Name a more unlikely duo than Joe Biden’s adult son in recovery and the right-wing conspiracy theory influencer who publicly attacked him for years.
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The right-wing influencer who repeatedly called Hunter Biden a crackhead over the past six years would like to apologize to him.
Candace Owens, the verbal-bomb-throwing conservative podcaster of Brigitte Macron and Charlie Kirk conspiracy theory fame, sat down with former president Joe Biden’s adult son for a podcast interview that was recorded last week but aired Thursday. The nearly two-hour-long interview included a number of mea culpas and brought Hunter Biden to tears.
For years, Owens lobbed attacks against Hunter Biden on social media and broadcast images of him appearing to be using drugs on her podcast.
The younger Biden says he has been sober since 2019 and is speaking to Owens because he feels he has nothing left to fear.
In the new interview, Owens and Biden bonded over their faith and shared deeply personal stories about how addiction impacted their families. Here’s what they discussed:
Hunter Biden sought to defend his father at times during the interview, and Owens disclosed that she pledged not to make him disparage the former president.
“I have already made the pledge, right when I got on the phone with you, that obviously I’m not going to make you say anything bad about your father because that would just be absolutely demonic … Everyone knows my opinions, my political perspectives. They’re already out there. He is your dad.”
Biden responded, “I appreciate it because there’s no way I possibly could.”
In 2024, Hunter Biden was found guilty of gun-related charges in Delaware and pleaded guilty to tax evasion in California.
But they did not discuss Joe Biden’s decision to grant Hunter Biden a full and unconditional pardon, which reversed Joe Biden’s pledge to not use his presidential powers to protect his only surviving son.
Early in the interview, Hunter Biden acknowledged his addiction, telling Owens: “I’ve heard you call me a crackhead many times, and the truth of it is I was a crackhead.”
He said his spiral into addiction to crack cocaine was sparked by the death of his brother Beau who died of cancer at age 46 in 2015. But Hunter Biden decided to get sober a few years later, around the time the laptop scandal forced his addiction into public view, he told Owens.
Owens said she didn’t realize that Biden became sober when his computer’s contents were made public.
“Something broke in me in a good way, which was that I no longer have any fear. … I don’t blame people who are not realizing that I have worked my effing a– off. I mean, in this environment, the best thing I’ve ever done is stay clean and sober through all of that,” Biden remarked, pointing to political attacks that ensued as a result of the laptop scandal.
Biden also said he wanted to publicly defend himself when the controversy was reported by the New York Post and other news organizations in the closing months of the 2020 presidential campaign. The laptop included embarrassing images of Hunter Biden’s drug use, as well as exchanges that critics claimed showed his father benefited from his son’s business deals.
But the timing made it difficult for Biden to speak out, because it was in the closing month of the 2020 presidential campaign, he told Owens.
Biden also vociferously pushed back on bribery allegations brought against him and his father by Republicans.
“Everybody has all this information,” Biden said, referring to the computer data that was made public. “There’s not a single [email or text] in which you’d find that in any way supports the really serious accusations of my father enriching himself somehow, none of it.”
Just as Biden has for years been a target of President Donald Trump’s mockery and personal attacks, Owens — once an ardent Trump ally — has also now become a MAGA persona non grata.
Her continued criticisms of the Trump administration, including Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Trump’s reluctance to release the Epstein files, recently elicited a personal response from the president. Last month, he called her “Really Dumb and mentally ill!”
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Biden, who repeatedly praised Owens in the interview, told her he wanted to be her friend because of her friendship with Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was gunned down at a college event last year. Owens has riled the conservative establishment with conspiracy theories questioning his death.
“I pray to God that by the end of this you think of me as a friend, because if anything were to happen to me, I want you,” Biden said. “ … And the criticism of you for asking questions for someone who was like a brother to you? It’s like what the eff are you talking about?”
Owens also apologized for perpetuating the laptop scandal, saying, “I feel, actually, terrible, realizing that you were finally clean and then it’s just this humiliation ritual over and over again of people putting everything out there and not realizing that. Also, your kids are facing that consequence as well.”
Biden, who teared up when Owens said she was sorry, told her that the apology “means the world.”
Biden also praised Owens for publicly scrutinizing the Trump administration’s handling of files related to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“I listen to you and I go, ‘Right on.’ … You want to find out why they don’t want to release all the Epstein files? All you got to do is look at a picture of Trump standing at his inauguration and look behind him,” Biden said.
When reached for comment for this story, the White House defended the administration’s handling of the Epstein files.
“By releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and calling for more investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement.
When Owens asked Biden what he thought about former vice president Kamala Harris, he demurred, saying that he didn’t know her well.
“I’m not dodging the question,” he said. But he added he didn’t want to dump on the “vice president, because I have no reason to, necessarily.”
Harris’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The interview went live the same day that the Democratic National Committee released a long-awaited autopsy analyzing the party’s failed 2024 presidential campaign. The report argues that the White House, under Joe Biden, did not do enough to set Harris up for political success when she abruptly became the Democratic presidential nominee.
But Hunter Biden has criticized Harris in the past. Last year, he said he was disappointed by what Harris included in her post-2024 memoir. In the book, Harris wrote that it was “recklessness” to leave the incumbent president to decide with then-first lady Jill Biden whether he should have sought reelection at age 80.
“I’d have to admit, it’s personally painful,” Hunter Biden told journalist Tommy Christopher last year, later adding, “I don’t understand why someone would choose the expedient path as it relates to that relationship, their own political expediency.”
The president’s son, who told Owens that he’s currently millions of dollars in debt, sought to defend the sales of his artwork during his father’s time in office. In Joe Biden’s final year in office, The Washington Post reported that the paintings had sold for a total of $1.5 million.
“You know, I did not do any business through the entire four years. I became a painter,” Hunter Biden told Owens, saying that creating art helped to keep him sober. “I’d never sell a painting or offer a painting for half a million dollars in my friggin’ life.”
The art sales, Biden argued, seem quaint when compared to what he described as inside dealing within Trump’s family.
“I think that we all can agree that we need to stop the wholesale murder of a population in Gaza,” Biden said. “Whatever you think about my father’s policies, I always say to people, ‘You know one thing he didn’t do? He didn’t green-light to turn Gaza into a Trump golf course with the maître d’ being Jared Kushner.’”
But Biden’s scrutiny of Washington also extended to liberals.
“Do you think that I’m going to defend the D.C. elite of the left? They crushed my dad … They did everything they could to push him out,” he said. You know why? Because he was never part of that club.”
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