Every file has its own reading edition, which works without JavaScript. The story and the full timeline follow the list.
- The family and the public career
Joe Biden went from a Scranton childhood to fifty years in national politics. His family went with him through a car crash that killed his wife and daughter, two brain aneurysms, Beau’s death and Hunter’s addiction. Most of the controversies in these files involve particular relatives, so it helps to know who is who.
- Joe Biden’s tall tales
Biden ended his first run for president in 1987 over borrowed speeches and an inflated academic record, and he kept telling stories that did not survive a check: an arrest in South Africa, an uncle eaten by cannibals, a son who “lost his life in Iraq.” Here is each story against the record.
- Jill Biden: the doctorate, the babysitter story and the power behind him
Jill Biden has been accused of faking her title, of being Joe’s teenage babysitter and, after the 2024 debate, of running the show. The degree is real, the babysitter story is false, and her influence in 2024 is well documented, including in her own 2026 memoir.
- Hunter Biden: addiction, the Navy and life after the pardon
Long before the laptop, Hunter Biden’s story was one of addiction. He was thrown out of the Navy Reserve in 2014 after a positive cocaine test, spent years in and out of rehab, and wrote about it in a 2021 memoir. Since his pardon he has sued his critics, moved between Malibu and Cape Town, launched a joke cryptocurrency and talked openly about his father’s cancer.
- Ashley’s diary and Tara Reade
Two of the most explosive personal stories about Joe Biden come from a diary stolen from his daughter and sold to Project Veritas, and from a former Senate aide who says he assaulted her in 1993. The diary theft is a criminal conviction. The Reade allegation has some corroboration, a firm denial and no finding either way, and Reade herself now lives in Russia.
- The Arkansas child
Hunter Biden denied fathering a child with Lunden Roberts in Arkansas until a DNA test proved it in 2019. He has been in court with Roberts ever since, over support, the girl’s surname and his finances, including a 2023 deal that gave the child some of his paintings.
- Burisma: what was Hunter paid to do?
In 2014, weeks after Russia seized Crimea and while his father ran the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy, Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, a gas company owned by a former Ukrainian minister under investigation in three countries. He was paid more than most American directors make in a year, every few months. Even the people who hired him say the name was part of what they bought.
- Did Biden get the prosecutor fired to protect Burisma?
In 2018 Joe Biden boasted that he had told Ukraine’s leaders they would not get a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee unless they fired their chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.” Shokin says he was fired because he was going after Burisma. The record shows the pressure was real and that it was the declared policy of the U.S., the EU, the IMF and a bipartisan group of senators. It also shows the Burisma case had stalled under Shokin.
- The email that started it all: did Joe meet the Burisma man?
The first New York Post laptop story, on 14 October 2020, was built on one email: a Burisma executive thanking Hunter for “an opportunity to meet your father.” The Biden campaign said no such meeting was on Joe’s schedule. Three years later Hunter’s partner Devon Archer told Congress the Burisma executive was at a dinner in Washington that Joe attended.
- “$5 million each”: the FBI informant’s bribery story
In July 2023 Senator Chuck Grassley released an FBI form in which a trusted informant said Burisma’s owner had paid Joe and Hunter Biden $5 million each. It became the centerpiece of the impeachment push. In February 2024 the informant, Alexander Smirnov, was charged with making it up. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years.
- The Ukraine call: Trump, Giuliani and the Bidens
In July 2019 President Trump asked Ukraine’s new president to look into Joe Biden and the fired prosecutor, while nearly $400 million in military aid was frozen. Rudy Giuliani had spent months collecting dirt on the Bidens in Kyiv, some of it from a man the U.S. Treasury later called a Russian agent. The House impeached Trump; the Senate acquitted him. The Burisma concern Trump raised was real; the bribery story behind it was not.
- China: what Hunter’s deals actually paid
Hunter Biden’s China business ran from a 2013 investment fund to a 2017 partnership with CEFC China Energy, a Shanghai conglomerate with ties to the Chinese state, whose chairman later disappeared in Chinese custody. Bank records show millions moving from Chinese companies to Biden family accounts after Joe left the vice presidency. The famous $1.5 billion figure was never Hunter’s money, and no record shows Joe received any of the Chinese payments.
