FIVE members of Joe Biden’s family have been to rehab for drug or alcohol abuse

Five members of Joe Biden‘s close family have been to rehab for drug or alcohol abuse, DailyMail.com can reveal.

The president’s brother Frank, children Hunter and Ashley, his niece Caroline and his late son’s widow who also became Hunter’s lover, Hallie, have all suffered from addiction issues and had spells in treatment centers – some at the orders of a judge. 

In text messages to Hunter, Joe even referred to his son’s addiction as a ‘disease from mommy and me.’

The revelations shed a new personal light on the president’s previous war on drugs, criticizing George Bush Sr’s 1980s War on Drugs for being ‘not tough enough’ and writing punitive laws with harsher sentences for drug crimes when he was head of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Joe Biden himself is reportedly a teetotaler, after seeing the effects of alcoholism on his favorite uncle who he lived with as a child, according to an October 2020 New York Times profile.

The president has previously accused the truck driver involved in the 1972 accident that killed his first wife and daughter, of being drunk at the time, despite the fact that the driver was not charged with a DUI and police found no evidence of drunk driving.

The President’s wayward son became the poster child for drug addiction’s ruinous effects, as his downward spiral into crack smoking and sordid affairs with prostitutes was laid bare last year when images and messages from his abandoned laptop fell into the media’s hands.

But texts on the laptop also reveal that Hallie Biden, his brother Beau’s widow who became his lover after Beau died of brain cancer in 2015, has been to rehab four times, costing over $100,000, some of it allegedly paid for by Joe Biden.

Amid an argument in December 2018 in their rocky and controversial relationship, Hunter texted Hallie saying: ‘You didn’t stay longer than 10 days away from family at any one of the 4 times you went to rehab.’

During the conversation Hunter discussed which rehab center he will be attending, and revealed that the president spent $45,000 on a ten-day rehab stay for Hallie.

‘It’s 3 Months because you have told me and anyone who would listen that I need long term It’s closer. D more accessible to my children and dad then Caron [a Pennsylvania and Florida rehab group] is by far,’ he wrote.

‘It’s much less than the $57,000 I paid for you at [upscale Malibu, California rehab] Passages ($5,700 per day) or the $45,000 Dad paid at Caron (4500 per day you stayed). You don’t [have] to help me with a dime.’ 

Other texts from Ashley, 40, on Hunter’s laptop reveal that she has also had to get sober after falling prey to addiction.

She texted Hunter warning him against his relationship with their brother’s widow, telling him his feelings for Hallie were fueled by his addiction.

‘I have my outpatient program until 8 pm but will call you after…I thought i was ”in love” until I got sober + realized it was all a joke,’ Ashley wrote. ‘This disease is cunning + baffling. And will f*** with you like no other. Now sober- I realized how much damage I did + how much my mind played tricks on me.

‘I ‘loved’ xxxx because he let me use + didn’t bother me about it. Then I got sober + I swear- it’s been the biggest mind f***. I wasn’t truly feeling any of those feelings. It was the drug.’

Ashley angrily referred to Hallie as ‘the most selfish, self absorbed, idiotic woman I know,’ blaming her for enabling Hunter’s addiction.

‘I will never look at Hallie again. She is truly the most selfish, self absorbed, idiotic woman I know. You + I used to talk about it all the time,’ she texted Hunter. 

Ashley herself was arrested in 1999 for possession of marijuana.

The then-18-year-old student at Tulane University in New Orleans was released on a $1,000 bond, and the local district attorney declined to prosecute.

Two years later the president’s daughter was arrested again for underage drinking in Howard County, Maryland. She was issued a bench warrant after she failed to show up to a hearing for the charge.

Ashley later pleaded guilty and was fined $125.

Court records show that later in 2001 she was evicted from her home in New Orleans.

She had a third run-in with the law in August 2002, when she was arrested for allegedly obstructing officers trying to break up a bar fight in Chicago.

She reportedly ‘blocked the officer’s path and made intimidating statements’ after one of the assailants threw a bottle at the police.

