to the West Coast at least in part to escape family drama, he explained in a July 17 message, saying his sister-in-law and former lover Hallie Biden had asked him to leave the state of Delaware. His day to day in California, text messages and passages from his 2021 autobiography reveal, was largely spent cooking up batches of crack cocaine and negotiating rates with prostitutes. But Joe Biden, according to a text from Caroline Biden to Hunter Biden, thought Hunter Biden was a “good influence” on her.
“Your dad thinks you’re a good influence which you are,” she wrote in a text message to Hunter Biden on July 20, 2018.
In text messages, Caroline Biden repeatedly referred to Hunter Biden as her “partner in crime,” and the pair commiserated over their “sick” family. She was trying to move to California to be closer to him.
Hunter Biden, Caroline Biden said, was the only family member she felt she could talk to, because “the majority of my family thinks I’m nuts and untalktoable.” She complained that “our family’s sick,” that she had “no relationship with my nuclear family,” and that she had to “do everything on my fucking own,” including finding a place to live in California.
That said, Caroline Biden does not appear to have been doing much on her own. Before Caroline Biden reached out to Hunter Biden for help, her father, Jim Biden, had asked Hunter Biden for help with the situation. “I need help with Caroline, she is off the rails,” Jim Biden told Hunter Biden in a July 13 message.
The idea to have Caroline Biden move to California appears to have been hatched in a follow-up conversation between Jim and Hunter Biden, but it was on Hunter Biden to deliver. Hunter Biden told Jim Biden as early as July 16 that he was looking for rentals in Laguna for his daughter. But by the time of Caroline Biden’s probation meeting when she messaged Hunter Biden about the address, he had still failed to secure a place.
