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  • 2020-10-05 (xsd:date)
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  • Was Hunter Biden Dishonorably Discharged from the Navy? (en)
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  • During the contentious debate between U.S. presidential candidates Donald Trump and Joe Biden on Sep. 29, 2020, Biden referenced an article from The Atlantic where he took a shot at Trump, who supposedly referred to veterans who died in combat as being suckers and losers. When Biden spoke of his own son's military service, the following exchange took place: Joe Biden was speaking of his late son Beau, who as a member of the Delaware Army National Guard was deployed to Iraq in October 2008, where he remained for a year and received a Bronze Star Medal for his service (later passing away of brain cancer in 2015.) Trump, however, tried to shift the conversation to Biden's other son, Hunter, who served in the Navy Reserve, claiming that he got thrown out of the military and was dishonorably discharged for cocaine use. As reported in 2014, Hunter Biden was commissioned as an ensign by the Navy Reserve in 2012, when he was 42 years old: The Wall Street Journal also reported that Biden had received a second Navy waiver because of a drug-related incident when he was a young man, according to people familiar with the matter. Hunter Biden's tenure in the U.S. Navy Reserve was a short one. In October 2014, the news broke that he had failed a drug test for cocaine in June 2013, and he was discharged in February 2014 (we note that it is more common to use the term dismissed instead of discharged for commissioned officers such as Biden, but in practical terms they refer to the same types of action). So, it is true, as Trump claimed, that Biden was discharged from the Navy for drug use. But it is not true, as Trump also claimed, that Biden's discharge was a dishonorable one. As the VA.org website (not affiliated with the U.S. government) observes, the U.S. military utilizes two forms of discharge — administrative and punitive. A dishonorable discharge is a form of punitive discharge: However, Dishonorable Discharges are generally only rendered for the most serious of offenses (e.g., treason, espionage, desertion, sexual assault, murder), not for drug offenses, and they require conviction at a general court-martial, something which did not take place in Biden's case. When news broke of his discharge, Biden acknowledged in a statement that it had been an administrative one: Hunter Biden's discharge was therefore certainly not a dishonorable one, but most likely a general discharge, or an other than honorable discharge: (en)
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