Hunter Biden news – live: I was drinking myself to death, says president’s son as addiction memoir released

Let’s take a look at some of the key passages in Beautiful Things in detail.

First up, here’s Namita Singh on what the president’s son has to say about his short-lived affair with Hallie Biden following Beau’s death from a brain tumour in 2015.

The president’s disgraced former attorney (once considered “America’s mayor”), who flew to Ukraine in spring 2018 in search of “evidence” to support his ludicrous Hunter Biden conspiracy theory cottage industry, is already out there attacking his new addiction memoir.

Another Trump crony, ex-US ambassador to Germany and acting national intelligence director Richard Grenell, has also been on the attack.

CNN’s media pundit Brian Stelter, no stranger to the political biography, is unsurprisingly more positive.

In his latest interview to promote the book with the BBC, Hunter Biden said he had no regrets over serving on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma despite Donald Trump seeking to drum up conflict of interest concerns over his role, given that his father, then the US vice president, was calling out corporate corruption in the country.

Biden did admit that he “missed… the perception that I would create. I know that it is hard to believe with 2020 hindsight how I could possibly have missed that”.

“My life is not a tabloid,” he told Mishal Husain for Radio 4’s Today programme of his extraordinary story. “I don’t belong to an administration, I belong to a family.”

He said his book is about “the love of a family and how it saved me,” adding that he took full responsibility for “creating a story… that anyone conscious would know would be a tabloid sensation” and that: “We’re going through two pandemics right now… there’s the pandemic of coronavirus, and there’s a pandemic of addiction too.”

On the death of his brother and its catalytic effect on his drug use, Biden told Husain is sent him to “a really dark, dark place”.

“There’s something at the centre of each addict that’s missing, that they feel that they need to fill… Nothing can possibly fill it. And so you numb yourself,” he said.

“My brother had just died, I’d separated with my wife, I was in an apartment by myself, and I was basically drinking myself to death. It was awful. I mean, grief does funny things. And combine that with addiction and it is a really hard thing to overcome.”

He spoke fondly of his father, saying the president “intuitively knew what to say” and that he expects him to run again in 2024 when he will be 82: “My dad is younger than me in his physical and mental capacity… I don’t know anyone that has more energy.”

“I think what people see in the Biden family is their family. I think that they see all of the tragedy in loss, but they see all the love and sincerity. And I think that they see that we’re not much different than any other family out there,” he added.

The son of US president Joe Biden publishes his new memoir Beautiful Things on Tuesday in which he recounts his long-running battle with drink and drugs, the grief of losing his mother as a child and later his elder brother Beau and the attacks he suffered from Donald Trump and his conspiracy-minded allies.

Here are all the revelations the author has discussed in advance on his extensive media tour to promote the book.

Good morning and welcome to The Independent’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s stark new memoir and the wild world of American politics.