Kathleen Buhle, Hunter Biden’s ex-wife, has revealed that her daughter Finnegan was the first to inform her about Biden’s affair with Hallie Biden, widow of his late brother Beau.
“‘Mom, I need to talk to you,’ Finnegan mumbled through tears,” Buhle wrote in an excerpt from her new book ‘If We Break: A Memoir of Marriage, Addiction and Healing’, recalling Finnegan’s surprise phone call during a visit to a therapist named Debbie in November 2016.
“‘What happened?’ I asked again, so scared. ‘I don’t want to tell you over the phone,’ she said. Three miles later I was at Debbie’s house. I went straight through to the sunroom and found Finnegan curled in a chair, holding a pillow while she wept. I wrapped my arms around her. ‘Everything will be okay. All right?’ I told her. ‘I love you.’ ‘Debbie’, Finny said once we had [daughter] Naomi on speakerphone, ‘can you tell her? We can’t do it’. Debbie looked me in the eye and calmly said, ‘Kathleen, Hunter’s having an affair with Hallie’,” Buhle wrote.
“‘Oh my God’. This was all I said. Was this what shock felt like? ‘How do you know?’ I finally asked. ‘We found his phone’, Finnegan said. ‘There were text messages between them,’ Naomi added,” Buhle wrote, recalling the traumatic experience.
Buhle wrote that she felt a “strange vindication” and “relief” after finding out about the affair, saying it demonstrated that not only was she “not crazy” for suspecting Hunter, but that it was simultaneously “so much worse than I could have imagined.”
Hunter and Hallie secretly struck up an eyebrow-raising relationship in 2016 after the death of Hunter’s 46-year-old brother Beau a year earlier. Beau suffered a lengthy battle with brain cancer before his death after tours of duty as a soldier in Kosovo, Serbia and Iraq – countries that faced extensive environmental damage following US and NATO bombardments using depleted uranium and burn pits.
Buhle, who was married to Biden in 1993, and divorced him in 2017 after years of separation, also recalled in her book how she threw him out of the house in the summer of 2015 after finding a crack pipe in an ashtray.
Hunter’s wife of 24 years said she suffered her “own kind of addiction” while living with Hunter, calling and texting him compulsively and monitoring his credit card purchases, and saying she found “hundreds” of charges to liquor stores and strip clubs despite his promises to her that he was “healthy and sober” and that she was “crazy” for suspecting him.
“I didn’t want to admit, to myself or anyone else, how unhealthy our relationship had become, so my struggle was just one more secret,” Buhle wrote.
Buhle told People Magazine that she had “forgiven” Hunter for lying and cheating on her. “Anger is such a heavy weight to carry and I was in a lot of pain. There was a lot that happened that was very hard for me. And when I made the decision to divorce, I wanted to let go of all of that,” she said.
Elsewhere in the memoir, Buhle indicated that Hunter had “started many ventures” during their marriage, including what she described as a “real estate investment fund” and a “technology company.” She insisted that she didn’t “understand any of it, or what pieces of his businesses actually generated income for us.” She admitted getting the sense that the family was living beyond its means, but stressed that she did “nothing to change it.”
“Hunter and I drove nice cars and had a beautiful home, but we were running fast on that hamster wheel and barely staying on,” she wrote.
Hunter’s finances are the subject of an ongoing federal probe into potential money laundering and tax fraud, with the laptop he left behind in a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019 –dubbed by media as the “laptop from hell,” pointing to potentially illegal “pay-to-play” corruption schemes involving the selling of access to his father while he was serving as Barack Obama’s vice president between 2009 and early 2017.
Hunter has denied any criminal wrongdoing, and expressed confidence that he would be cleared of suspicion by an impartial investigation. His father has dismissed claims of any involvement in his son’s schemes, despite multiple references to “pops” and “big guy” found in Hunter's computer.
Hunter has freely admitted his substance abuse problems, saying in his own memoir published in 2021 that he was “smoking crack every 15 minutes” during a particularly bad patch of his life in the mid-late 2010s.