Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, sat down for two lengthy interviews in which he discussed his past drug abuse, denied that a bag of cocaine found at the White House during his father’s administration was his, and discussed his father’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential election.
The younger Biden’s two separate interviews with former Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison’s new “At Our Table” podcast and on the Channel 5 YouTube account created by Andrew Callaghan aired Monday.
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Here are the Washington Examiner’s top takeaways from both interviews.
1. Hunter says Joe Biden was on Ambien during the debate against Trump
Hunter Biden suggested in his interview with Callaghan that Joe Biden was on Ambien during his campaign-ending debate performance against President Donald Trump last year.
“I know exactly what happened in that debate. He flew around the world basically, and the mileage that he could have flown around the world three times. He’s 81 years old. He’s tired as sh**,” Hunter Biden said during his interview with Callaghan.
He continued, “They 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 f****** story that anybody wants to tell.”
The younger Biden talked about the debate between Joe Biden and Trump several times throughout his interviews with Callaghan and Harrison.
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During his interview with Harrison, Hunter Biden claimed he was not in favor of the June 2024 debate against Trump held in Atlanta, Georgia.
“Look, I was opposed to the debate,” he said. “I didn’t understand why we were rushing into a debate with somebody who had just been convicted on 34 felony counts, and why we weren’t just going to wait to see how this played out.”
The June 27, 2024, debate was the earliest-ever debate between presidential candidates. Biden’s aides had pushed for it to stave off doubts about Biden’s mental acuity.
But ultimately, Biden’s fumbling and ramblings hastened his exit from the race.
“That debate was awful when my dad walked out, I knew that he had an off night, you know what I mean. He wasn’t drooling, but he had an off night,” the younger Biden said.
2. Hunter blames Pelosi for making the ‘decision’ on his father dropping out
Hunter Biden suggested that Nancy Pelosi was the one to drive the former president out of the race in an “At Our Table” podcast, hosted by former DNC chair Jamie Harrison.
“They already made a decision. They clearly made a decision. When I say ‘they,’ I mean the speaker,” he said when asked about his father’s decision to drop out of the race.
Pelosi, who remains a prominent figure in the Democratic Party, was the House speaker during the Biden administration.
However, shortly before Biden dropped out of the 2024 race, Pelosi told the New Yorker that she had concerns about the election and Biden’s chances of winning, putting pressure on Biden to drop out.
The younger Biden recalls Alexandra Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, calling Jill Biden out for not pushing the former president to drop out of the 2024 race.
“And I heard Alexandra Pelosi say something like ‘put your big girl pants on’ to my mom, and I kind of feel like saying who the f*** do you think you are,” he said. “I’d never speak about your mom that way. I would never speak about your father that way. I would never insult your parents that way.”
3. Takes special shots at George Clooney
Hunter Biden’s disdain for celebrity actor George Clooney was on full display during the podcast interview with former DNC chairman Jaime Harrison.
“I love George Clooney’s movies, but I don’t really give a sh** what he thinks about who should be the nominee for the Democratic Party,” Biden said bluntly.
Clooney was among the loudest voices last year calling for the elder Biden to exit the 2024 race after the disastrous debate against President Donald Trump, even writing an op-ed piece in the New York Times.
The younger Biden criticized Clooney over his behavior during a June 2024 fundraiser. CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson wrote in their book Original Sin that Biden didn’t recognize the Hollywood actor.
“I’ll be honest, I really don’t like George Clooney as an actor or as a person,” Biden said to Harrison.
In the interview with Andrew Callaghan, Hunter unleashed even more: “F*** him! F*** him and f*** everybody around him,” he said.
Biden claimed Clooney threatened to pull out of an event because the president refused to recognize the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
4. Gushes on Wes Moore and the future of the party
In an interview with Andrew Callaghan on Channel 5, Hunter Biden gushes over the Maryland governor, seeing him as the future of the Democratic Party.
“I don’t think the Democratic Party’s dead. I think that there’s some really incredible leaders in the Democratic Party,” he said. “Wes Moore gives me an incredible amount of hope. He’s incredibly dynamic. He’s so goddamn smart, and he’s truly a genuinely decent human being. I love Governor Moore.”
Biden continued to say that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and former Vice President Kamala Harris are also “incredible leaders,” but questions whether they can run again and if they even want to run again. He also thinks the Democratic Party is always claimed to be in “disarray” before every election, saying there’s no leadership and nothing’s getting done. However, Biden believes “someone will emerge.”
“There will be a leader that will emerge. The stakes are too high,” he said. “Whether they’ll succeed in this environment, I don’t know. And that’s the question: How far are people willing to go?”
The younger Biden said there needs to be a leader who puts “themselves in jeopardy on behalf of the American people,” using Sen. Alex Padilla’s (D-CA) notable moment of interrupting Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s press conference as an example.
Harrison, the former DNC chairman, claimed during the podcast that Biden’s decision to exit the 2024 race was “the most selfless act that I’ve ever seen in American politics,” to which the younger Biden concurred.
“Do you think your dad stepping out was a mistake?” Harrison asked Biden.
“No,” he responded.
“I know that it wasn’t a mistake in that moment, because what he did is, I think, that he made the only choice that was left to him, which was either save the party or save himself. And he chose to save the party,” he continued. “And in so doing, I think, did one of the most selfless acts of anybody that I know, as a student of history.”
The younger Biden also claimed that had his father remained, he would have secured a second term.
“Do I think that he could have won? I think that he could have won, yeah,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that I don’t respect other people’s opinion, because nobody can actually answer that question.”
5. Denies responsibility for the cocaine bag found at the White House
Hunter Biden denied any responsibility for the bag of cocaine found inside the White House in July 2023, asking Callaghan rhetorically during his interview why he would bring the drug to the residence and “stick it into a cubby outside the situation room in the West Wing.”
