In the winter of 1995, Hunter Biden was broke but happy. He was 25, recently married and living in a run-down garden apartment in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife, Kathleen, and their baby girl, Naomi. Hunter was deep in debt but on the cusp of graduating from Yale Law School, which would open him up to a world of lucrative opportunities. All he needed to do was pick the right next step.
In her 2022 book, If We Break: A Memoir of Marriage, Addiction, and Healing, Kathleen writes that Hunter promised to eschew his East Coast roots and take a job in her hometown: Chicago. He’d secured well-paying internships at a couple firms in the Windy City, and a news report from the time suggests that one of them had made him an “attractive” full-time offer.
Everything seemed to be going to plan — until Hunter visited his hometown, Wilmington, Delaware, on a frigid day and, according to Kathleen’s book, “met with someone to get career advice.” After the meeting, the plan suddenly changed.
The book doesn’t say who counseled Hunter. But someone with knowledge of the meeting said Hunter met with Charles Cawley, the CEO and founder of MBNA bank and a close political ally of his father, Joe Biden.
Immediately following his conversation with Cawley, who died in 2015, Hunter returned to his dad’s Delaware home. According to Kathleen’s book, he looked dazed. “You won’t believe what just happened,” he told her in the kitchen. “I was offered a job at MBNA.” Hunter then produced a small piece of paper and slid it to his wife across the table. On it was written what she described as a “dollar amount greater than anything I’d ever imagined someone our age earning.”
Hunter lobbied hard for this new, well-paying opportunity. Kathleen, though, was opposed. “I don’t want to live in Delaware,” she explained to him. “I don’t belong there.” But for Hunter, Delaware was in his bones. It was the place where he was born and raised, but also where his mother and 1-year-old sister died in a terrible car crash that nearly killed Hunter and his older brother, Beau.
Hunter ultimately took the job with MBNA. In doing so, he settled into a pattern that would last the rest of his life, taking opportunities and putting himself in positions marked by good money and terrible political optics.
MBNA was then the largest independent credit card issuer in the world, and perhaps the most plum professional gig available in Delaware. Over the course of Joe Biden’s congressional career, MBNA executives showered him with more than $200,000 in campaign donations, the largest amount in his war chest tied to any one company. Sen. Biden was friendly with MBNA officials, including Cawley, and a reliable ally for their issues. (Which would later trouble him with the left when he ran for president.) After investigating these ties, in 1998 conservative journalist Byron York derided Biden in The American Spectator as “The Senator from MBNA,” in part detailing what he termed Hunter’s “mystery job.”
The move to MBNA thrust Hunter into a small, chummy world where it would prove impossible to escape his father’s shadow. He worked full-time at the bank for more than two years, entering its management training program in late 1996 and exiting as a senior vice president in 1998 for a job in Washington at the Commerce Department. In 2001, Hunter left government and co-founded a lobbying firm. That year, MBNA rehired him as a consultant and kept paying him until 2005. Over that same period, his father helped a big bankruptcy reform bill that had been aggressively championed by MBNA and other credit card companies become law. (Joe Crouse, who served as MBNA’s top D.C. lobbyist between 1999 and 2005, told me that Hunter had no role in the bank’s lobbying activities.)
While he had no first-hand knowledge of how or why Hunter was hired, Crouse said “nobody was really surprised” when he was brought onboard. “He was a Biden, and we were in Delaware,” Crouse explained.
Over the intervening years, Hunter’s last name has become both a blessing and a curse, elevating him professionally at the cost of increasingly knotty conflict-of-interest questions. All of this has culminated in a moment of unprecedented scrutiny for Hunter — personal scandals, mounting legal troubles, and congressional investigations over his business dealings that threaten to taint his father’s presidency and could prompt a House impeachment vote. After months of insisting he testify before Congress in public, Hunter recently agreed to sit for a private deposition with the House next month. (The White House and Hunter Biden’s representatives declined to comment for this story.)
Hunter’s stint at MBNA predates the examples of influence peddling that have received the most attention during the current maelstrom. His work there was, by all available accounts, perfectly legal. And yet........