WASHINGTON (AP) — Kathleen Buhle, the ex-wife of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, says she has “total control over my life now,” five years after her divorce, as she opens up about her marriage in a new memoir.
Buhle describes her ex-husband’s drug addiction, her response to his infidelity — including an affair with her widowed sister-in-law — and her challenges integrating into the Biden family. Excerpts of “If We Break” were published Wednesday by People magazine.
In the book, Buhle describes the pain she felt watching Hunter spiral into addiction, even as he denied it, and how “it became my own addiction” to document it. She writes that the couple separated not long after Beau Biden’s 2015 death from brain cancer, when Buhle found a crack pipe in their ashtray.
Buhle said she found out about Hunter Biden’s affair with Hallie Biden, Beau’s widow, in Nov. 2016, after her daughters asked the family’s therapist to tell her.
“I was shocked, but not heartbroken. Heartbreak has already flatted my self-esteem that past year,” she writes. She says her daughters discovered the relationship when searching through texts on Hunter’s phone.
Buhle told People that she and Hunter “come together in our shared love for our daughters,” as they prepare for their eldest daughter Naomi’s wedding at the White House this November.
While Hunter’s finances are under investigation by the Justice Department, Buhle told People that “I couldn’t be of any help,” adding, “I kept my head so deeply buried in the sand on our finances.”
After Biden became President Barack Obama’s vice president in 2008, Buhle writes experiencing “one frequent reminder I wasn’t a true Biden,” when a Secret Service agent informed the family that her then-husband and daughters would receive round-the-clock protection, but not her.
Buhle, in 2019, legally reclaimed her maiden name, which she said once felt like a “crown and shield to me.”
“I was no longer a Biden,” she writes. “I’d handed in my crown and shield because I no longer needed them. Maybe I never had.”
News
By Mark Moore
February 9, 2021 | 10:19am
Joe Biden departs a church service with Jill Biden, and his son-in-law Howard Krein. Joshua Roberts/Getty Images
President Biden’s son-in-law’s investment in a health care company involved in the coronavirus vaccine effort is raising eyebrows in ethical circles after the president pledged that family members would have no influence in government matters, according to a report Tuesday.
Yosi Health CEO Hari Prasad created software that would help make the vaccine process more efficient and sought help from one of his company’s first investors, StartUp Health, which employs Biden son-in-law, Howard Krein, as its chief medical officer, ABC News reported.
Prasad sought help from StartUp Health in December to pitch their software platform to government health officials, the report said.
”Our goal with StartUp Health is to leverage their relationships and work with state and federal agencies,” he told ABC News.
Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and China raised concerns during the 2020 presidential campaign about influence peddling, and now Krein’s involvement in the health care firm poses more ethical questions for the administration.
The Post, in a series of reports in October, revealed how the younger Biden had a seat on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, while his father was vice president in the Obama administration.
Emails found on a laptop Hunter Biden left at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Del., show that the son introduced a top executive at the company to his father less than a year before the elder Biden pressured Ukraine to fire a top prosecutor who had investigated Burisma.
“Howard Krein is playing with fire,” Meredith McGehee, executive director of Issue One, a nonpartisan ethics watchdog group, told ABC News. “If he gets too close to that flame — if he is trying to either cash in on his relationship with the president, or he is trying to influence policy — the flame is going to get him. And it is not worth it to him or to Biden.”
In an interview earlier this month, the president vowed that family members will not be involved in foreign policy or government matters.
“We’re going to run this like the Obama-Biden administration. No one in our family and extended family is going to be involved in any government undertaking or foreign policy. And nobody has an office in this place,” Biden said in the interview.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked about Krein at the daily briefing on Tuesday and emphasized Biden’s vow on ethics.
She said Krein was at the White House for the inauguration, adding that the president will keep an “absolute wall between him and any businesses connected with his family members, and as he reiterated just last week, no family member is going to have an office in the White House or be involved in any government policymaking, that applies to his son-in-law and applies to every single member of his family.”
Krein, a noted surgeon from Philadelphia who married Biden’s daughter Ashley in 2012, oversees StartUp Health’s investments in hundreds of companies.
The president has been a supporter of the business Krein started with his brother Steven Krein and tech entrepreneur Unity Stoakes, appearing at corporate conferences and inviting the company’s executives to the White House to meet former President Barack Obama.
Krein also began advising his father-in-law during the campaign in the spring, playing an unofficial role in developing pandemic response plans.
The relationship drew scrutiny at the time because StartUp Health was trying to invest in companies working on products to be used in responding to the coronavirus.
With Biden now in the White House, the questions are getting renewed attention amid the potential for ethical blunders.
“Dr. Krein presents an ethical dilemma because he’s being placed in a position where people want him to deliver access and information that will provide them with a competitive advantage,” Scott Amey, general counsel at the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, which investigates possible conflicts of interest and allegations of waste or fraud in federal government, told ABC News.
“At the same time, Biden has to ensure that family and friends’ private matters don’t merge with official government actions,” Amey said. “This situation will take a good amount of transparency and oversight to ensure that lines are not crossed and that ethics standards are upheld.”
StartUp Health and Krein did not respond to requests for comment from ABC News.
A White House spokesman said the president will maintain “the highest ethical standards for himself, his administration, and those around him.”
“Any implication to the contrary is flatly untrue and unsupported by the facts,” Michael Gwin said.
StartUp Health has touted its Washington connections and has promoted Krein’s travels with Biden to promote cancer research and the former vice president’s speaking appearances at its annual festival.
Krein talked about a White House meeting in a 2015 interview.
“I happened to be talking to my father-in-law that day and I mentioned Steve and Unity were down there [in DC],” Krein said. “[Biden] knew about StartUp Health and was a big fan of it. He asked for Steve’s number and said, ‘I have to get them up here to talk with Barack.’ The Secret Service came and got Steve and Unity and brought them to the Oval Office.”
Filed under Coronavirus , COVID vaccine , joe biden , white house , 2/9/21