- “10 held by H for the big guy?”
In May 2017 a business partner of Hunter’s proposed splitting a new China venture so that 10% would be “held by H for the big guy?” Tony Bobulinski, the venture’s would-be CEO, says the big guy was Joe Biden and that he met Joe to talk about it. Two months later Hunter sent a CEFC contact a furious message claiming to be “sitting here with my father.” This is the strongest evidence that Joe’s name was being traded on. Whether Joe ever knew or took a share is the part that remains unproven.
- The bank records: $20 million and where it went
House Republicans subpoenaed bank records and traced over $20 million from foreign sources to the Biden family and their associates, much of it routed through intermediary companies. It is the most concrete financial record of the whole affair. It also shows where the money went: to Hunter, James, Hallie and the partners. No transfer to Joe was found.
- Moscow’s mayor’s widow, a Kazakh oligarch and a Romanian tycoon
Beyond Ukraine and China, the bank records show $3.5 million from the wife of Moscow’s former mayor, a $142,300 wire from a Kazakh oligarch that paid for Hunter’s sports car, and three years of payments from a Romanian property developer fighting a corruption conviction. Two of those people dined with Joe Biden at Café Milano.
- “I have never spoken to my son about his business”
Joe Biden said repeatedly that he had never discussed Hunter’s overseas business. Witnesses describe him dropping in on dinners with Hunter’s clients, taking calls on speakerphone, and shaking hands with the CEO of the China venture. Separately, the Bidens earned more than $15 million in two years after he left office, legally, from books and speeches routed through their own companies.
- James Biden: Americore, the checks and the referrals
Joe’s younger brother James took money from a struggling rural-hospital company that its bankruptcy trustee says was promised Middle East investment through the Biden name. Two of his checks to Joe, for $200,000 and $40,000, became Republicans’ evidence that Joe profited. The bank records show both were repayments of loans Joe had made weeks earlier.
- Hunter’s paintings: who bought them?
When Hunter Biden began selling paintings in 2021, the White House said buyers would stay anonymous, even to him. Under oath his gallerist said Hunter knew who bought most of them, by value, and that the biggest buyer was his friend and lender, the lawyer Kevin Morris.
- The laptop from hell: how it got out
In April 2019 a man the shop owner says was Hunter Biden left a water-damaged MacBook Pro at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, and never came back. Eighteen months later its contents were on the front page of the New York Post, three weeks before the election. The device was real, the FBI had had it since December 2019, and Hunter spent years in court with the people who spread it.
- Is the laptop real?
For two years one camp called the laptop Russian disinformation and the other called every file on it gospel. Forensic examinations by the Washington Post and CBS, Secret Service travel records, and finally the Justice Department’s own use of it as evidence settled the main question: it was Hunter’s, and the core data is real.
- The 51 spies who signed the letter
Five days after the Post story, 51 former intelligence officials signed a public letter saying the laptop emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Biden quoted it at the final debate. The data turned out to be real, the letter’s organizer later testified that a Biden campaign adviser set it in motion, and in January 2025 Trump revoked the signers’ security clearances.
- Twitter, Facebook and the FBI: was the story suppressed?
In October 2020 Twitter blocked users from sharing the Post’s laptop story and locked the paper’s account; Facebook slowed its spread while fact-checkers looked at it. Both companies later said they were wrong. The FBI had warned platforms all year about Russian “hack-and-leak” operations while it held the laptop itself, and messages released in 2025 show agents being told not to discuss its credibility.
- Hunter in the dock: the gun, the taxes and the deal that blew up
For five years a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney investigated the president’s son. In June 2023 it looked as if it would end with two tax misdemeanors and no gun conviction. A federal judge balked, the deal fell apart in open court, and a year later Hunter Biden was a convicted felon who had also pleaded guilty to every count of a nine-count tax indictment.
