The filing is three words long and nine thousand miles wide. “Mr. Biden lives abroad.” That is the legal description — submitted by Hunter Biden’s former attorneys at Winston & Strawn LLP to a federal court — of the current residential status of the 56-year-old son of the 46th President of the United States.
He lives abroad. In South Africa. Owing $17 million. To the lawyers trying to find him.
Let us appreciate the sheer gravitational pull of this sentence. A man whose father spent four years in the Oval Office — a man who sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, sold paintings to anonymous buyers for six figures, received a presidential pardon on his way out the door, and has been the subject of more federal investigations than most crime families — has physically left the United States of America and relocated to Cape Town, South Africa. The reason, as best as anyone can reconstruct from court filings and podcast interviews, is that he fell “madly in love” with the city. He also can’t pay his lawyers. That part he mentioned less enthusiastically.
The Winston & Strawn filing is the kind of document that makes career attorneys sigh into their coffee. Hunter Biden retained one of the most expensive law firms in Washington to defend him through years of tax investigations, gun charges, and congressional subpoenas. The firm did the work. Hunter didn’t pay. Now the firm is in court seeking “millions” in unpaid fees, and their filing includes the extraordinary detail that their former client has left the country and “cannot pay his current lawyers.”
Cannot pay. Not “will not pay.” Cannot. The man whose family name was worth a Burisma board seat and a $50,000-a-month consulting fee is now, per his own legal representation, broke enough that he cannot cover the bills generated by the legal consequences of the lifestyle that made him need lawyers in the first place.
There is a word for this and the word is “consequences,” but nobody in the Biden family has heard it pronounced correctly in decades.
Cape Town is 9,400 miles from Washington, D.C. It is 9,800 miles from Wilmington, Delaware. It is approximately 10,000 miles from the nearest congressional subpoena server. These are not unrelated facts. Melissa Cohen, Hunter’s wife, is South African. The couple reportedly splits time between Cape Town and “the States,” although the court filing suggests the Cape Town side of that split has recently become more permanent.
South Africa does not have an extradition treaty with the United States for civil debt collection. It does have very nice beaches, a favorable exchange rate, and a legal system that is unlikely to prioritize the unpaid invoices of an American law firm against a client whose father used to run the free world.
Here is the civilizational tell, and it’s worth saying out loud. For a century, the American elite class played by one unspoken rule: whatever you do, you do it on American soil, where the system can eventually catch up to you. The Kennedys stayed in Hyannisport. The Clintons stayed in Chappaqua. Even Nixon stayed in San Clemente. You could dodge, deflect, and delay, but you stayed in the jurisdiction. Hunter Biden broke that rule. He picked up and left. And the message that sends to every other politically connected failson with a legal bill and a passport is: you can, too.
The $17 million is distributed across multiple firms and creditors. The pardon covers the federal criminal exposure but not the civil debts. The paintings haven’t sold in a while. The memoir advance is long spent. And the one asset Hunter Biden still has — the last name — is depreciating faster than a cryptocurrency endorsed by his father’s former staff.
“Mr. Biden lives abroad.” Write that on a sticky note. Put it on your refrigerator. Look at it every April 15 when you’re filing your taxes on time, in the country where you live, paying the bills you owe, to the government that Hunter Biden’s family ran for four years before handing their son a pardon and a boarding pass.
Welcome to Cape Town, Hunter. The weather’s nice. The lawyers are patient. And the rest of us are still here, still paying, still watching.
