Less than a week after Joe Biden formally announced his presidential run, one of the most potentially awkward aspects of his family history—perhaps even more awkward than his predilection for over-enthusiastic hugging—appears to have resolved itself. Page Six reports that Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden has split up with Hallie Biden, the widow of Hunter’s late brother, Beau, ending a two-year-long relationship that began after Beau died of brain cancer.

The devastating loss of Beau, the charismatic attorney general of Delaware and a rising star in the Democratic Party, was perhaps the foremost reason that Joe Biden decided not to run for office in 2016, despite overwhelming popularity and Beau’s reported encouragement. Hunter and Hallie became an item slightly less than two years later, apparently with the Biden parents’ approval, and while Hunter was separated from his wife. “We are all lucky that Hunter and Hallie found each other as they were putting their lives together again after such sadness,” Biden told Page Six in 2017. “They have mine and Jill’s full and complete support and we are happy for them.” It’s unclear what caused the split—sources described the breakup as a private family matter, but “amicable.” (Hunter’s ex-wife and the mother of his three children, Kathleen, whom he divorced in 2017, is reportedly “thriving and looking better than ever and back on the dating scene.”)

Though Biden the Elder was (and remains) the likely front-runner in the 2020 Democratic primary, rumors swirled for months that he might decline to run, in part, because of various family dramas. Hunter Biden was discharged from the military after testing positive for cocaine (he’d already received a waiver for a previous drug-related incident), and in a court filing during divorce proceedings, Hunter’s ex-wife claimed he was “spending extravagantly on his own interests including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations.” (The former couple agreed to settle the divorce in private.) Biden allies and Democratic insiders also feared that Hunter’s former position on the board of a Ukrainian gas company with ties to an oligarch and former president Viktor Yanukovych would be scrutinized. None of which, it seemed, was Hunter Biden’s intent. “You know how some people are both fuck-ups and earnest at the same time? That’s how Hunter is. He’s not a bad guy at all,” a former colleague of Hunter’s told my colleague Chris Smith earlier this year.

Back in January, Hunter told Smith that he didn’t expect his past to factor into his father’s decision. “My father has been a constant source of love and strength in my life. Even though my life has been played out in the media, because I am a Biden, my father never once suggested that the family’s public profile should be my priority,” he wrote. “The priority has always been clear for my dad, as it is, now, for me: Never run from a struggle.”

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