Pressed by a podcast host about years of swirling controversy, Hunter Biden delivered a rare moment of candor this week, conceding outright that joining the board of a Ukrainian energy firm was a misstep he now regrets.
The exchange unfolded Monday on comedian Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert,” where Shepard didn’t pull punches, accusing Biden of cutting deals with a Ukrainian oligarch and questioning whether his conduct had been clean for over a decade.
“Certainly your behavior couldn’t have been above board for 15 years while your own desperation was raging,” Shepard told him during the taped conversation.
Asked point-blank whether any of the long-running allegations against him actually held water, Biden didn’t deflect.
“Here’s the validity. The validity is that I should never have taken the board seat with Burisma. That’s the validity of it,” he said.
That board seat dates back to April 2014, when Hunter Biden signed on with Burisma and, according to reports from the time, helped link the gas company to the consulting firm Blue Star Strategies as it battled corruption accusations on its home turf.
The timing has fueled scrutiny for years: while his son collected a board position, Joe Biden was vice president, simultaneously steering the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy from Washington.
Biden used the podcast platform to draw a hard line between his business role and any government entanglement. “It was not with Ukraine. Was not with a foreign government. It was not with an oligarch,” he insisted.
To bolster his case, Biden rattled off a résumé far beyond Burisma, framing the seat as one item among many rather than a singular, suspicious appointment.
“I was public about going on the board. I served on 14 other boards before that. I was chairman of the board of the US World Food Program, the largest humanitarian organization in the world. I was vice chairman of the board of the largest railroad company in the world, which is the national passenger rail system, which is Amtrak. I was chairman of the board of the Truman National Security Project. Chairman of the board of the Center for National Policy,” he said.
He kept building the résumé case further, citing academic and entrepreneurial work.
“I was a professor of at Georgetown’s master’s program of the school of foreign service for four years. I had my own business in consulting, and I had been in more places in the world than 99.9% of people.”
Far from a political favor handed to an unqualified relative, Biden argued, his Burisma role grew out of legitimate legal work, pointing to his position as counsel at Boies Schiller Flexner LLP as proof of his standing before the board appointment ever happened.
Biden recounted that he turned down the board seat the first time it was offered, opting instead to advise Burisma purely as an attorney.
Only months later, he said, did former Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski convince him to formally join the board, a request tied to pressure the company faced after Russia’s incursion into eastern Ukraine threatened its natural gas operations there.
By his telling, the arrangement was never secretive, but instead pitched to him as an open and publicly disclosed position.
“It obviously turns out to be a mistake. But not because of anything that I did, and not because of anything that my dad did,” Biden said, drawing a clear distinction between regretting the decision and admitting any wrongdoing tied to it.
He also tackled head-on the suspicion that he used his father’s influence to benefit the company, pointing to a specific piece of evidence often cited in the controversy.
“I mean there’s a text message in which the board secretary of Burisma says it was nice meeting your dad and I know we were at a restaurant together, and he sat down and there were 10 other people at the table,” Biden said. “He was in from Ukraine. I introduced him to my dad and that’s it. Now they had an impeachment hearing over that. And so I take responsibility for doing something that could ever cause the perception of that.”
This isn’t the first time Biden has owned the misstep publicly. He made a comparable admission back in December 2025, similarly labeling the Burisma board seat a mistake.
Monday’s podcast appearance adds another chapter to a saga that has shadowed the Biden family for years, with critics continuing to point to the overlapping timeline between Hunter’s business dealings and his father’s vice-presidential duties in Ukraine.
Through it all, Biden’s position has remained steady: regret over the decision itself, paired with a firm denial that either he or his father did anything improper in connection with it.
