Beautiful Things

by Hunter Biden

  The stark realization of what it’s like to exist as a stateless person—with nowhere to return to, no community to live in beyond the camp’s perimeter, being dependent on governments with no direct interest in your fate or freedom—was disturbing on an almost fathomless level.

  My trip to the Middle East had its own challenges. I landed there battling my grief, my alcoholism, and my knowledge that I was advocating for people whose stakes were, at base, life-and-death.

  Accompanied by Rick Leach, CEO of World Food Program USA, and fellow board member and former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, I arrived at the royal palace in Amman at the end of our six-day mission.

  We had come from Beirut, where we’d spent most of each day driving through tense neighborhoods to meet with the prime minister, a UN-appointed administrator, and other players and actors with that chaotic government feeling the enormous economic and social pressure caused by the influx of a million-plus Syrians. We discussed the WFP’s push for more assistance through an electronic debit card system that would benefit both refugees and the deteriorating local economy. There were a lot of moving parts and competing agendas; discussions were arduous. We would eventually get enough cash aid to launch the program in Lebanon without violence or incidents in the many pop-up camps throughout the country.

  Now our goal was to convince King Abdullah II to allow more Syrian refugees into Jordan’s Zaatari camp. The king was understandably reluctant: he feared infiltration by ISIS or other terrorists.

  We arrived at the royal palace and were escorted to the king’s office door. I entered alone. The only reason the king had agreed to meet, after many denied requests from WFP headquarters in Rome, was out of respect for my dad. I guess you could chalk it up to nepotism, in the best possible way.

  I sat down across from the bright, personable king, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, with thoughts of my hotel room’s minibar intermittently racing through my head. I was determined during the trip to regulate my drinking. I kept it private inside my room, walking the tightrope between being debilitated by the DTs because I didn’t drink enough, and drinking too much to be effective. Now, I was sweating beneath my shirt but not through my jacket.

  The king spoke first about our families and how much he respected my father. He went on about how my dad not only speaks with knowledge and experience but always tells the truth—which, in the king’s estimation, was the foremost compliment he could pay someone engaged in the high-stakes politics of war and peace. He appreciated how blunt my dad was while still managing to remain diplomatic. They were cut from similar cloth: steeped in history, respectful, relaxed.

  I’d come to advocate for refugees but also to listen and learn. We exchanged thoughts on the historical context affecting the dynamics throughout the region. The king made it clear that he was working from a place between empathy and realism. He saw the situation as a life-or-death struggle both for the refugees and for Jordan, expressing to me the tenuousness of national security in a region as volatile as his. One mistake could cost lives. Yet he was vetting refugees wanting entry into Zaatari even as we spoke.

  I was fully engaged: thoughts of those vodka mini-bottles back at my hotel were quickly subsumed by the gravity of our conversation. Lives were on the line. The discussion went on for nearly an hour, just the two of us.

  When we finished, King Abdullah spoke briefly with Rick, who then took the lead as we met in another part of the palace with one of the king’s aides and had a more detailed discussion about programs the WFP hoped to implement in Zaatari.

  Not long after we returned to the States, King Abdullah let many of the isolated refugees in Syria into Zaatari. My meeting was not the only determining factor in persuading him; there were many others advocating for these desperate, proud people. But it clearly helped. More important, considering my personal battles at the time, I hadn’t blown it. I hadn’t cost innocent lives.

  That accomplished, I needed to get back to my apartment, uncap a bottle, lock the door.

  * * *

  I picked up where I left off—with a vengeance. I soon was drinking to avoid the physical pain caused by not drinking. Forget the underlying roots of alcoholism—unresolved trauma, genetics, disease—I was drinking now just to banish the ache of withdrawal. I felt lucky if I passed out. I’d be in such physical pain if I went any length of time without a drink that every joint in my body felt like it had been soldered shut. My anxiety spiked so high I’d wake with the pillow soaking wet and the couch cushions drenched with sweat, as if someone had poured a bucket of water over me. I’d have chills and a fever until I threw down another drink. Then, for an instant, it would all go away. But that effect became harder and harder to achieve. If a shot of vodka gave me relief at the start, I soon required a tumbler, then a full Collins glass, then a full fifth, just to maintain some kind of equilibrium.

