The backdating of President Biden’s pardon for his son to the start of 2014 has angered Republicans because they believe the family should be examined for Hunter Biden’s lucrative job on the board of a Ukrainian gas company and several other murky business dealings.
Hunter, a Yale Law School graduate, was paid an annual salary of $1 million by Burisma when he took up his post at the Kyiv-based company in April 2014, at the time that his father was vice-president with responsibility for Ukraine. This salary was halved in 2017, when Joe Biden left office, and Hunter quit the board in 2019.
Hunter’s 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things, documents how his descent into crack-cocaine addiction coincided with his highly paid role, stating that “in the last five years alone, my two-decades-long marriage has dissolved, guns have been put in my face, and at one point I dropped clean off the grid, living in $59-a-night Super 8 motels off I-95 while scaring my family even more than myself”.
