Entous: The accusations mainly began with a conservative researcher named Peter Schweizer, who was the author of Clinton Cash. He had come out with a book in early 2018 that went into what he termed “corruption by proxy.” The idea was that foreign governments that want influence with politicians in the United States would sometimes throw business in the direction of their siblings or family members to try to curry favor with them. Earlier this year, it started to get a little bit more traction with a new twist in the allegations, which was that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, [pushed for Ukraine to dismiss] a prosecutor named Shokin, who was, according to the accusation, investigating Burisma at the time.

And so my assignment was, basically: get to the bottom of it. Is there any “there” there? I gradually decided, “You know what, I’m just going to reach out to Hunter.” And so I sent him an email, and a little bit to my surprise, he said that he’d be willing to talk with me, walk me through everything. And so the story, which began as a “get to the bottom of these allegations swirling in the mainly conservative press,” became something else. It became much more of a personal account about his struggles, not only in business, but also with drugs and alcohol.

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So when he took this job, he didn’t talk to his father in advance. He told me that was part of a long-standing arrangement that he and his siblings had, where they wouldn’t talk to [their father] about these activities. I can understand the criticism of Hunter’s decision to take this position on this board at a moment when his father was overseeing the policy. When you look at it further, particularly when it comes to some of these allegations in the conservative media—did they take the argument farther? What they said was that Biden used the power of the vice presidency, in this case that Ukraine had this prosecutor fired. When I looked into that, I found from talking to senior members of the Ukrainian government, talking to senior advisers to Biden, talking to members of the company in question—I found that the allegation, as best I could tell, was not true. That Biden didn’t use his office to protect his son.

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The basic argument is that foreign governments—the Chinese government, Ukrainian oligarchs—are enriching the kids to influence the parents. It’s not a completely crazy concept. I think that it is legit to raise the question, but [Schweizer] should have looked, in my opinion, a little bit further, to see whether in fact there was any adjustment. What he’s doing in the book is just raising the question. He brings together what he claims are facts but actually are completely unrelated things. For example, Hunter Biden—around the same time as he’s joining the board at Burisma—is going to the White House with one of his business partners, Devin Archer. And the idea is that they must have gone there to meet with Joe Biden to discuss [the gas company].

[Schweizer] didn’t have much of a chance of actually directly speaking to the principals here. So when I asked them, you know, “Hey, what was…the deal with that White House visit?” Archer put his son on the phone with me—maybe he was seven at the time, something like that. His son said he was working on a school project to basically do a model of the White House. When Hunter had heard that, he invited him and cleared him in with the Secret Service to come in there to walk around.

This is something I think a lot of journalists unfortunately tend to do when we don’t understand. We see coincidences and we automatically assume that there must be some nefarious intention there. But if you actually poke a little, if you look a little more closely, you often find that it’s not nefarious. If [Schweizer] had done more human reporting, actually talking to people instead of just looking through calendars and looking at press reports and lining everything up in chronological order—if he had actually talked to people, he would’ve gotten closer to the truth.