Biden Takes the Deal — Leaked Video Sparks Family Shock
Newly reported footage from an unfinished documentary about Hunter Biden offers a rare look at the president's son during one of the most consequential periods of his legal troubles, days after federal prosecutors announced a proposed resolution of tax and gun charges in June 2023.
The footage was reviewed and reported by The New York Post in May 2026. It was filmed by a crew working with Hollywood lawyer and writer Kevin Morris, a close Hunter Biden friend and financial benefactor who spent years documenting parts of Biden's personal life, recovery, art career and legal battles.
One clip is time-stamped June 29, 2023. In it, Hunter Biden appears agitated while speaking by phone with his then-art dealer, Georges Berges, and repeatedly challenges the suggestion that he was somehow protected.
“What are you talking about 'I'm protected'?” Biden says in the clip, according to the Post. He then asks Berges, “Who am I protected by, Georges? Who am I protected by?”
The footage is politically explosive because it was recorded only nine days after the Justice Department publicly announced that Hunter Biden had agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor federal tax offenses and enter a pretrial diversion agreement over a felony firearm charge.
But the clip has to be interpreted carefully. The available excerpt does not establish who had allegedly suggested Hunter Biden was protected, what kind of protection was being discussed, or whether the exchange concerned the Justice Department, the White House, the art market or something else. The strongest defensible conclusion is that the video captures Biden angrily rejecting an apparent claim that he was protected. It does not, by itself, reveal who he believed might have been protecting him or prove that anyone actually was.
The June 2023 agreement itself was real, but descriptions of it as a completed plea deal can be misleading. On June 20, 2023, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Delaware announced that Hunter Biden had agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges for failing to pay federal income taxes for 2017 and 2018. The government also announced a separate diversion agreement addressing his possession of a firearm while he was an unlawful user of and addicted to a controlled substance.
The arrangement never became the final disposition of the case.
When Hunter Biden appeared before U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika on July 26, 2023, the proposed resolution unraveled after the judge questioned the relationship between the plea agreement and the diversion agreement, including disagreements over the scope of immunity Hunter Biden would receive from future prosecution.
The collapse was a turning point. What had initially appeared to be a negotiated end to the investigation instead led to additional charges, two separate federal cases, a jury trial and a second criminal proceeding in which Hunter Biden eventually pleaded guilty without a plea agreement.
That later history is essential context for the leaked footage. Whatever Hunter Biden believed or feared in his Malibu studio on June 29, 2023, the arrangement announced days earlier did not protect him from further prosecution.
In September 2023, federal prosecutors indicted him on three felony gun charges in Delaware. On June 11, 2024, a federal jury convicted him on all three counts connected to his purchase and possession of a revolver in October 2018 while he was addicted to crack cocaine.
The tax case became even more serious. In December 2023, prosecutors charged Hunter Biden in California with nine federal tax offenses, including three felonies and six misdemeanors. The indictment alleged that he failed to pay at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes and spent heavily on drugs, hotels, cars and other personal expenses during years in which he owed substantial taxes.
On September 5, 2024, Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to all nine tax counts. The Justice Department specifically said there was no plea agreement in that case.
He was awaiting sentencing in both cases when his father intervened.
On December 1, 2024, President Joe Biden issued Hunter Biden a full and unconditional pardon. The clemency warrant was far broader than simply erasing the gun and tax convictions. It covered federal offenses Hunter Biden “has committed or may have committed or taken part in” from January 1, 2014, through December 1, 2024, including the offenses prosecuted by Special Counsel David Weiss.
The breadth of that language immediately became one of the most controversial aspects of the pardon. It reached back to the beginning of 2014, the same year Hunter Biden joined the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and extended through the day the pardon was signed.
That timing fueled political accusations that Joe Biden was trying to shield his son from possible future investigations connected to his foreign business dealings. Critics, including Jeanine Pirro and other Fox News commentators, argued that the pardon protected Hunter Biden from exposure extending well beyond the charges for which he had already been convicted.
The pardon unquestionably was broad. What the pardon does not establish is that Joe Biden committed wrongdoing, participated in Hunter Biden's business arrangements or knew that his son had committed other federal crimes during the covered period.
That distinction is especially important because congressional investigations produced evidence that can be cited by both critics and defenders of the Biden family.
