Politico

WILMINGTON, Del. — Some days it’s with a text. On others, it’s a call, even just to leave a message.

President Joe Biden reaches out to his son Hunter regularly to check on him. And increasingly, those messages have taken on a fresh sense of urgency.

The younger Biden is facing new criminal charges and could soon be held in contempt of Congress after refusing to testify in a Republican-led hearing meant to impugn the reputations of both him and his father. Those closest to the president have grown more worried about the personal toll it is taking on the older man.

“I know when he hurts. He doesn’t talk about it much, most of us don’t,” said former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who has been friends with the elder Biden for more than four decades. “He has a real human decency, and a lot of it is created by scarring. And he’s worried.”

Joe Biden’s concern about his surviving son has only grown since he took office, according to aides and confidants — five in total — all of whom were granted anonymity to speak about private conversations.

The White House has long stressed that the president does not interfere in matters before the Justice Department. But privately, fears about the upcoming campaign and potential criminal trial have become an ever-present weight on the president, according to those close to him. The elder Biden has told friends he worries that his son could even backslide into addiction.

In recent months, Biden also has asked some of his closest friends — those he has known for decades from Wilmington and Washington — to call or email his son themselves to check on him, so the younger Biden always knows he has a support system in place, according to two of the people asked to check in on the younger Biden.

Hunter Biden has ratcheted up his own defenses, taking an aggressive tact against the criminal and political, at times to the dismay of his father’s political advisors. The new charges against him — and the accompanying spotlight — come at a politically perilous moment for his father, whose poll numbers have slipped and show a dead heat with his likely GOP rival, Donald Trump.

Those close to the president don’t believe his ability to do the job has been impacted by his concerns about his son. But they see his worry.

“You can see it in his eyes, and you can see his shoulders slump,” said one confidant of the president in describing a recent conversation. “He’s so worried about Hunter. And we’re worried it could consume him.”

The younger Biden could face up to 17 years in prison if convicted of three felony and six misdemeanor charges — including filing a false tax return — that were included in an indictment released last week. He also faces a felony gun charge in Delaware and risks facing contempt of Congress proceedings after he failed to appear at a closed-door deposition Wednesday before the GOP committees leading the impeachment inquiry into his father.

Hunter Biden has offered to testify publicly, which Republicans rejected. The younger Biden, in turn, refused to testify behind closed doors, but he appeared Wednesday on the Hill anyway to defend his father and reject the GOP attacks.

“They have taken the light of my father’s love for me and done their best to turn it into darkness,” he said. “They have no shame.”

Members of the president’s inner circle have expressed frustration over how the matter was all but behind them. Hunter Biden was just a few minutes from accepting a plea deal that would have kept him out of prison when it collapsed in a Delaware courtroom last summer. Several people close to the elder Biden portrayed him as having been deeply anxious for months about his son’s legal fortunes and frustrated at the appointment of a special counsel, at the time singling out Attorney General Merrick Garland for private criticism.

President Biden has checked in on his son as part of his daily routine. Hunter Biden and his family frequently visit the White House, Camp David and the family home in Delaware. As the spotlight on the younger Biden has grown, the president’s instinct has been to pull him closer, even if it hands fodder to his critics, according to the people close to him.

The 81-year-old president is deeply sensitive about his son and has barked at aides who have mused about Hunter Biden as an electoral liability or those who wondered if he should be accompanying the president on the road. Many aides now choose to avoid the subject, for fear of triggering the president’s temper, according to two of the five confidants. For example, no one raised whether it was a good idea for Hunter Biden to attend a June state dinner for India’s prime minister just days after accepting a plea deal.

The president, though, is not shy about expressing his worries over the phone to family members and a select group of confidants. He has quizzed them as to what they thought would happen to his son and expressed that he fears the worst if his son were convicted or faced any sort of prison time.

Hunter Biden knows he is in the political crosshairs. In recent conversations with family friends, he has worried that he might have to flee the country if Trump were to be elected president again, according to two people who have spoken to him. He has also worried about the intense scrutiny that his family would face during the 2024 campaign — and went public in recent days with his own concerns about the toll on his father.

“What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to kill me, knowing that it will be a pain greater than my father could be able to handle — and so therefore destroying a presidency in that way,” Hunter Biden told the musician Moby in a podcast released last week.

