The family and the public career

Joe Biden served in the Senate from January 1973 to January 2009, as vice president from 2009 to 2017 and as president from 2021 to 2025. He has two sons from his first marriage, Beau (1969–2015) and Hunter (born 1970), and a daughter, Ashley (born 1981), with his second wife, Jill. [1][2][3][4]

Most of the business stories involve two people: Hunter, a lawyer and lobbyist turned consultant and board member, and Joe’s younger brother James (Jim), who worked in construction, health care and consulting and was Hunter’s partner in the China venture. Their records, bank accounts and testimony are the core of the 2023–2024 House impeachment inquiry. [5]

Others appear more briefly. Joe’s sister Valerie Biden Owens ran his early campaigns. James’s wife Sara, Valerie’s husband John Owens and Joe’s youngest brother Francis (Frank) were all named in the clemency warrant Biden signed on 19 January 2025, his last full day in office. [6]

On 18 December 1972, six weeks after Biden won his Senate seat, a tractor-trailer hit the station wagon carrying his wife Neilia and their three children. Neilia and 13-month-old Naomi died. Beau and Hunter, then three and two, were hospitalized; Biden was sworn in at their bedside. He has said the grief nearly led him to quit before he started. [1]

For years Biden said the truck driver had been drinking. PolitiFact found no evidence for that. The driver, Curtis Dunn, was never charged; police found Neilia had pulled out from a stop sign into his path. [2]

Beau became Delaware’s attorney general, served in Iraq with the Army National Guard in 2008–2009 and died of glioblastoma in May 2015. Biden has linked the cancer to burn pits in Iraq; the science on that link is not settled. [3][4]