In March 2009 an anonymous informant approached the New York Post with a video they claimed showed Ashley snorting cocaine at a party in Delaware that month.

The Post declined to purchase the video but ran a story about it.

The newspaper reported that in the video a woman resembling Ashley snorted lines of white powder on a desk through a red straw, and later shouted ‘Shut the f*** up’ to others in the room.

The Post reported that lawyers who were touting the video for their client claimed ‘At one point she pretty much complains that the line isn’t big enough,’ and that ‘She talks about her dad,’ adding that they had been offered $250,000 for the footage.

Ashley, her family and the White House did not respond to the Post’s requests for comment at the time, and did not respond to DailyMail.com’s current requests for comment. 

Ashley was a social worker in Delaware at the time, and had campaigned for her father.

She went on to become Executive Director of the Delaware Center for Justice, a criminal justice reform-oriented nonprofit, and is now the founder of a social justice-focused clothing company.

Joe Biden’s brother Frank has had multiple alcohol-related driving offences and was ordered by a judge to attend rehab for three months after a 2004 arrest for driving with a suspended license.

DailyMail.com revealed last year that Frank, 67, had dodged paying a bereaved family a $1 million judgement for 20 years after he was involved in an accident that killed their son in 1999.

Frank rented a Jaguar with his friend, and after picking up two women during a night of drinking, they started speeding down Highway 101 in Southern California.

According to court documents from a civil lawsuit over the car killing, then-25-year-old Jason Turton was driving over 80 mph in a 35 mph zone while Frank operated the stick shifter from the passenger seat, when they ploughed into Michael Albano who was crossing the road.

One of the passengers claimed they heard Frank say ‘keep driving’ and Turton fled the scene, telling police someone advised him to, while another passenger in the car said ‘everyone was drinking’.

Albano’s family was awarded a $1 million default judgement after Frank failed to answer their civil case.

Despite earning hundreds of thousands of dollars from business ventures over the next two decades, the president’s brother failed to pay any of the debt until DailyMail.com uncovered the story in February last year.

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Four years after Frank’s car crash, on August 20, 2003, the president’s brother was arrested for a DUI.

He had an open and almost empty 375ml bottle of Popov Vodka in his car, ‘red watery eyes, slurred speech, flushed face,’ and he ‘did not know where he had been or where he came from’, a police affidavit said.

During the stop he gave the police officer his credit card and a handful of change in lieu of his driver’s license and registration and flunked a roadside test, cops recorded.

His license had already been suspended a total of four times. He was given six months probation for the 2003 offence, public records show.

A month later Frank was arrested for petty theft at a Blockbuster in Pompano Beach, Florida.

He was arguing with store workers who called police and when he was searched he had DVDs of ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’ and ‘They’ stuffed down his pants.

‘The defendant’s intention was to exit the store without paying for the above DVDs,’ said one of the arresting officers on scene.

In May 2019 Frank told the Herald-Mail of Hagerstown, Maryland he was 23 years sober, though his DUI arrest records made clear that was untrue.

In a text message to Joe, Hunter accused his father of letting Frank give him and Beau driving lessons ‘when he was more f***ed up than I’ve ever seen a person.’

‘You let Uncle Frankie get be Beau and I driving lessons when he was more f***ed up than I’ve ever seen a person,’ Hunter wrote to Joe.

‘He had Beau go 79 miles p/h from our neighborhood entrance and without breaking ake that left on to Buck Rd. It was actually fun.

‘When I knew Ash was using and told you you let her drive the kids to the Beach and back,’ he added.

The news of Frank’s involvement in the 1999 car crash killing would have brought back devastating memories for the Biden family, as Joe’s first wife Neilia and his 13-month-old daughter Naomi died in a collision with a tractor-trailer in 1972.

A young Hunter and Beau were also in the car at the time, but survived.

Police determined that Neilia, 30, pulled out from a stop sign into the path of the farm vehicle, possibly because her head was turned. The driver, Curtis Dunn, overturned his truck swerving to avoid a collision, then sprinted to the mother and children to give aid.