Biden’s own frequent calls and texts to his son are largely upbeat, focusing on the family’s love, according to a person familiar with their contents but not authorized to publicly discuss them. They lack the panic of a 2018 voicemail, published by the Daily Mail, that Biden left his son when the younger man was in the throes of addiction

“It’s Dad. I’m calling to tell you I love you. I love you more than the whole world, pal,” Biden said at the time, sounding emotional. “You gotta get some help. I don’t know what to do. I know you don’t either.”

That voicemail was played up by conservative media, which believed it would show Biden enabling a corrupt son. Instead, many White House aides believe it simply showcased the concerns of a loving father and resonated with many Americans whose own families are touched by addiction.

Those close to the president say he is experiencing the worry that any parent would have about a troubled son. But aides note his ability to simultaneously handle the world’s most difficult job, including managing a pair of foreign wars and an economic recovery while preparing to fully launch his reelection campaign.

But the president also faces enormous guilt about the circumstances his son faces, according to two people close to him. Hunter Biden was just 3 years old when he and his brother Beau survived a 1972 car accident that killed their mother and sister. Beau Biden then grew up to become Delaware’s attorney general and a rising political star before dying of brain cancer in 2015 after serving in Iraq with the state’s Army National Guard.

A grieving Joe Biden responded by clinging tightly to his surviving son. While serving as vice president, he allowed his son to travel with him extensively overseas — a practice that raised eyebrows in the Obama White House. Republicans claim that travel helped Hunter Biden enrich himself by offering prospective clients access to his father. But it’s unclear if he was simply offering the veneer of access. GOP investigators have yet to provide evidence of any illegal behavior by the now-president.

Joe Biden, who takes enormous pride in his son’s sobriety, has privately confided to friends that he knows his decision to run for the presidency in 2020 made his son’s life harder and that next year’s campaign will take an enormous toll. The impact that the scrutiny of another campaign might have on Hunter Biden was weighed, according to three people not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.

Some Democrats believe that the trials could damage Biden politically. And friends of the president and some Democrats now worry they could shadow the campaign and that Biden would worry about the younger man. But they also noted Hunter Biden’s resilience and vow to fight for his father’s reputation.

“The president has said over and over again: He’s proud of his son,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre this week, “and he is proud of him building his life back up.”

President Joe Biden on Wednesday met for nearly two hours with the family members of American hostages held by Hamas in a session relatives later said had strengthened their faith in the administration’s efforts to bring their loved ones home.

“We have no better friend in Washington or in the White House than President Biden himself,” said Jonathan Dekel-Chen, one of roughly a dozen people who met with Biden and other top aides. “They are willing and ready to do all that they possibly can, by any number of means to get the hostages out.”

The lengthy meeting came as Israel has intensified its fighting in Gaza, after a seven-day truce centered on agreements to free some hostages fell apart last week.

More than 100 hostages were freed during that period, including four Americans.

The White House has worked since to strike another deal to pause the fighting, in an effort to get more hostages out.

The family members declined to say whether they had received an update on their relatives or detail specifics of the private meeting, but said that the administration had kept in constant contact with them since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

“We know that they are working 24 hours a day, and they are going to work through the holidays,” said Liz Naftali, the great aunt of Abigail Edan, who was one of the Americans released during the pause in fighting. “And they are going to do everything they can to make sure that all of our loved ones — real people — come home to us and to the families across the world and in Israel.”

Vice President Kamala Harris will host a gathering of state legislators at the White House on Wednesday, an event designed to roll out new policies from the administration to combat gun violence at the state level.

Harris will announce the Biden administration’s new “Safer States Initiative,” and unveil two new executive actions — the first ones announced by the two-month-old White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.

The initiative outlines steps states should take to combat gun violence, and the White House will work with officials to provide necessary resources for implementation.

The administration is encouraging state officials to establish their own state-level gun violence prevention offices; to invest in gun violence prevention, such as community violence intervention programs; to bolster support for survivors and victims affected by gun violence; to push for safe storage and reporting of lost and stole firearms; and to enact legislation to strengthen background checks and ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

“These are all policies where the White House in this administration have made progress at the federal level,” said Stefanie Feldman, the director of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, in a call with reporters. “And we are going to continue to call on Congress to act but in the meantime, we are going to be working hand in hand with states to advance all these agenda items.”

Harris will highlight two new executive actions from the Department of Justice as part of the announcement. The first provides states with safe storage model legislation, detailing how states can require safe storage of guns — and hold people legally responsible for injury caused by an unsecured weapon. The second offers a model for the reporting of lost and stolen firearms, in an effort to assist law enforcement in investigating and prosecuting crimes.