  Eventually it became too much for me to even pour a drink. I’d use a kitchen knife to remove the plastic nub that controls the pour on a handle of vodka, then drink straight from the bottle. Given my weakened state, even that required some finesse: I learned to twist and contort my body in such a way as to lessen the weight of the bottle, to make it more manageable. I must have looked like a cartoon moonshiner throwing back gulps from a jug.

  Alcohol is a harrowing drug to be terrorized by. You really do need to keep drinking to stay alive, not just to get drunk, at least if you’re drinking at the preposterous level I was. The only way to stop safely is to clinically detox, meaning to do it while in the hands of professionals. Otherwise, it was clear to me, you could die.

  I stopped answering the phone altogether, not picking up for my dad, for my daughters, for anybody. My yoga instructor called once from outside my front door. I let it go. While I put work on pause, not pursuing new business, I paid bills with the legacy pieces of contracts I still had, with clients like HNTB, a global infrastructure design company, and several private equity firms. By then I was also receiving a substantial monthly fee from Burisma, the energy company in Ukraine whose board I’d joined in early 2014.

  The last thing I wanted was Dad showing up in front of my apartment building with his massive security detail. But almost a month in, he’d had enough. He reduced his security to a minimum and knocked on my door. I let him in. He looked aghast at what he saw. He asked if I was okay and I told him, sure, I was fine.

  “I know you’re not fine, Hunter,” he said, studying me, scanning the apartment. “You need help.”

  I looked into my dad’s eyes and saw an expression of despair, an expression of fear, even—fear that I wasn’t going to be able to save myself. I knew he wouldn’t leave until I agreed to do something—that at this point he’d take control physically in some way if he had to. I wanted to avoid that at all costs. I was in no shape to have an emotional discussion about Beau or my pain or his pain or the utter depression and hopelessness I felt. I knew he was right—I was anything but fucking okay. I was locked in an unrelenting drinking binge that was not in any way sustainable.

  I finally told him I knew of a program out west where I could get sober and heal. He made me promise to follow through, said that he’d be back to make sure. He hugged me tight, and I walked him to the door.

  There was no drama, no fireworks. Two days later, I flew to the Esalen Institute retreat center in Big Sur, California, where I’d previously gone through a twelve-step yoga retreat that had helped me for a while. This time I essentially detoxed myself while I was around others participating in various programs. I got better and left there to ski alone for a week at Lake Tahoe, retracing the same runs Beau, Dad, and I covered years ago. I returned home clean, healthy—and alive.

  Dad saved me. When he knocked on my door, he jolted me out of whatever state I was in and saved me by making me want to save myself. Left on my own, I’m certain I would not have survived.

  That was Dad. He never let me forget that all was not lost. He never abandoned me, never shunned me, never judged
me, no matter how bad things got—and, believe me, from here on they would get much, much worse. There’s a popular theory that an addict needs to hit bottom before he or she can be helped. The addicts I know who hit bottom are dead. So as busy as Dad always was, he never, ever gave up on me.

  I believe it’s because Dad needed me. And by me, I don’t mean me. In many ways, the greatest expression of his love was the love he had for me and Beau. I was now what remained of that. This isn’t to say he doesn’t love my sister just as much or love my mother most of all. But Beau and I always believed that Dad truly thought, as we both did, there was something singular the three of us shared. As a consequence, he never allowed me to fade away, never let me escape, no matter how often during the next three and a half years I tried. There were times when his persistence infuriated me—I’d attempt to fade to black through alcoholism or drug addiction, and then there he was, barging in again with his lantern, shining a light, disrupting my plans to disappear.