Republican-led House committees spent years investigating Hunter Biden's foreign business relationships, taxes, art sales and financial ties to Kevin Morris. Republican investigators argued that Hunter Biden repeatedly benefited from his father's name and access and that the family's business practices raised serious ethical and influence-peddling concerns.
At the same time, those investigations did not establish that Joe Biden personally received money from Hunter Biden's art sales, directed the pricing of his work or used presidential authority to arrange the transactions.
Georges Berges, the New York gallerist who represented Hunter Biden, testified under oath to House investigators in January 2024 that he had never spoken with Joe Biden about pricing Hunter's art and had never spoken with the White House about pricing the work.
Asked whether President Biden had any role in setting the price of Hunter Biden's art, Berges answered no. He also said neither the president nor the administration contacted him to promote or sell the art and that he had no reason to believe Joe Biden received any benefit from the purchases.
That testimony does not eliminate every ethical concern surrounding the art sales. Berges also acknowledged that Hunter Biden's name influenced the market value of the work, and congressional investigators identified politically connected buyers.
One of the most important buyers was Kevin Morris himself.
House investigators reported that Morris purchased $875,000 worth of Hunter Biden's artwork in January 2023 under an unusual financial arrangement. Morris had also provided Hunter Biden with millions of dollars in loans for taxes, living expenses, legal costs and other needs.
Republican investigators later described the amount loaned by Morris as exceeding $6.5 million. Documents and testimony released by the House committees confirm that Morris provided Hunter Biden with multimillion-dollar financial assistance, although public descriptions of the exact total changed as additional loans and expenses were documented.
Morris told congressional investigators that President Biden never asked him to lend Hunter money, that nobody in the White House asked him to do so and that he neither expected nor received a political favor in return.
Those facts make Morris a central figure in Hunter Biden's story without proving that his financial assistance was part of a White House protection scheme.
Morris's relationship with Hunter Biden also extended far beyond lending money. He acted as a lawyer and adviser, bought Hunter's art and funded a long-running documentary project that followed him through the Biden presidency.
According to the Post, Morris's crew filmed Hunter Biden between 2021 and 2024. The project captured gallery events in Los Angeles and New York, scenes connected to Hunter Biden's legal cases and moments from his private life as he tried to establish himself as an artist after years of addiction.
The documentary has not been publicly released in full. That matters because short leaked clips can provide authentic glimpses of a person's behavior while still withholding the context necessary to understand the entire conversation.
The June 29 scene is a good example.
Hunter Biden's appearance is striking, and his repeated question about who supposedly protected him naturally invites political interpretation. But body language and emotional intensity are not evidence of a criminal conspiracy. The clip shows anger and anxiety. It does not identify a protector.
The same documentary footage reportedly shows a more ordinary scene in which Berges examines one of Hunter Biden's paintings while Biden holds his young son Beau and keeps a paintbrush in his mouth.
Berges reportedly studies the work and tells him, “I think it's missing something.” That moment is less politically dramatic, but it illustrates how deeply the film project followed the overlap between Hunter Biden's family life, art career and legal crisis.
Hunter Biden's art career had already become a Washington ethics controversy before the documentary scene was filmed.
The White House initially said a system would be used to prevent Hunter Biden and administration officials from learning the identities of buyers, a safeguard intended to reduce the risk that purchasers could buy expensive art in an attempt to gain political access.
Republicans argued that the arrangement was inadequate and potentially impossible to enforce. Later testimony created additional questions about how the policy operated in practice. Berges testified that he had not communicated with the White House about pricing or administering the supposed ethics arrangement.
The investigation also identified buyers with Democratic political connections, including Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali, who purchased Hunter Biden artwork and was later appointed by President Biden to the Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad.
That sequence generated legitimate questions about appearances and possible conflicts of interest. But publicly released testimony did not establish that the art purchase caused the appointment or that Joe Biden directed the transaction.
Hunter Biden's foreign business career raised even more serious political questions.
He joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company, in 2014 and remained on the board until 2019. The arrangement drew intense scrutiny because Joe Biden, then vice president, was a leading figure in the Obama administration's policy toward Ukraine.
Hunter Biden had legal, corporate and board experience, but he did not have a conventional background in the Ukrainian energy industry. His compensation and family name therefore became central to allegations that Burisma valued access or prestige associated with the vice president's son.
