Hunter Biden, whose conviction on gun and tax charges and subsequent pardon by his father caused a furor on right-wing media, recently sat for a warm, nearly two-hour interview with Candace Owens, a popular right-wing podcaster and conspiracy theorist.
The interview was filmed last week at Ms. Owens’s home in Nashville and released Thursday. It came at a moment when Ms. Owens has joined a small but influential group of conservative voices who have turned on the Trump administration over the war with Iran and the government’s handling of files related to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Mr. Biden has given few interviews since his father, Joseph R. Biden Jr., left office as president. But the younger Mr. Biden found time for Ms. Owens, who has been accused of defamation in recent lawsuits filed by the French president and first lady, and by the former head of security for Charlie Kirk, the prominent right-wing political activist who was killed in September.
Mr. Biden’s appearance with Ms. Owens brought together two figures who find themselves out of step with their longtime parties. Mr. Biden has been fiercely critical of Democrats’ effort to push his father to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race. Ms. Owens says she feels “betrayed” by Mr. Trump.
The genial meeting would have been all but unimaginable during the Biden administration — a period in which Ms. Owens called for the younger Mr. Biden’s imprisonment. But during the conversation, they seemed to find plenty of common ground.
Here are five memorable moments from the unusual interview:
Mr. Biden said cocaine found in the Biden White House was not his.
The conversation began with what Ms. Owens described as a “question for the culture”: whether cocaine discovered in the White House during his father’s presidency belonged to the younger Mr. Biden, who had a decades-long addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine.
The discovery of the cocaine in 2023 caused parts of the White House grounds to be shut down as response workers assessed the substance.
“Was it yours?” Ms. Owens asked.
“No,” Mr. Biden responded, saying that he had been sober since 2019. He later added that if it had been his cocaine, he would not have “forgotten it in a cubby to go into the Situation Room.”
Ms. Owens apologized for past comments about him.
Ms. Owens told Mr. Biden that she felt “terrible” that she had attacked Mr. Biden over content, surfaced by The New York Post at the height of the 2020 election, that was purportedly taken from a damaged computer found a year earlier at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Del.
“Genuinely, I am so sorry,” she said.
Ms. Owens said that at the time she felt “gaslit” by an open letter, signed by 51 former intelligence officials, that suggested the materials might be part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
Mr. Biden said Ms. Owens was “absolutely right,” and that he wished he’d been allowed to speak about the issue at the time, but suggested he could not because the election was approaching.
Mr. Biden said the materials, which included images of his smoking crack in a motel room, showed him as a drug addict. But he said that they did not offer evidence of corruption by his father, as some conservatives argued.
“That was addiction,” he said. “That wasn’t corruption.”
They discussed shared histories of addiction in their families.
Much of the conversation centered on Mr. Biden’s battle with addiction.
“I grew up with tons of addicts in my family,” Ms. Owens said.
She said she felt “guilty” that she had attacked Mr. Biden over his past.
“I just didn’t even consider: He’s a crackhead,” she said. “That’s actually a very relatable thing.”
Ms. Owens said she was touched by Mr. Biden’s defense of his father.
Ms. Owens said her view of the younger Mr. Biden changed long before they met for the interview. She was affected, she said, by his forceful, profanity-laced defense of his father during an interview last year with Andrew Callaghan, a YouTuber.
“I was like, OK, this is just a normal father-son relationship,” Ms. Owens said.
Ms. Owens said she had promised not to push him to say anything critical about his father.
“There’s no way I possibly could,” he said.
Mr. Biden suggested he and Ms. Owens go to the Vatican together.
Ms. Owens and Mr. Biden seemed to bond during the conversation.
“Your audience absolutely trusts you,” an emotional Mr. Biden said. “And the reason that they trust you is because you’ve shown an enormous amount of courage of speaking your mind.”
After Ms. Owens asked Mr. Biden about his Catholic faith, he suggested they go to the Vatican together.
“You should go to confession,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve been to confession.”