  Disappearing was the most profound betrayal of the love that existed between us. It’s what I tried instead of suicide.

  CHAPTER SIX BURISMA

  The episode that led to the impeachment of a president and landed me in the heart of the decade’s biggest political fable is most remarkable for its epic banality.

  It contains no clandestine, cloak-and-dagger, international hocus-pocus. There’s no criminal sexiness, no corrupt moral bottom to make other bad actors feel better about themselves.

  There is, in short, no there here—except in the up-is-down, self-dealing universe cooked up for political and personal gain by Trump and Giuliani and their circle of bandits.

  My five-year involvement on the board of Burisma Holdings, one of the largest private natural gas producers in Ukraine, ultimately has its roots, as does so much else in my life at the time, in the circumstances surrounding my brother’s grave illness.

  I want to be clear: Beau’s health problems didn’t prompt me to do something I wouldn’t have done otherwise. The money was helpful, but I could’ve figured out another way to make it. I wasn’t desperate. Yet it did provide me the ability not to work as hard at continuing to develop clients, the most time-consuming part of my work—drilling twenty dry wells to finally hit pay dirt. That gave me more time to tend to Beau.

  I’d learned of Beau’s tumor just months before I received a call regarding Burisma from Devon Archer, one of my business colleagues from Rosemont Seneca. Our deal with the biggest potential was a partnership with a Chinese private equity fund seeking to invest Chinese capital in companies outside the country. I was an unpaid advisor in that deal, and to this day have collected no money from the transaction. Yet, like everything else, it has joined the ever-swelling club of Trump’s conspiratorial delusions, from birtherism to QAnon.

  In 2013, Dad asked my then-teenage daughter Finnegan to join him on Air Force Two to Japan and then on to Beijing, where he was meeting with President Xi Jinping. Dad often asked his grandkids to accompany him on overseas trips. It was his chance to catch up. I jumped on the plane from Japan to China to spend time with them both. While we were in Beijing, Dad met one of Devon’s Chinese partners, Jonathan Li, in the lobby of the American delegation’s hotel, just long enough to say hello and shake hands. I was meeting with Li as a courtesy call while I was in the country; the business deal had been signed more than a week earlier. Li and I then headed off for a cup of coffee.

  And that was that—until Trump declared I walked out of China with $1.5 billion. It’s a figure that was plucked from a statement made by a company official at the time who said that was the amount the firm hoped eventually to raise. The actual amount raised before that trip to China: $4.2 million. I had no equity in the company at the time and only bought a 10 percent stake after my father left office.

  A couple of months later, Devon was traveling to raise money, domestically and internationally, for his real estate investment fund, a venture I was not a part of. During one such trip to Kyiv, he met Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner and president of Burisma.

  The encounter came at a critical moment for modern Ukraine. After President Viktor Yanukovych rejected an EU trade deal in 2013, Ukrainians flooded the main square in the capital city of Kyiv, demanding economic and human rights reforms and an end to the regime’s massively corrupt, Putin-backed kleptocracy. Protests continued for three months, into the brutally cold winter. Government security forces finally stormed the protesters’ encampments and shot into crowds, killing dozens and leaving bodies to bleed out in the streets. Ukrainians burned tires and barricaded themselves against a larger massacre that felt inevitable. It was a full-blown revolution.

  Yanukovych fled for the border under the cover of night and turned up in Moscow, where he’s now in exile and wanted in Ukraine for high treason. But there was no time for celebration in Kyiv. A nation still reeling from so much bloodshed and mayhem at the hands of its government now witnessed a brazen military operation carried out by inscrutable “little green men”—masked Russian special forces in unmarked uniforms. They took over military and government sites across Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula soon annexed by Putin. Russian troops then massed along Ukraine’s eastern border, near where many of Burisma’s natural gas fields are located—fields Russia coveted. Zlochevsky and other Ukrainians viewed Putin as a creeping threat to the country and, by extension, to Burisma.