- “I will not pardon him”: the pardon
Joe Biden said repeatedly that he would not pardon his son. Then, on 1 December 2024, three weeks after the election and two weeks before Hunter’s sentencing, he did, for any federal offense from 1 January 2014 onward. It covered the gun and tax cases and everything else from the Burisma years.
- The last-hour pardons for James, Valerie and Frank
In the final hours of his presidency on 20 January 2025, Biden announced preemptive pardons for five relatives: his brothers James and Francis, his sister Valerie, and their spouses Sara Biden and John Owens. None had been charged with anything. The pardons reached back to 2014, the same start date as Hunter’s.
- The IRS whistleblowers and the special counsel
Two IRS criminal investigators who worked the Hunter case for years went to Congress in 2023 to say the Justice Department had slow-walked it and given the president’s son special treatment. Democrats called them disgruntled. Within two years both were advising the Treasury secretary, the federal whistleblower agency had found the IRS acted unlawfully toward one of them, and the government had settled their claims.
- The impeachment inquiry that never impeached
House Republicans spent most of 2023 and 2024 trying to prove that Joe Biden was in on his family’s foreign business. They subpoenaed bank records, deposed Hunter and James, and heard from Hunter’s former partners. Their final report accused the president of impeachable conduct. The House never voted on articles of impeachment.
- Hunter vs. the House
Hunter Biden defied a subpoena for closed-door testimony in December 2023 and instead gave a speech outside the Capitol. Facing contempt, he sat for a deposition two months later and denied, under oath, that his father had ever been involved in his business. Republicans then accused him of lying.
- “A well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”
Biden’s lawyers found classified papers from his vice presidency in a Washington office in November 2022, and the FBI found more in his Wilmington garage, basement and offices. Special counsel Robert Hur found evidence that Biden willfully kept and shared classified material, and declined to charge him, partly because a jury would see “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” That one line did more political damage than the documents.
- The debate that ended a campaign
For two years the White House called concerns about Biden’s age bad-faith attacks and the viral clips “cheapfakes.” Then, on 27 June 2024, a national audience watched him lose his train of thought against Trump. Jill and Hunter urged him to stay in. Twenty-four days later he quit the race.
- Was Biden’s decline covered up?
After he left office the question changed from “is he too old?” to “who knew?” A bestselling book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson said aides had hidden his decline for years. His doctor and two of his closest aides refused to answer House questions, citing the Fifth Amendment. Republicans called it a conspiracy. Biden says he was fully in charge.
- The autopen pardons
Biden signed many pardons and commutations by autopen, including those for his family. Trump has said those pardons are “void” and “terminated.” House Republicans said the president may not have approved some of them. Biden told the New York Times he made every decision himself.
- The cancer diagnosis
On 18 May 2025 Biden’s office announced he had an aggressive prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. People asked at once how a president under constant medical care could have missed it. His office said his last PSA test was in 2014.
- “Biden was executed in 2020”
A long-running internet theory says the real Joe Biden was executed or died and was replaced by a double, a clone or a robot, pointing to photos where his face, ears or height seem to change. It would have stayed on the fringe if the sitting president had not reposted it.
- The cocaine in the West Wing
In July 2023 Secret Service officers found a small bag of cocaine in the White House. Given Hunter’s history, much of the internet assumed it was his. The investigation closed in 11 days without identifying anyone.
- Are the Bidens in the Epstein files?
When the Justice Department released its Epstein files in 2025 and 2026, Congress required a list of every politician and public figure named or mentioned anywhere in them. Ashley, Hunter, Jill and Joe Biden are on it, alongside Beyoncé, Jeff Bezos and Steve Bannon.
- Robert L. Peters and Robin Ware
As vice president, Joe Biden used email accounts under other names, including Robert L. Peters, Robin Ware and JRB Ware. Republicans say he used them to send government information to Hunter. The National Archives has been releasing them slowly in response to lawsuits.
Approved reader comments and ratings are shown on the interactive edition. This plain reading edition does not load them.