Hunter Biden, as the second-born son of President Joe Biden, has reaped the benefits of being the son of a powerful politician for his entire adult life, according to public information and data discovered on his old laptop.
The privilege in his adult years started as early as 1988, when he was arrested at the age of 18 for drug possession at the same time that his father, then a senator from Delaware, was pushing for more harsh sentences for drug users, reports The New York Post.
Hunter Biden admitted to the easy treatment in a disclosure made when he was nominated to serve on the Amtrak Reform Board in 2006, commenting that he was "cited for possession of a controlled substance in Stone Harbor, NJ. There was a pre-trial intervention and the record was expunged."
The benefits continued when he applied to Yale Law School in 1993. The dean at the time, Guido Calabresi got a phone call from then-President Bill Clinton, the schools' most powerful alumnus, asking him to accept Biden, who had recently graduated from Georgetown University, according to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Calabresi had refused to use his position as dean to determine admissions issues and told Clinton he couldn't help.
However, the dean met with Hunter Biden and encouraged him to just go to a different law school and transfer to Yale a year later. Biden followed the advice, went to Georgetown University Law for a year, and the next year, 1994, was accepted to Yale.
That was also the year Clinton nominated Calabresi to a federal judge position, but the retired dean, now 89 years old, insists he had nothing to do with Biden's acceptance and does not recall knowing about it when it happened.
Hunter Biden's success kept coming, including in 1996, when as a new Yale graduate, he got a job with the Delaware-based bank MBNA, which also happened to be his father's biggest campaign donor, writes New York Post columnist Miranda Devine in her book "Laptop from Hell."
His first job paid $100,000 a year, plus he got a signing bonus that was not disclosed, Devine writes, and in under a year, Hunter Biden was an executive vice president at the bank.
Then, emails from the laptop show that when MBNA's founder, Charlie Cawley, died in 2015, former Delaware Sen. Ted Kaufman, a close associate of Joe Biden's, invited Hunter to the funeral.
But just a few years later, in 1998, Hunter Biden sought a job with the Clinton administration through William Oldaker, an attorney who had worked on his father's presidential campaign in 1988.
Oldaker, through Commerce Secretary William Daley, got Hunter the job as a "policy director specializing in the burgeoning Internet economy," reports The New Yorker.
Biden was also still collecting money from the bank, however, drawing $100,000 a year for the next five years, Devine writes.
After President George W. Bush took office in 2000, Hunter Biden then went to work with Oldaker in a lobbying shop, followed by several other corporate positions.
By 2006, however, Joe Biden was considering another run for the White House and wanted his son to get out of the lobbying profession.
At that point, James Biden, Hunter's uncle, worked with New York financial advisor Anthony Lotito to purchase the Paradigm hedge fund, according to legal filings. The Bidens were able to use $1 million in funding to buy the hedge fund in 2009 but eventually had to return the money.
Eventually, in 2010, Hunter Biden was hired by the law firm of Boies, Schiller, and Flexner in an "of counsel" position, and earned $216,000 a year, according to an email on his old laptop. The job did not require his presence.
All of these positions took place before Biden's work in Ukraine for the Burisma energy giant, or in China. According to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Biden's work history paints a picture of family corruption that must be investigated by a special counsel that does not answer to the president.