Kathleen Buhle, ex-wife of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, said she had no control over the family’s finances during her 24 years of marriage, according to her new memoir and first television interview about her marriage.
“It’s embarrassing to say that I ceded all financial control to my husband.”
“I liked the nice things,” she added. “And I didn’t want to think about the cost at which they were coming.”
Buhle was married to Hunter from 1993 until 2017, around the time when Biden’s affair with his late brother’s widow first became public. Buhle, 52, said she doesn’t receive alimony from her ex-spouse.
It was in 2003 when Hunter first returned from a rehabilitation center for his drug abuse problems. He told Buhle that they owed tax money but assured her that he had set up a plan to pay it back.
In the memoir “If We Break,” which goes on sale on June 14, Buhle wrote about the time when they were living in Delaware with three daughters while Hunter commuted to Washington.
“The way that Hunter and I handled money was that whenever I needed any, I called Hunter. More than once my debit card was declined at a store. I'd have to call Hunter to transfer money into my account. Hunter and I drove nice cars and had a beautiful home, but we were running fast on that hamster wheel and barely staying on.”
In a 2019 interview with ABC, Hunter was asked whether he would have been asked to be on the board of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma “if his last name hadn’t been Biden.”
“I don’t know. Probably not. I don’t think there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life. If my last name wasn’t Biden,” he said at the time.
Buhle was evasive when asked whether she agrees with his statement.
“Not entirely. Trying to get someone to parse out what parts of their life, you know, came from their parents is, in my mind, not a healthy exercise,” she said. “So I think he has always acknowledged the benefit and advantage of coming from a prominent family.”
She also sidestepped a question on whether she thinks Hunter had used his family name to “deliverately curry favor or seek profit.”
“I saw someone who loved his father, respected his parents, and was proud to be their son.”
Hunter’s tangled foreign business dealings with China and elsewhere have also been attracting greater scrutiny by Republicans in the past few years.
“That’s what happened here. All we’re doing is replacing the KGB with the Chinese Ministry of State Security. It’s the exact same story and it ought to be setting off the exact alarm bells,” he said.
Buhle said she wouldn’t have anything to say if she was called to testify in the ongoing Hunter Biden investigation.
“I have buried my head in the sand,” she said.