Though investigators found no evidence of drink-driving, the president has repeated rumors that Dunn was drunk.

During a 2001 speech at the University of Delaware, Joe said a drunk driver crashed into his family, and repeated the story at a public appearance in 2008.

‘A tractor-trailer, a guy who allegedly — and I never pursued it — drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly and killed my daughter instantly and hospitalized my two sons,’ he said.

In 2008, the now-deceased Dunn’s daughter Pamela Hamill demanded Joe apologize for the unfounded allegations.

‘We always felt like our heartstrings were attached to [Biden’s] heartstrings. Now we feel stabbed in the back,’ she told the Newark Post.

Biden has since apologized Hamill. In 2008 his spokesperson said Biden ‘fully accepts the Dunn family’s word that these rumors were false.’

Caroline Biden, daughter of Joe Biden’s other brother, Jim, has also attended court-ordered rehab after a DUI and has struggled for years with addiction.

Friends told the New York Post the 34-year-old went to rehab for alcohol and Adderall addiction while studying at Georgetown University.

In 2009 she was briefly detained by Amtrak police after a dispute over a train fare, and in 2013 she was accused of assaulting a New York Police Department officer who broke up a fight.

She was sent to an anger management rehab the following year.

In 2017 Caroline admitted to spending $110,000 on a stolen credit card in New York, and in January she spent 20 days in rehab and was sentenced to six months’ probation for a DUI after crashing her car into a tree in Pennsylvania.

The arresting officer, Jeffrey Seamans, noted Caroline was driving without a license and ‘had difficulty focusing on the conversation’ while being questioned.

Text messages from July 2018 show her planning a beach getaway with Hunter in Los Angeles where they partied before an upcoming court hearing she had to attend.

‘It would be fun to decide on a place tonight I’m really lonely,’ she wrote. ‘I have a friend Victoria but she is NOT an escort and I don’t know anyone cool w drugs.’

‘I’m not looking for an escort dude! And not looking for a drug buddy,’ Hunter replied. ‘Find me a house.’

He also texted her father, telling Jim: ‘im doing my best to get her to NYC w/o an arrest.’

The two cousins ended up renting a sea view apartment at Surf and Sand Beach Resort in Laguna Beach.

Photos on Hunter’s laptop show them partying and dancing in the seafront apartment lit with psychedelic lights.

Texts show that at the time, Caroline was facing a court hearing and was out of work, but had just turned down a $85,000 job offered by a family friend. 

Caroline also texted Hunter dejectedly telling him she felt unworthy of a job and that she was the ‘untrustworthy black sheep’ of the family.

‘I’m not a fit for the f***ing company,’ she wrote. ‘Casey and missy [Caroline’s cousins] work at coke and Starbucks but I’m untrustworthy black sheep. There’s zero place for me anywhere. 

In a January 2019 text conversation with Hunter, Caroline said, ‘I’m the only person sober in this family. Literally. Not a joke.’

‘True dat. B***hes,’ Hunter replied. ‘They all on something except dad.’ 

In June 2018 Joe Biden wrote to Hunter referring to his addiction as a hereditary ‘disease’.

‘You’ve always made me proud you got the disease from mommy and me but you are strong and courageous with so much more to give,’ he wrote.

In September that year Ashley also referred to addiction as a disease.

‘It is so hard and sad for me to see you in this state,’ she texted Hunter. ‘I [hate] seeing you always angry. At someone. I hate this disease. And how it has taken you from us.’

DailyMail.com obtained a copy of Hunter’s laptop hard drive from former Steve Bannon podcast co-host Jack Maxey.

John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the computer store where Hunter abandoned his laptop, gave a copy of its hard drive to Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani in September last year.

Giuliani reportedly leaked documents and photos from the drive to the New York Post, and also gave a whole copy of the drive to Trump’s former advisor Bannon and his podcast co-host Maxey.

Earlier this year DailyMail.com commissioned top cyber forensics experts Merriman & Associates, who verified the contents of the drive.

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