  After returning from Kyiv, Devon told me about his talk with Zlochevsky, Ukraine’s former minister of ecology and natural resources, who cofounded Burisma in 2002. Smart, serious, imposing—six feet two inches tall and at least 250 pounds, with a shaved head, booming laugh, and essentially no neck—Zlochevsky was concerned with protecting his company from Putin’s advances.

  Toward that end, Zlochevsky wanted to lure more U.S. and European investors, both as a way to grow his business and as a show of solidarity with the West. He saw that solidarity as a bulwark against Russia’s aggression. To enhance those ties, he wanted to ensure that Burisma’s business practices adhered to Western standards of corporate governance and transparency.

  That’s a big ask in Ukraine, long in the lower tier of most-corrupt-country rankings.

  To help burnish Burisma’s reputation, Zlochevsky was putting together a board of directors that included non-Ukrainians with name recognition and global contacts. His most prominent get was Aleksander Kwasniewski, former president of Poland and a pro-democracy stalwart.

  Devon said he had raised my name for a possible board seat—along with his own. Kwasniewski soon reached out to me. He rolled out his firsthand assessment of the threat Russia posed to an immature democracy like Ukraine. He framed Burisma as critical to maintaining the country’s independence.

  A compelling orator, Kwasniewski delivered a pitch to me that was impassioned, even poetic. He underscored the importance of the historical moment. The Soviet Union’s chokehold on the region was still recent history for him: Poland and Ukraine were under Soviet control just over two decades earlier. He said the notion that the Iron Curtain couldn’t descend again overnight was a Western fantasy.

  “Russia without Ukraine is just Russia,” he explained. “Russia with Ukraine is the Soviet Union.”

  He then brought up the recent elections of right-wing populists in Poland, as well as the sprouting of pro-Russia demagogues in once-budding democracies throughout Eastern Europe.

  Russia’s push into Ukraine was Putin’s attempt to annex not only land and people, he said, but also the most profound sectors of the country’s economy, with energy being chief among them.

  “The only bulwark against that aggression,” Kwasniewski pronounced near the end of his call with me, “is to strengthen the independent, nongovernmental entities that can give Ukraine the chance to blossom.”

  It was inspiring. It was consequential.

  And, to be honest, the pay was good.

  There’s no question that the board fee, five figures a month, appealed to me. It wasn’t out of line with com
pensation given to board members at some Fortune 500 companies, but I wasn’t used to such a handsome sum for that kind of work. My position on the board of the World Food Program USA was voluntary, and Amtrak had only paid my expenses.

  Yet the fee came at an especially fortuitous juncture. I was spending so much time with Beau and his urgent medical needs that my business was being neglected. I’m not saying I would not have taken Burisma’s offer if Beau hadn’t gotten sick—the money helped.

  “This is private industry—of course you’re getting paid,” Kwasniewski said to me at one point, addressing whatever dissonance I might have felt between idealism and generous compensation.

  He added, “You can get paid by the Russians or the people who are fighting them.”

  * * *

  I was interested but cautious.

  I did my due diligence. When dealing with international businesses, the line between the good guys and bad guys can get murky. Most companies outside the U.S. operate in a gray area when it comes to markets and the rules they have to abide by. U.S. companies adhere to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which applies U.S. law to any American corporate entity in its domestic and international operations. It’s why a company like, say, ExxonMobil can’t simply bribe the president of Papua New Guinea for drilling rights. Enforcement for companies elsewhere is less stringent.

  I brought Burisma to Boies Schiller Flexner, the New York–based law firm where I was of counsel. With offices around the country and in London, Boies Schiller is as savvy internationally as any firm in the world, and they wanted to see whether Burisma was legit or plagued with corruption before taking them on.

  Burisma showed me a report done by Kroll, a leading corporate investigations firm and publisher of a widely read annual assessment called the Global Fraud and Risk Report. While the report gave the company a clean bill of financial health, it was a year and a half old. That concerned me.