Hunter Biden told an addiction podcast that his father showed up at his Washington, D.C., residence, where he was living with a crack dealer, in a Secret Service motorcade, raising fresh questions about what the Biden inner circle knew and tolerated during those years.
The 56-year-old former first son, now sober and in the middle of a wide-ranging media tour, described the visits in detail on the Dopey podcast, hosted by David Manheim. Hunter said Joe Biden, then serving as Vice President, came to the house twice, arriving with a convoy of roughly six SUVs and one or two Secret Service agents who stayed at his side. Page Six reported on the episode, which also included Hunter's account of a months-long stay at a Hollywood hotel and his admission that he remained on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma throughout his addiction.
The picture Hunter paints is extraordinary by any standard, and it raises questions that go well beyond one family's struggle with addiction. A sitting Vice President of the United States, accompanied by the Secret Service, repeatedly visited a home where crack cocaine was being used and sold. Nobody in the government apparatus around Joe Biden appears to have intervened, flagged the security exposure, or stopped the visits.
Hunter described the scene at his D.C. home in vivid terms. He had been living with a person he identified only as "Bicycles", a woman he said he had originally sought out to sell him crack and teach him how to smoke it. She later became his roommate.
Joe Biden, Hunter said, would call repeatedly and then drive over with a motorcade he tried to keep as small as possible. Hunter recalled looking out his window and watching the SUVs pull up:
"I'd look out my, you know, window because I'd hear all these cars and you'd see like six SUVs, you know, pull up and my dad get out and walk with one or two [Secret Service] guys because they have to be next to him. And I'd hear a knock on my door, and I'd open it, and, you know... there I would be, and you know [in] all of the obviousness of someone that was, you know, in distress."
Hunter said his father pleaded with him to make a plan. Joe Biden's words, as Hunter recalled them: "Please, like, what are we gonna do tomorrow? What's the plan?" Hunter told Manheim he would respond by assuring his father he had one.
He also said Joe Biden encountered "Bicycles" during at least one of the visits. "I think he ran into her," Hunter told Manheim.
The broader Biden family's post-presidency trajectory has drawn sustained public attention, including Hunter's recent disclosure about his father's spreading prostate cancer. But the podcast revelations reach back to a period when Joe Biden held one of the most powerful and security-sensitive positions in the federal government.
Hunter told Manheim that in 2018 he traveled to Los Angeles and checked into the Chateau Marmont, the storied Hollywood hotel where John Belushi overdosed decades earlier. Hunter acknowledged the grim parallel directly.
Manheim described the trip as a "crack road trip." Hunter did not dispute the characterization. He said he lived in one of the hotel's bungalows for close to two months.
When Manheim brought up Belushi's death at the same hotel, Hunter said the history was on his mind:
"Exactly. Yeah, which was always in like the... forefront of my mind. I mean, I think I went more than anything because I was... like, 'hey, might as well go out with a bang.'"
He went further, saying he was engaged in a slow-motion attempt to end his own life. "I was trying to commit suicide without having the courage to do it in a very direct route," he said on the podcast. "Like I mean, who else does that other than somebody that knows that they want to?"
His 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things, reportedly described him picking parmesan cheese out of the rug at the Chateau and smoking it, believing it was crack. He also wrote in the book that he learned to cook crack while living at the hotel and became, in his words, "absurdly good at it."
After leaving the Chateau Marmont, Hunter said he spent roughly two years living in motels and other locations across Los Angeles, surrounded by what he described as "drug dealers to prostitutes to sex workers." The hotel itself did not comment when contacted.
Manheim asked Hunter a simple question during the podcast: "How did you scrape the money together for it?" Hunter's answer cut to the heart of a controversy that dogged his father's presidency and two impeachment proceedings.
"I never went broke," Hunter said. "Well, I still had the residual. Like for instance, I still was on the board of Burisma."
He then laid out the arrangement plainly. He joined the board of the Ukrainian energy company while Joe Biden was Vice President. He remained on it for three years after his father left office. The position required him to attend four board meetings a year, a schedule he said he managed even at the depths of his crack addiction.
"I took that when my dad was vice president, and then for three years after I was still on the board, and the requirement of the board would be that I would show up for four meetings a year, even when I was a crack addict and out of my mind. I could show up for four meetings a year."
Hunter also claimed he had previously served on approximately 14 boards of "major national and international organizations" and had been "of counsel" at the law firm Boies Schiller. Burisma was dissolved in 2023.
The admission that he held a lucrative foreign board seat, one that became a central issue in American politics, while openly struggling with severe addiction raises its own set of questions. If Hunter could barely function, what exactly was Burisma paying for? The answer has always seemed obvious to critics: access to his father. Hunter's own account on the podcast does nothing to dispel that conclusion.
Hunter has been making the rounds with a range of media figures, sitting down with Tucker Carlson, Bill Maher, Candace Owens, ex-CNN anchor Don Lemon, and YouTuber Andrew Callaghan. The interviews have covered everything from addiction to politics to family. In one recent appearance, Hunter called Merrick Garland his father's "greatest mistake" as attorney general, a striking public rebuke from within the Biden family itself.
The most politically loaded detail in Hunter's account may be the motorcade. A Vice President does not move through Washington without the Secret Service knowing where he is going, who lives at the destination, and what the security posture looks like. If Joe Biden visited a residence where crack cocaine was present, twice, the agents accompanying him would have been aware of the environment.
Hunter himself described the scene as one of obvious distress. He said he opened the door and stood there "in all of the obviousness of someone that was, you know, in distress." He was living with a crack dealer. The Secret Service was feet away.
No one in the Biden orbit has addressed what, if anything, the Secret Service reported about those visits. No one has explained how a sitting Vice President's son could live openly with a drug dealer, in the nation's capital, without triggering any visible law-enforcement response. The questions surrounding the Biden family's internal dynamics have only deepened in recent months, as former allies like Nancy Pelosi have pointed fingers at the Biden inner circle over what they knew and when.
Hunter, for his part, spoke warmly of the staff at the Chateau Marmont who looked after him during his lowest period. "There was a bellman and the guys that parked the cars," he said. "Like I still know those guys to this day because they protected me, and they were kind to me."
The contrast is hard to miss. Hotel bellmen protected Hunter Biden. The question is why the most powerful institutions in the country, the ones surrounding his father, apparently did not. Revelations about Joe Biden's private political calculations during that same era only add to the picture of a family whose public image and private reality ran on separate tracks.
Addiction is a brutal disease, and no one should mock a person for fighting it. But the public has every right to ask hard questions when that person's father was the Vice President, when foreign money kept flowing, and when the Secret Service motorcade parked outside a crack house without anyone in Washington raising an alarm. Sympathy for the struggle does not require silence about the system that looked the other way.