Both the president and vice president have talked repeatedly about safe storage laws. The majority of K-12 shooters use firearms they’ve obtained from their home or the home of a friend, Feldman noted, and the White House believes these laws can not only reduce school shootings but also suicide by firearm. And for the administration’s push on lost or stolen firearms, a Department of Justice official said it can help local and state law enforcement solve crimes and also “identify recurring patterns,” such as firearms trafficking.

The new actions from the White House gun office come on the heels of a string of mass shootings this fall, adding to the long list of 636 in this year alone, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

While President Joe Biden has signed a slew of executive orders to date, the administration’s latest effort encourages state-level policy changes — a response, in part, to inaction from Congress and increasingly protective rulings on gun possession and ownership from the courts. Many gun safety experts see more appetite for policy changes at the state level in the near term.

“All across the country — in Memphis, in Nevada, in Chicago, all parts of the country — each one of the tragedies that have been in national headlines recently have demonstrated how important it is to have strong federal legislation but also strong state and local legislation,” a senior administration official told reporters, previewing the announcement. “And we certainly want to show up as partners for states to help them advance their efforts to save lives.”

The White House invited a bipartisan group of legislators from across the country to attend Wednesday’s event, the senior administration official said. Legislators from Maine are expected to be in attendance, just months after a shooter killed 18 people in Lewiston.

Shia Kapos contributed to this report. 

President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart last month touted an agreement to resume military communications as a step toward better relations. But almost four weeks later, the two sides appear no closer to ending the 16-month standoff between defense teams.

U.S. officials say a significant hurdle is the fact that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has yet to appoint a new minister of defense to replace Gen. Li Shangfu, who was ousted in October. That means that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has no counterpart to call or meet with — and Beijing has not yet offered up a suitable replacement.

“We certainly urge them to designate somebody soon,” John Kirby, spokesperson for the National Security Council, told reporters. “We’re eager to get those comms going.”

DOD officials say logistical conversations are taking place in order to get the senior leader meetings on the schedule. But some expressed frustration at the lack of progress, blaming stonewalling from the Chinese side.

“We’ve seen a long list of excuses and delays over the past two years,” said one DOD official, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive talks.

Beijing’s foot-dragging in resuming high level military communications adds a dangerous level of instability to an already fraught relationship. Even before Beijing cut those links, U.S.-China military communications systems were highly unreliable. Their absence at a time of rising tensions across the Taiwan Strait — including Chinese air and naval harassment across the median line separating Taiwan and China — deprives Washington and Beijing of reliable high-level channels essential to de-escalating encounters between their militaries.

Beijing has also ramped up aggressive naval challenges of Philippine vessels in Manila’s waters in the South China Sea, prompting the State Department to warn on Sunday that the U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty obligates the U.S. to respond to armed attacks on Philippine forces “anywhere in the South China Sea.” That raises the risk of potential miscommunication that could fuel a dangerous U.S.-China military confrontation.

China’s excuses for the delay in re-establishing communications range from sanctions to American support for Taiwan. In August 2022, the Chinese cut off communications between military chiefs as a reprisal for then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. Tensions skyrocketed again in February, when the U.S. shot down a Chinese spy balloon. Before Gen. Li was ousted, the Chinese government refused to set a meeting with Austin because Li was under U.S. sanctions.

Beijing’s reluctance to reconnect high level military contacts contradicts its public messaging on the need to stabilize U.S.-China ties. The U.S. should “work with China to implement the common understanding reached by the two heads of state in San Francisco … and take concrete actions to maintain the momentum of stability and improvement of China-US relations,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns this month.

In response to questions for this article, a Chinese embassy spokesperson said the office had no new information to offer.

“China attaches great importance to military-to-military relations with the United States, and the Chinese armed forces are willing to work with the United States to earnestly implement the consensus reached by the two Presidents,” Liu Pengyu said.

Ely Ratner, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific affairs, said the two sides are in discussions about “what that schedule of engagement is going to look like and what the sequencing is going to be.”

At the very latest, the talks will happen within months, Ratner said at an event in Washington last week.

“We have underscored many times the importance of ensuring that senior leader level communication continues to mitigate and prevent miscalculation,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters on Tuesday, noting that DOD’s defense attache and policy team are working to coordinate the meetings.

Some DOD officials indicated that lower-level commanders are waiting on a meeting with Austin and his counterpart — or whoever the closest official is — before they can resume dialogue with their own counterparts.

