Video News Clips: In Their Own Words

‘Sleazy And Prone To Horrible Decisions’: Jake Tapper Goes Scorched Earth On Hunter Biden

Screenshot/YouTube/Katie Couric

CNN anchor Jake Tapper didn’t hold back when criticizing former President Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s role in his family during an interview with journalist Katie Couric posted Tuesday.

Biden kept offering to testify in Hunter’s federal gun trial in Delaware in June 2024, Tapper’s new book with Axios Reporter Alex Thompson, “Original Sin,” alleges, according to Axios. On “Next Question with Katie Couric,” Tapper said Hunter functioned similarly to a chief of staff for the Biden family, which he characterized as strange, given his history of moral failings and poor choices.

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“It’s bizarre because I think he is provably, demonstrably, unethical, sleazy and prone to horrible decisions,” Tapper said.

“Tell me how you really feel,” Couric quipped in response.

Tapper then recounted one instance of Hunter’s past to illustrate his point.

“Just look at the record: after his brother died, he cheated on his wife with his brother’s widow and then got her addicted to crack,” the CNN anchor said. “That’s just one thing I could say. I don’t have a lot of personal regard for him … I barely have ever met him. I’ve met him like once or twice.”

He also contrasted Hunter with his deceased brother Beau.

“I knew Beau. Beau was a great, upstanding guy. A real loss, for the country too — not just for his family, for the country,” he said. “But Hunter is not that, and the idea of letting him drive the family car, as it were, is just really, really questionable.”

Special counsel David Weiss charged Hunter in September 2023 in relation to his purchase of a Colt Cobra revolver in October 2018 while facing a drug addiction and making false statements on the purchase form. A jury convicted Hunter on all three counts following his June 2024 trial, but the former president pardoned him in December 2024 after months of denying he would do so.

Texts from Hunter’s abandoned laptop showed him fuming at Beau’s widow Hallie after she allegedly threw the gun into a garbage bin. The two were engaged in an affair at the time that commenced after Beau died of cancer in 2015.

Moreover, Hunter begged Hallie to undergo HIV screening about a month before he fathered a child with a former stripper, Lunden Roberts, in 2018. Emails uncovered on his laptop showed that he was “sick scared” of having contracted the chronic illness.

Hallie also testified during Hunter’s trial that he introduced her to crack, which she began using in 2018, CNN reported.

Furthermore, Hunter allegedly influence-peddled  by leveraging his father’s political position to engage in lucrative foreign business dealings.