Hunter Biden doesn’t hold back: “Matt Gaetz giving me shit about addiction? Really?”

Hunter Biden, former President Joe Biden’s only living son, gave a lengthy interview to Andrew Callaghan which aired Monday his Channel 5 on YouTube. The younger Biden laid into those Democratic lawmakers and donors who pushed his father out of the 2024 presidential race with special vitriol for George Clooney, of whom he said “cut the knees out from a sitting president, the most successful president.”

While that may have captured the majority of the attention, he delved into several other topics during the three-hour-long interview. One of those was his drug addiction and the hypocrisy of the Republicans, especially former Representative Matt Gaetz, who used it as a cudgel to hurt then-President Biden.

“Matt Gaetz giving me shit about addiction? Really?”

Hunter Biden addressed the issue of the cocaine found in the White House in 2023, into which the FBI has opened an investigation this year. “I have been clean and sober since June of 2019. I have not touched a drop of alcohol or a drug,” he said, adding, “and I’m incredibly proud of that.”

“Addiction is not an excuse, but it is an explanation,” he shared at another point in the interview in reference to the legal problems he’s faced for his past actions, including being in possession of a firearm illegally and his tax fraud evasion. “There are consequences for people… and I’m still appropriately paying the price… trying to make amends.”

However, he lamented how addicts are treated in society. “I don’t believe that should be a continued… that someone should have to wear a scarlet letter A for the rest of their life,” he explained.

And then there was the hypocrisy of Republicans who called on him to testify before Congress behind closed doors where he was asked about his addiction and alcohol abuse which he found galling. “Matt Gaetz giving me shit about addiction? Really? Of all the people at the table, you’re going to talk to me about my addiction, my alcoholism.”

Gaetz resigned from Congress in November when then-President-Elect Donald Trump said he was going to tap him for the position of US attorney general. At the time he was facing a House ethics inquiry which later found that he had paid tens of thousands of dollars to women for sex or drugs. That information eventually squashed his nomination for a position in the Trump administration.

The former US representative wasn’t the only one Biden had an issue with. “And I said ‘how many of you have had your own experience with alcoholism and addiction?’ Because I knew at least 4 or 5 people in that room, on the Republican side, were in recovery,” he said. “And I knew of three that had been accused, credibly, of being drug users.”

“And I knew that every single one of them had someone in their family that was absolutely facing a serious drug problem,” Biden added.

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