“I think you’re going to need to see the top-level talk first,” said Adm. Christopher Grady, vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last week during an event in Washington.

“I’m sure it will start with the secretary of defense first,” said Gen. Charles Flynn, the commander of U.S. Army Pacific, speaking to reporters at the Halifax International Security Forum in November not long after the Biden-Xi meeting. “It’s a couple of days old. So we’ll get the mechanics of it worked out.”

Meanwhile, top military officers have been left hanging. Gen. C.Q. Brown, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent an introductory letter to his Chinese counterpart after he took over the top job in October, saying he was open to a meeting.

Brown did not specify to whom he sent the letter, but China’s Gen. Liu Zhenli is the chief of the Joint Staff Department of the Central Military Commission.

As of Monday, the chair still has not talked to his counterpart, according to a second DOD official.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday warned Israel that international support for its response to the Oct. 7 attack was beginning to fracture, issuing his bluntest public critique yet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the conflict.

Speaking at a closed-door fundraiser in Washington, Biden said that U.S. and European support for Israel was softening in the wake of “indiscriminate bombing.” He also said Netanyahu “has got a tough decision to make” when it comes to his own government, which the president described as the “most conservative” in Israel’s history.

“I think he has to change,” Biden said, but the “government in Israel is making it very difficult for him to move.”

Biden suggested that any sort of long-term solution would not be feasible with Israel’s current government, pointing out that its conservative factions opposed anything “remotely approaching a two-state solution.”

The president’s comments were vague on details. But the context was unmistakably critical. At one point, Biden placed Israel’s current campaign in Gaza in the context of World War II and America’s response to 9/11.

“It was pointed out to me — I’m being very blunt with you all — it was pointed out to me that, by Bibi, that ‘Well, you carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died,’” Biden said, according to a White House provided transcript.

“I said, ‘Yeah, that’s why all these institutions were set up after World War Two to see to it that it didn’t happen again — it didn’t happen again. Don’t make the same mistakes we made at 9/11. There was no reason why we had to be in a war in Afghanistan at 9/11. There was no reason why we had to do some of the things we did.”

Biden has kept in close touch with Netanyahu throughout the conflict but has been reluctant to criticize him publicly, even as some members of the president’s own party have expressed outrage at Israel’s bombing campaign in Palestine that has killed thousands of civilians. For weeks, the White House had argued that the president had more leverage in influencing Netanyahu’s decision making if he publicly embraced him and reserved his critiques behind closed doors.

But Biden’s comments on Tuesday were the clearest sign yet that his relationship with Netanyahu is shifting as the conflict drags into its second month.

Biden has kept in close touch with Netanyahu throughout the conflict but has been reluctant to criticize him publicly, even as some members of the president’s own party have expressed outrage at Israel’s bombing campaign in Palestine that has killed thousands of civilians. For weeks, the White House had argued that the president had more leverage in influencing Netanyahu’s decision making if he publicly embraced him and reserved his critiques behind closed doors.

But Biden’s comments on Tuesday were the clearest sign yet that his relationship with Netanyahu was shifting as the conflict drags into its second month.

Hunter Biden is urging a judge to throw out the gun charges he faces, citing a deal his team negotiated with the Justice Department this summer.

The Justice Department has said that deal, which included language protecting him from criminal charges, was never finalized. But Hunter Biden’s lawyers argue it is in place and that it shields him from both his criminal gun charges in Delaware and a new set of criminal tax charges that prosecutors brought against him in California last week.

Lawyers for the president’s son made the argument Monday as part of a series of motions asking U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika to throw out the gun case, in which Hunter Biden is charged with illegally owning a gun as a drug user and lying on a federal gun purchase form. His lawyers also argued that the federal ban on drug users possessing firearms violates the Second Amendment, that the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden broke the Justice Department’s own rules and that the case is a “selective and vindictive prosecution” stoked by Republican pressure.

In June, federal prosecutors, led by Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, reached a two-part deal with Hunter Biden that would have resulted in his pleading guilty to two tax misdemeanors and his entering a pretrial agreement intended to lead to the withdrawal of a gun charge. Hunter Biden and a prosecutor on Weiss’ team both signed the pretrial agreement, which included language protecting him from future criminal charges.

But after a contentious July hearing, the plea deal appeared to collapse. In August, Attorney General Merrick Garland made Weiss a special counsel, formally broadening his prosecution authority. Weiss, who was originally appointed to his U.S. attorney post by former President Donald Trump, brought the Delaware gun charges in September and also obtained the recent tax indictment accusing Hunter Biden of failing to pay federal income taxes over a three-year period.

