In a Hunter Biden interview on IHIP News, he and host Jennifer Welch have an honest, candid — and at times, hilarious — conversation covering a lot of ground: the pardon, seven years of sobriety, his podcast appearances with far-right figures, and where the Democrats go from here.
But the headline moment comes when Welch asks about the Justice Department’s failure to hold Donald Trump accountable. Hunter doesn’t hedge.
“The single greatest mistake of my father’s administration was the leadership of Merrick Garland,” he says.
The Garland Verdict
Hunter’s argument goes like this. His father restored the post-Nixon wall between the White House and the Justice Department, which meant the January 6 investigation belonged to Garland alone.
And Garland, in Hunter’s telling, treated an attempted coup like a public relations problem to be managed quietly.
“Did you not watch what I watched?” he asks, pointing to a mob beating police officers and hunting lawmakers through the Capitol on live television.
The plan wasn’t even a secret. Leaked audio published by Mother Jones captured Steve Bannon, days before the 2020 election, telling associates of Guo Wengui that Trump would simply declare victory regardless of the count.
Hunter’s point: prosecutors had a premeditated conspiracy on tape, and the DOJ still waited for Congress to do its work first.
Jack Smith wasn’t appointed until the classified documents case forced the issue, and that case landed in Florida instead of Washington.
Welch, who covers the same failure in her upcoming book Not Today, Fascists, agrees: Democrats keep letting Right-wing framing dictate their choices, and the Garland appointment was an example of that instinct.
Why the Pardon Happened
Hunter also gives the fullest account yet of the pardon.
He insists his father meant it when he said he wouldn’t grant one, because Joe Biden still believed in a legitimate judiciary and a Justice Department that answered to the law.
That belief died on a specific day. “The day that he nominated Matt Gaetz to become the next attorney general, my dad was like, you know, all bets are off,” Hunter says.
Then came Kash Patel. Then a cabinet that, in his words, has no plan for governing, only for looting.
What father, he asks, leaves his son in the hands of people who would use him as leverage?
Welch, whose husband is a criminal defense attorney, calls the whole thing a layup: Trump wouldn’t hesitate to pardon his own sons, the pair she cheerfully calls “dumb and dumber.”
Seven Years Sober, and the Smear That Wouldn’t Die
The most human stretch of the interview is about addiction. Hunter has been sober since June 2019, after nine stints in rehab.
Every public torment that followed — the laptop circus, the prosecutions, the humiliation — happened to a man in recovery.
He stopped reading his own coverage to protect that recovery, and only on this podcast tour did he learn how many Americans assumed he was using through his father’s entire presidency.
He wasn’t. Not for a single day of it.
He describes what was done to him as a public pillory: tied to a post, pelted, set on fire.
But the fire went out, the crowd went home, and he was still standing, with a platform he never asked for.
He’s decided to spend it on the roughly 50 million Americans he says are struggling with addiction or fighting for their recovery on any given day.
Addiction, he calls it, is the great connector — it lives in MAGA households and liberal ones alike, and almost nobody talks about it out loud.
Welch talks about it out loud. Her husband is in recovery, and she describes loving an addict as a pain that rips through you precisely because love is supposed to feel good.
It’s why the 2020 debate moment still hits: Trump tried to weaponize Hunter’s addiction on a national stage, and Joe Biden answered with “I’m proud of my son.”
Hunter reveals his father called him beforehand to apologize for what was coming.
Into the Lion’s Den
Hunter also explains his much-discussed decision to sit across from people like Candace Owens and white nationalist Nick Fuentes — a meeting brokered by Channel 5’s Andrew Callaghan that reportedly grew heated, though Hunter says the online rumors of a near-fistfight are false.
His opening question to Fuentes was ‘why are you such a Nazi?’
Fuentes chalked his Holocaust rhetoric up to “edgelording,” a joke taken too far.
Hunter, whose wife and son are Jewish, told him it’s no joke to people carrying generational trauma that stretches back two thousand years.
He’s clear that he isn’t letting anyone off the hook. He just rejects the premise that the Left should be afraid of these rooms while the Right builds massive audiences inside them.
“There’s a Leader”
(Karamccurdy, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Where the corporate wing of the Democratic Party looks at New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and sees the apocalypse, Hunter sees the future.
And Mamdani keeps handing him evidence: the Rent Guidelines Board voted 7-1 in June to freeze rents on roughly a million stabilized apartments, and free childcare began rolling out in his first hundred days.
Promises made, promises kept.
Hunter pairs that with a lesson from his father’s 81 million votes: Joe Biden was as confused about trans issues as anyone his age, and he still appointed trans officials, defended trans people in executive orders, and won anyway.
You don’t have to throw a vulnerable community under the bus to reach rural America. You just have to mean what you say.
The full interview is worth your time. Watch it above, and subscribe to IHIP News for more.
