You will not be surprised to learn that a January 2019 text message Hunter Biden to sent his daughter Naomi which read “I Hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family [for] 30 years. It’s really hard. But don’t worry unlike [Joe Biden] I won’t make you give me half your salary,” that Republicans claimed was evidence of the now-president personally profiting from his son’s sketchy business schemes was taken out of context, the New York Times reports.
Sad and kind of boring story short, Hunter had claimed to Naomi that when he was in college, Joe told him “you can keep half of the paycheck, but you have to hand over the other half for ‘room and board,'” meaning Joe was encouraging his son to work and would tax him for his college costs. It’s not clear if it was literally half or if Hunter had just been embellishing, but it was him trying to tell his daughter that the money he was pulling in from Burisma wasn’t enough to cover everything for the then-25 year-old Naomi. Hunter was also in the middle of ketamine treatments for his drug and alcohol addiction at the time and simply rambling to his daughter via the text message exchange.
Exactly the kind of shit Republicans love to take out of context, which they did when the message was cherry-picked out of the contents of the “Laptop from Hell” by the MAGA media industrial complex. “I started crying. You really can’t make sense of these texts because they don’t make sense. It was such a hard time. These were his darkest days because of the drugs. It’s just, like, little bits of trauma and anger coming out,” Naomi told the Times. “Imagine if you read through anyone’s text messages. Of course you can twist these things. And of course they’re not going to be understood by everybody, because there’s a lot of personal nuances and inferences.”