Video News Clips: In Their Own Words

Chuck Todd Wonders If Public Bought ’40-Year Bill Of Goods’ About Biden Being Family Man

Screenshot/YouTube/ The Chuck ToddCast

Former NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd during a Monday podcast wondered whether former President Joe Biden’s decades-long image as a devoted family man may have been a myth.

Biden formally announced his candidacy for the 2020 Democratic nomination on April 25, 2019, despite his son Hunter’s serious drug addiction issues. Todd, on “The Chuck ToddCast,” told “Original Sin” co-author Jake Tapper that he believed Biden’s “original sin” was running in 2020, rather than running for reelection in 2024 as Tapper’s book posits — citing the plight of Biden’s family at the time.

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“So for me, the original sin was running in the first place. Because his family was in crisis. I followed that Hunter Biden [gun] trial soup to nuts,” Todd said. “I read every single transcript. I read all of the testimony. I cannot believe to this day, Jake, that Joe Biden did this to his kids. I just can’t believe that he did it. I can’t.”

A Delaware jury convicted Hunter on three felony gun charges in June 2024 after special counsel David Weiss charged him in September 2023 on three counts pertaining to his purchase of a Colt Cobra revolver in October 2018. Weiss alleged Hunter knowingly possessed the firearm while addicted to drugs and made false statements on the purchase document.

To demonstrate Hunter’s addiction at the time, prosecutors referenced portions of his memoir, “Beautiful Things,” where he details his drug use in 2018, including text messages he sent relating to it.

“I was sleeping on a car smoking crack on 4th street and Rodney,” Hunter wrote in a text from Oct. 14, 2018.

Biden ultimately pardoned Hunter in December 2024 after months of insisting that he would not intervene.

“Look, I mean, you and I covered, for most of our professional lives, the story of Joe Biden was this guy cared about his family so much he commuted home every night from Washington,” Todd added. “By the way, you know what else you could say is this man was so ambitious that after his family went through that tragedy, he commuted every day to work. Like, it’s the same story. It’s all about the narrative. I sit here, I look at this, and I think, were we sold a 40-year bill of goods?”

Biden had three children with his late wife Neilia Hunter, who perished in a car accident in December 1972 alongside their infant daughter Naomi. Following the tragedy, Biden commuted by Amtrak to and from Washington, D.C., almost every day to assist in parenting his two surviving sons, Beau and Hunter in Delaware, according to CNN.

Todd previously criticized Biden as “selfish” for running for the presidency in 2020, again citing Hunter’s gun trial.

“I followed the Hunter Biden trial very closely. I read every transcript, all the testimony … all that was made public … you want to get angry just as somebody, and just all these mixed emotions, you read the Hallie Biden transcript, and that’s Beau’s widow,” Todd said at the time. “And essentially, he turned her into a crack addict. And this was all happening in 2017, 2018.”

“And Joe and Jill Biden were so concerned about their family that they decided to run for president … So when you talk about the word selfish, it’s almost like the word doesn’t — I mean, their decision to run for president put the entire Democratic Party and the United States of America in the position that it’s in now,” he added.