Hunter Biden’s lawyers argued Monday that the pretrial agreement both sides signed in July remains binding.

Hunter Biden’s former lawyer Chris Clark — who negotiated the deal with the Justice Department and then left his legal team after its collapse — entered a statement to the court supporting his former client. Clark said that the deal’s unorthodox two-part structure was the Justice Department’s idea. He also said the deal was written to “protect Mr. Biden from being charged for the same conduct by a possible future Trump-led DOJ.”

In addition to shielding him from the gun charges, Hunter Biden’s lawyers contended that the pretrial agreement “would seem to bar” the recently filed tax charges in California as well.

Aside from the somewhat technical arguments about the status of the pretrial agreement, Hunter Biden’s lawyers lodged aggressive constitutional attacks on the nature of the prosecution and the merits of the gun charges. They cited an August decision from the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that struck down the federal law banning drug users from possessing guns. That decision is not binding in Delaware, but the federal government has asked the Supreme Court to clarify the law’s constitutionality.

Hunter Biden struggled for years with drug and alcohol addiction, which he chronicled in 2021 memoir. The gun indictment alleges he purchased a gun in 2018, a time when he has written that he regularly used crack cocaine.

The White House on Monday declined to weigh in on whether University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill’s decision to step down from her role following a contentious House hearing on antisemitism last week was the right one.

But her choice to walk back remarks she made about pro-Palestinian protests on campus that sparked a flurry of outrage among lawmakers and UPenn donors was “the right thing to do,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said during a gaggle Monday, as President Joe Biden headed to Pennsylvania for an unrelated event.

“The president believes strongly that this is a moment to put your foot down and to ensure we have moral clarity,” Bates told reporters. “I saw that [Magill] issued a statement withdrawing those comments. That was the right thing to do. I’ve seen others have done the same. That was the right thing to do.”

Magill’s resignation over the weekend came just days after a House Education committee hearing last week. She and Harvard President Claudine Gay and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth have faced intense blowback and calls for their resignations after a clip of their responses to questioning from Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) went viral shortly after the hearing.

“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?” Stefanik asked Magill on Tuesday, to which Magill responded: “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.”

Stefanik slammed the response, saying: “Conduct meaning committing the act of genocide? The speech is not harassment? This is unacceptable.”

The other presidents responded similarly to the question, saying that while they personally did not agree with the rhetoric used, they were committed to preserving free speech on campus.

Gay walked back her testimony in a statement the day after after the hearing, and has since apologized for her remarks. “When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret,” she said in an interview Friday with The Harvard Crimson.

President Joe Biden will host President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine at the White House on Tuesday, as negotiations on an aid deal for the country remain stalled in Congress.

Zelenskyy’s visit will “underscore the United States’ unshakeable commitment to supporting the people of Ukraine as they defend themselves against Russia’s brutal invasion,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter.

The meeting is the latest White House effort to apply pressure on Congress, where a deal that would deliver emergency aid to Ukraine seems to have reached an impasse.

In a letter to congressional leaders last week, White House budget chief Shalanda Young warned that inaction before the end of the year on a new round of funding threatens to “kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield.”

Only about a third of Americans polled approve of the Biden administration’s response to the Israel-Hamas war, according to a Pew Research Center survey published Friday.

Among Republican respondents, 51 percent disapprove of the administration’s response, while 28 percent approve. Democrats polled are more split: 44 percent approve, 33 percent disapprove and 22 percent are not sure.

That’s an ominous sign for President Joe Biden heading into the election year. The conflict, which began in early October after the Hamas militant group mounted a deadly surprise attack on Israeli soil, has quickly emerged as one of the biggest foreign policy challenges for the Biden administration.

Divisions on the war are also generational, with younger people expressing deep skepticism of Biden’s response. Respondents under 30 years old were most critical of Biden of all groups: Just 19 percent approved of the White House’s response, while 46 percent disapproved. Older generations were generally less negative in the poll.

That tracks with an increasingly sympathetic sentiment toward Palestinians among young people. About 1,200 Israelis were killed in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, while some 17,000 Palestinians have been killed and nearly two million internally displaced due to Israel’s retaliatory attacks.

The poll was conducted from Nov. 27 to Dec. 3 and includes responses from 5,203 adults across the country who took self-administered online surveys. Its margin of error for the full sample size was plus-or-minus 1.8 percentage points.