Hunter Biden and his new wife Melissa Cohen met with producers to pitch a reality TV show about the family in 2019, according to upcoming...
Hunter Biden and his new wife Melissa Cohen met with producers to pitch a reality TV show about the family in 2019, according to upcoming book Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump.
Author Edward-Isaac Dovere claims that Hunter and his new wife 'spent the summer of 2019 in meetings with producers about a hazy concept they had for a reality TV show to highlight his charity work, which he said would also help soften his father's image.'
Dovere, a political journalist for The Atlantic, writes that one of the producers questioned if his father Joe Biden was okay with the idea for a reality show and Hunter replied, 'I know where the line is. And my dad is understanding of what I am up to.'
The author writes that Joe survived and beat Donald Trump 'almost in spite of Hunter.'
A new book claims Hunter Biden and his new wife Melissa Cohen had meetings with producers to pitch a reality TV show about the family in 2019. Author Edward-Isaac Dovere writes that Hunter believed the show would help 'soften his father's image'
During the campaign, Hunter continued giving high-profile interviews in an effort to help his father's image - to the chagrin of Biden's campaign team.
Yet, the author writes, Hunter 'kept being sure he knew what he was doing.'
The author points to Hunter's 2019 interview on Good Morning America in the middle of the House impeachment hearings.
Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump hits shelves May 25
'The campaign found out he'd recorded [the interview] only when they saw a commercial promoting its airing the morning of the October debate,' he writes.
In the interview, Hunter said he exercised poor judgement in his business deals with Ukraine and China - but emphasized he did nothing wrong in the scandals that had engulfed his father's presidential bid and made the family a political target for Trump.
Then in February 2020, Hunter decided to have a New York Times reporter and photographer visit his art studio for a feature that ran right before the South Carolina primary.
These insights into Hunter's private life were all done without the knowledge of his father's campaign.
But Dovere says that Joe was 'always ready to again trust his son to do it right this time, a la- la- la willful naivete that Biden believed he could, and sort of did, maintain.
And it was a few months after Joe saved a seat for his son at his Philadelphia campaign launch event - which Hunter skipped out on - that he visited producers to pitch his reality TV show.
The author writes that Biden's campaign was 'so weak, so broke, so dysfunctional that it might not have survived at all, had it not been for Trump's fear that he was a sleeping giant instead of Sleepy Joe.'
He goes on to suggest that Trump's impeachable offenses overshadowed the stain Hunter had put on his father's campaign.
The author writes that Joe Biden survived to face Donald Trump 'almost in spite of Hunter'
Hunter's laptop scandal could have been the nail in the coffin for Joe's campaign and it weighed on the president heavily.
'Biden tried to keep himself steeled against it, repeat to himself and to his advisers that this was the cost of running against Trump, that he'd been through much worse, that he was still proud of his son,' the author writes.
Images of Hunter getting high, naked and emotional texts between father and son were revealed on his laptop
'Giuliani said the texts were more proof of the nefarious scheme he was concocting, but to most, this never became more than yet another storyline in the Trump- friendly media's Comic Con–style universe of inside jokes and obscure references that made sense only to obsessive superfans.'
Images of Hunter getting high, naked and emotional texts between father and son were revealed.
And while the Biden camp denied the authenticity of the contents, they were real, according to the book.
In one text, Hunter wrote to Joe from rehab in February 2019 that he was a 'f**ked up addict that can't be trusted, relied upon nor defended,' then added, 'if you don't run [for president] ill never have a chance at redemption.'
A Biden aide is quoted in the book saying, 'We were able to put [the laptop scandal] in a box and have the media treat it like it deserved to be treated— which was like a conspiracy theory, and not like it was Clinton's emails or the crazy parade of accusers at the St. Louis debate.
'We had been preparing the whole ecosystem to respond to some crazy Trump October surprise. And it responded responsibly. That doesn't happen by accident. This all stems from the way we responded on Ukraine.'
Beau famously kept his last name off his uniform when he was deployed to Iraq with his unit while he was attorney general so that he wouldn't get special treatment as the vice president's son.
Dovere, who is a staff writer and lead political correspondent for The Atlantic and its lead political correspondent who has covered Democratic politics for 15 years, touches on Joe's relationship with his late son Beau and the differences between the sons.
'Beau was always special, had an ease about him,' Dovere writes. 'Hunter had the cool air that covered feeling not quite up to it.'
'I'm not sure if people put a lot of weight into who my mom and dad are as much as they focus on whether I'm doing the job they elected me to do,' Beau said in a 2012 interview in Wilmington, halfway through his second term as Delaware attorney general. 'George Bush, who I don't often quote, had a great line. He says he inherited all of his dad's enemies but some of his friends.'
Dovere writes that 'if Beau didn't need Joe, Hunter had spent his life trading on his father's name.
'Joe was protective, always stepping in to help him along. When Biden was in the Senate, Hunter got a job at the Commerce Department. He got an appointment to the Amtrak board of directors. He was a lobbyist who man-aged to attract some heavy- hitter clients who were hoping for help from his sheen.'
In contrast, Beau famously kept his last name off his uniform when he was deployed to Iraq with his unit while he was attorney general so that he wouldn't get special treatment as the vice president's son.
Meanwhile, 'Hunter managed to get a special waiver to join the Navy Reserve at age forty- three and made it a month into his commission as an ensign before testing positive for cocaine. Then he somehow received an administrative, rather than dishonorable, discharge.'
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