Hunter has spent much of his life vaguely trading on his father’s name by working as a lobbyist, working as an executive at a bank that was also a major Biden donor, getting a gig on the Amtrak board he didn’t seem qualified for in any way, and eventually scoring a well-compensated gig on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
Hunter’s work was widely known in Democratic politics. In a New Yorker profile, Adam Entous writes that Hunter met with a private equity manager in China while on an official trip to Beijing with his father. “A senior White House aide told me that Hunter’s behavior invited questions about whether he ‘was leveraging access for his benefit,’ which just wasn’t done in that White House.”
Hunter knew that his conduct was seen as a problem years before during the campaign. As Entous writes:
Hunter had heard that, during the primaries, some of Obama’s advisers had criticized him to reporters for his earmarking work. Hunter said that he wasn’t told by members of the Obama campaign to end his lobbying activities, but that he knew “the writing was on the wall.”
Hunter told his lobbying clients that he would no longer represent them, and resigned from an unpaid seat on the board of Amtrak, a role for which, Hunter said, the Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid had tapped him. “I wanted my father to have a clean slate,” Hunter told me. “I didn’t want to limit him in any way.”
Given his history, Hunter’s seat on a Ukrainian energy board certainly looks like trading on his father’s name.