US presidential hopeful Joe Biden’s son Hunter once held at gunpoint while buying crack cocaine in Los Angeles, report says
- Former vice-president’s son felt a gun at his head after approaching a homeless man while looking for drugs, according to New Yorker magazine
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Joe Biden, the current front runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, has repeatedly faced family tragedy during his decades in public office.
After approaching a homeless man in downtown Los Angeles in 2016, “Hunter said that the man took him to a nearby homeless encampment, where, in a narrow passageway between tents, someone put a gun to his head before realising that he was a buyer,” the article says.
The magazine piece cites interviews with Hunter Biden – who said he “needed a way to forget” – and people who knew and interacted with him.
“He returned to buy more crack a few times that week,” the article continues in a section detailing a period of drug use and tumult in Biden’s life.
Hunter Biden was only occasionally in the public eye during his father’s time as vice-president under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017.
Soon after first winning election to the Senate in 1972, Biden lost his wife and baby daughter in a car crash that also left Hunter and his brother Beau Biden badly injured.
Beau became a rising star in the Democratic Party but died of cancer in 2015, an event thought to have derailed Biden’s expected bid for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.
