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Hunter Biden's ongoing rehabilitation tour is about to take a hard right turn with an unorthodox sit-down with Nick Fuentes. His conversation with the far-right influencer is slated to premiere on web channel Channel 5 News later this month. The much-discussed interview - which nearly ended in fisticuffs - appears to be part of the former first son's pivot toward life as an edgy but earnest media personality. Or is it more PR spin from Biden, who is rewriting his chaotic personal story to cast himself as a victim of the Republican smear machine?
Biden has been working with an L.A.-based homelessness prevention nonprofit and is starting a foundation for addiction aftercare, since he was disbarred in Connecticut and Washington, D.C. last year following his 2024 conviction on federal gun-possession and tax-evasion charges. He has also spent the past year building a second act as a visual artist.
He's now slowly stepping back into public view, but clearing his name doesn't appear to be his only motive. Last week, he won $1.7 million in a defamation suit against former Overstock CEO and 2020 election denier Patrick Byrne, who'd falsely claimed Biden solicited an $800 million bribe from Iran in 2021. He's fighting the lies, but he's also owning the mistakes. Not that his motives aren't being questioned.
"There's an enormous freedom in owning your own story," Biden told Gavin Newsom last month on the governor's podcast, after the two joked about each other's presidential ambitions. He also defended his appearance on right-wing provocateur Candace Owens' show, telling Newsom he hoped Owens could see the humanity in his situation. "I don't think these are bad people," he explained.
Now a painter rather than an attorney and globe-trotting lobbyist, Biden splits time between South Africa and the U.S. You are most likely to see him, however, working a growing podcast circuit - including Friends Keep Secrets, Armchair Expert and This Is Gavin Newsom and Candace, among them. But it was his August 2025 interview with Channel 5's Andrew Callaghan - where he opened up about his addiction, the laptop scandal and the 2020 election - that set his next move in motion: the two are reportedly teaming up on a podcast, giving Biden a full-time pulpit to talk recovery, politics or whatever he likes.
A month ago, Biden and Callaghan approached Callaghan's publicist, Mitchell Jackson - the former Vice wunderkind turned go-to fixer for mostly right-wing disruptors - about landing a heavy-hitting conversation that could "move the needle" in American politics, a source familiar with the plans told The Hollywood Reporter. It was that same day that Jackson found himself on the phone with Fuentes.
The far-right pundit - who in 2022 finagled a Mar-a-Lago dinner with President Donald Trump, and now commands his growing following of vocal bigots - was looking for an image rehab interview, Jackson said, hoping to explain how his views have evolved past the antisemitic material that built his brand. Who better to arrange it than the publicist behind Owens, the reigning queen of online controversy?
Jackson pitched both camps on staging the interview inside a seedy motel - a wink at the 2019 photos of Biden in the New York Post, where he appeared shirtless and smoking a crack pipe in a motel room. But no Philly-area motel would let them film, so they built a set to match. Biden, Jackson said, had signed off on the concept fully aware of what it referenced. His real motive for sitting with Fuentes, per Jackson, was reach: "The way he explained it was that he wanted to speak with Nick because Nick is one of the most influential people with young men in America. Which is true."
Fuentes commands an unusually devoted audience. His self-styled "Groypers," named for a Pepe the Frog variant, is a symbol embraced by the far-right since roughly 2016. Fuentes has spent years stoking racism, nativism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism, deploying that army with ease, most often against Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA, which Fuentes considered insufficiently "America First."
Jackson believes Fuentes, 28, is now trying to put distance between himself and his past remarks. He's evolved, Jackson argues - he says he never supported violence, never identified as a Nazi, and the "edgelord" trolling of his teenage years isn't who he is now, even if his America First politics haven't moved an inch.
"I went and looked at some of the stuff he said recently on the show. I needed to watch it outside of clips going viral," Jackson said. "It was very clear he's been criticizing his own audience - if anyone would bother to watch, instead of just the clips sent to them by people who hate him."
The interview - already deemed notorious by a press corps that hasn't seen it - premieres this week. Whether it's the swing that launches Biden into the podcast big leagues remains to be seen.
Until this recent run of appearances centered on sobriety and his personal scandal, Biden kept a low profile, communicating mostly through a recently launched Substack and avoiding cameras in the wake of the controversial pardon his father issued on the way out of the Oval Office (after promising he wouldn't). Hunter is back now, and being far more candid than anyone might expect from a scandal-plagued former president's son.
In June, he joined X with an opening line built for virality: "I'm Hunter Biden. You've never actually heard from me." (Never mind that his 2021 addiction memoir, Beautiful Things, became a bestseller once the GOP weaponized it). Since his return to public life, he's leaned into confrontation - sparring with Trump immigration adviser Stephen Miller (he later clarified he'd meant to call Miller "sadistic, infantile" and something cruder, not merely "ugly") and with CNN's Jake Tapper over a jab at stepmother Jill Biden's memoir - while staying self-aware enough to needle himself, too ("I am not posing nude," he told a Playboy writer angling for a Q&A).
Jackson, for one, sees strategy here: Biden is reaching across the aisle in a way Democrats broadly haven't. "I think the Republicans have been much better at finding common ground with people; the Democrats have been much more resistant to doing that," he said. "If the Democrats have a brain, they're going to watch the episode on Friday and send Andrew Callaghan a thank-you note. But I don't know if Democrats have a brain."
Yet there's an entirely different read on Biden's media blitz. In a scathing New York Post column last week, Miranda Devine - author of the data deep dive book, Laptop From Hell - argues that Biden's press tour is really a promotional run for two things at once: a forthcoming documentary and a new, more convenient answer to the question of his infamous laptop. The documentary, which had cameras, follows Biden from 2021 through his 2024 pardon, was produced by Kevin Morris, the Hollywood lawyer and longtime Biden benefactor who loaned him millions of dollars over the same years the cameras were rolling and who has separately bought pieces of Biden's artwork (as he explained when dragged into a closed-door meeting with House Republicans).
The film, Devine writes, posits that the "laptop from hell," with its evidence of the Biden family's Ukraine dealings, among other alleged scandals and all that motel footage, was never a laptop at all, but a database stolen and doctored by Rudy Giuliani, or possibly Russian operatives, or maybe both, then passed off as real with the help of Trump allies and a psychologist who once treated Biden.
The forthcoming documentary is directed by S.R. Bindler, of the 1997 cult favorite and Morris-produced Hands on a Hardbody, and coming soon, per Bindler's website. But last week, Biden sent the stolen-laptop theory wide after previewing the claim in a recent Wired interview promoting his forthcoming book, with posts on X and his Substack.
"They called it the laptop. I will call it that too, although the name is not accurate, the provenance was never established, and no court or forensic examiner ever certified the chain of custody that would have made it evidence rather than theater," he wrote on X, throwing to his Substack, where he writes that "a scandal was constructed, and a laptop was produced to anchor it."
But what about the crackpipe? The motel room trysts? The stolen database does contain real footage of his, he says - the evidence of the years-long struggle with addiction that has become central to his new public persona.
"Twenty years of my life, or a version of it. Messages sent at hours that don't belong to anyone sober. Photographs I would never have taken in daylight," he shared. "It is accumulation - the slow daily work of an addict doing the thing that is killing him because the alternative feels like dying faster."