“I have been clean and sober since June of 2019, and I have not touched a drop of alcohol or a drug, and I’m incredibly, incredibly proud of that,” Hunter Biden said.
The bag of cocaine found at the White House during the Biden administration has been the subject of much controversy, as speculation mounted that the bag belonged to Hunter Biden, whose struggles with drug and alcohol addiction had been widely known.
The denial comes after FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino announced earlier this year that the agency would reopen its investigation into several cases of “potential public corruption” that have held public interest, including the cocaine discovery.
6. Claims to be in the White House for ’12 days’ during his father’s presidency
As Republicans investigate Joe Biden’s mental acuity during his time in the White House, Hunter Biden forcefully denied allegations that he was the “acting Chief of Staff” for his father.
“You think Joe Biden was involved in some cover-up? You think Jake Tapper is telling the truth when he says that I was the acting Chief of Staff [of President Joe Biden’s White House]?” Hunter Biden questioned while speaking with Harrison.
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CNN’s Jake Tapper, alongside Thompson, said during an interview with Katie Couric that he thought Hunter Biden was “driving the decision-making for the family,” and was “almost like a chief of staff” for the Biden family.
“I was in that White House 12 days over the last two years of the administration,” Hunter Biden claimed. “I stayed as far away as I possibly could, which by the way broke my heart.”
7. Hunter Biden calls Netanyahu a ‘monster’
Hunter Biden touched on Israel’s war against Hamas and attacks on Iran and called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “monster,” after the prime minister went on TV talking about the “awful sacrifices he’s had to make,” most notably regarding his family.
“Bibi Netanyahu went on TV and said about the awful sacrifices that he’s had to go to because his son has had to cancel his scheduled wedding twice now,” he said. “He said that on TV, and he said and his wife has gone through so much pain because she’s had to put her life on hold these last two years, since October 7, and he hadn’t said one f***ing thing about how many people that are still hostages, that he refuses to negotiate for? That to me is a monster.”
The younger Biden also noted that this isn’t the first time Israel has warned the United States about potential Iranian nuclear weapons.
“Netanyahu has been promising us that Iran was on the verge of a nuclear weapon for 22 years now,” he said. “And then he did it a few months ago, and then he did it a few weeks ago, and then he dropped it, and then he dropped bombs.”
“He’s been wrong every time, but he’s the boy who cried wolf, and one day the wolf is going to be pushed,” he said about Iran’s ability to get a nuclear weapon.
Biden then claimed that Netanyahu bombed Iran to “save his own a** so that he doesn’t end up in jail, because he has a favorability rating inside of Israel of about 22%.”
8. Accused Trump of sending illegal immigrants to death camps
Wading into domestic politics, Hunter Biden forcefully rebuked Trump’s decision to send illegal immigrants to prisons in El Salvador and South Sudan, calling the latter a “death camp.”
“If you think that the prison in El Salvador is not a f***ing concentration camp, you’re out of your f***ing mind,” Hunter Biden said. “Tell me, anybody that’s returning from there. You saw those pictures. Do you think anybody’s getting out of there?”
He continued, “You think anybody’s getting out of those South Sudan prisons ever? Ever? Out of your fucking mind. That’s a f****** – That’s a death camp. They’re done. They’re over. And if you’re not dead, you would want to be dead if you were in that prison.”
The Trump administration has conducted several deportation flights since he returned to the Oval Office, despite questions over the legality of some deportations the White House has carried out.
At times, the White House has fought the court system, with federal judges halting deportation plans or ordering the return of specific individuals, such as the mistakenly deported Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was brought back to the U.S. after a lengthy battle.
9. Downplays the significance of his laptop
The embattled Biden minimized the importance of the laptop scandal that roiled his family in 2020 after the New York Post published the contents of a hard drive he left at a repair shop in 2019.
During his Channel 5 sit-down, Hunter Biden said that none of his legal issues have stemmed from the discovery of the hard drive. He said that “not one single person has ever accused me of a crime based upon anything that was in or discovered as it relates to my laptop.”
“So this whole idea that there was some conspiracy to cover up the laptop — they uncovered 20 years unvarnished, of every single communication that I have ever had over a phone or by text or over email or computer in any digital way,” he said. “There’s not one communication that you can even remotely say is evidence of a crime. Not one.”
However, in the final days of his presidency, President Joe Biden issued a sweeping pardon for his son, preventing him from ever serving prison time for his convictions on tax and gun felonies. President Joe Biden had pledged not to pardon his son, but he reversed course in December, just days before Hunter was to be sentenced on three gun felonies and faced a second sentencing for failing to pay income taxes on millions of dollars worth of income.
The complete and unconditional pardon covers any crimes the younger Biden may have committed starting in 2014, before the laptop was discovered, and runs through 2024.
10. Joe Biden’s prostate cancer ‘not curable’
In his interview with Callaghan, Hunter Biden addressed his father’s recent prostate cancer diagnosis that revived questions about the former president’s health while in office.
Hunter Biden explained that his father was not tested for the disease during his time in office because it is not a standard test for men older than 70.
“And he went in and got tested, and he had prostate cancer, and it had spread to his bones,” Hunter Biden said. “He’s in great health otherwise, and they can treat it, but it’s not curable.”
He continued, “And so that’s all the public knowledge of it. But I think that that is literally everything that there is to know about it. They do this thing called hormone therapy, and it makes you tired and stuff like that. But seeing him day-to-day, he’s doing well.”
Joe Biden was diagnosed with prostate cancer after getting a biopsy to follow up on “increasing urinary symptoms,” his office said in a statement at the time. The older Biden was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, characterized by a Gleason score of 9, or Grade Group 5, with metastasis to the bone.