Republican investigators argued that Hunter Biden and other relatives monetized the Biden family name and that Joe Biden sometimes interacted socially with his son's business associates.
However, the congressional inquiry did not establish that Joe Biden changed U.S. policy to benefit Burisma, received proceeds from Hunter Biden's Burisma compensation or took an official action in exchange for money paid to his son.
That is why statements claiming investigators “definitely” proved Joe Biden was involved in criminal business dealings go beyond the public evidentiary record.
Jeanine Pirro's December 2024 commentary should therefore be presented as argument, not established fact.
After Joe Biden pardoned Hunter, Pirro and other Fox News hosts argued that the sweeping clemency proved the president had long understood the danger created by his son's business and legal history. Pirro also focused on the pardon beginning in 2014 and criticized the investigation by Special Counsel David Weiss.
Those were political and legal opinions offered in the aftermath of an extraordinary presidential pardon. They were not judicial findings that Joe Biden participated in Hunter Biden's business deals.
The criticism of the pardon nevertheless had a substantial factual foundation: Joe Biden had repeatedly said publicly that he would not pardon his son, and then reversed himself after Hunter Biden was convicted and before sentencing.
In explaining the reversal, Joe Biden said his son had been selectively and unfairly prosecuted and argued that political pressure had infected the process. The president said he believed Hunter Biden had been treated differently because he was his son.
Critics responded that the pardon itself looked like the very special treatment Biden had previously denied would occur.
The debate became even sharper because the clemency grant was not limited to the cases already adjudicated. Its language protected Hunter Biden from federal prosecution for covered conduct during an 11-year period, subject to the legal scope of the presidential pardon power.
That broad protection is an important fact. It still should not be converted into evidence of specific uncharged crimes without proof.
The leaked documentary footage now adds another piece to this already complicated history.
It shows Hunter Biden at a moment when the public believed his legal case might soon be resolved through a negotiated agreement. He appears angry at the suggestion that he was protected and demands to know who supposedly was protecting him.
Weeks later, the agreement collapsed.
A year later, he was a convicted felon in the gun case and had pleaded guilty to nine tax offenses.
Then his father issued one of the broadest and most politically controversial family pardons in modern presidential history.
Those events make the June 2023 footage historically interesting because Hunter Biden's question - “Who am I protected by?” - was followed by a legal trajectory that included both serious prosecution and, ultimately, extraordinary presidential protection.
The irony is obvious. It should not replace evidence.
What can be said with confidence is that The New York Post reported reviewing unreleased Kevin Morris documentary footage time-stamped June 29, 2023, showing Hunter Biden angrily rejecting the idea that he was protected while speaking with Georges Berges.
The original June 2023 plea-and-diversion arrangement did not survive judicial scrutiny and collapsed the following month.
Hunter Biden was later convicted on three federal gun felonies and pleaded guilty to nine federal tax offenses.
Joe Biden then issued him a full and unconditional pardon on December 1, 2024, covering federal offenses committed or potentially committed from January 1, 2014, through December 1, 2024.
Kevin Morris provided Hunter Biden with millions of dollars in financial support and purchased a large amount of his artwork, while also financing or producing the documentary project.
Hunter Biden's art sales raised legitimate ethics questions and were investigated by Congress. But his gallerist testified that Joe Biden had no role in setting art prices, promoting sales or receiving benefits from the purchases.
Likewise, Hunter Biden's Burisma role created serious appearance and influence concerns, especially because his father was deeply involved in U.S. policy toward Ukraine. Yet the public congressional record did not establish that Joe Biden changed policy or took official action in exchange for Hunter Biden's compensation.
The strongest version of this story therefore does not need to claim that the leaked clip proves a cover-up.
The verified story is already extraordinary: Hunter Biden was filmed privately demanding to know who supposedly protected him just days after prosecutors announced a highly controversial legal agreement; that agreement collapsed; he was later convicted and pleaded guilty in separate federal cases; and his father eventually granted him a pardon broad enough to cover more than a decade of potential federal offenses.
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That sequence deserves scrutiny on its own terms.
The unanswered question in the leaked footage is the same one Hunter Biden asked in 2023: who, exactly, was he talking about? Until the full conversation or additional evidence establishes the context, any confident answer would be speculation.
