Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden and an ongoing target for conservatives, has already started to cash in on his father’s presidency.
Wasting no time, Biden has announced he’s releasing a book in April.
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The memior is called “Beautiful Things” and will center on the younger Biden’s well-publicized struggles with substance abuse, according to Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
The release of “Beautiful Things” was kept under wraps during the campaign after Biden’s business dealings became a fixation of then-President Donald Trump and critics. Biden’s finances and taxes are under investigation by the Justice Department.
“Beautiful Things” was circulated among several authors and received praise from Stephen King, Dave Eggers, and Anne Lamott.
“In his harrowing and compulsively readable memoir, Hunter Biden proves again that anybody — even the son of a United States President — can take a ride on the pink horse down nightmare alley,” King writes in his blurb. “Biden remembers it all and tells it all with a bravery that is both heartbreaking and quite gorgeous. He starts with a question: Where’s Hunter? The answer is he’s in this book, the good, the bad, and the beautiful.”
During one of last fall’s presidential debates, Joe Biden defended his son from attacks by Trump.
“My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem,” the Democratic candidate said. “He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it, and I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son.”
Hunter Biden, who turned 51 Thursday, is the oldest surviving child of the president, who lost his first wife and 1-year-old daughter, Naomi, in a 1972 car accident, and son Beau Biden to brain cancer in 2015. The title of Hunter’s book refers to an expression he and his brother would use with each other after Beau’s diagnosis, meant to emphasize what was important in life.
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Hunter Biden joined the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma in 2014, around the time his father, then U.S. vice president, was helping conduct the Obama administration’s foreign policy in that region. Trump and others have insisted that Biden was exploiting his father’s name.
Last December, Hunter Biden confirmed that the Justice Department was looking into his tax affairs, and The Associated Press subsequently reported that he had received a subpoena asking about his interaction with numerous business entities. Though Trump made clear publicly that he wanted a special counsel to handle the investigation, then-Attorney General William Barr did not appoint one. Biden has denied any wrongdoing.
Financial terms for “Beautiful Things,” which was written in collaboration with the author and journalist Drew Jubera, were not disclosed.
The Associated Press contributed to this article