The name of Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden has appeared among millions of others in the Ashley Madison website hack, but he insists that he wasn’t the one who set up the account with the infidelity-promoting website.
He thinks it could have been created by “one of America’s enemies to discredit him,” according to Breitbart News, which quoted him contending it could have been due to his service on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
The business executive, whose full name is Robert Hunter Biden, is one of Joe Biden’s closest advisers as the vice president considers launching a presidential campaign, the report said.
But he has stated he’s not the “Robert Biden,” the fan of “anything goes” with women, who appeared on the Ashley Madison website, which promotes infidelity with the slogan “Life’s short, have an affair.”
Its computers were hacked, and millions of names, credit-card numbers and addresses have been appearing online.
“I am certain that the account in question is not mine,” Hunter Biden said in a statement. “This account was clearly set up by someone else without my knowledge and I first learned about the account in question from the media.”
He said he doesn’t use the email address listed “as I became aware that this email account may have been compromised.”
Find out how many presidents Vice President Joe Biden has known “intimately,” in “Biden Time.”
“This is unfortunately not the first time that someone has used my name and identity to try to discredit me,” he said.
Breitbart said the “Robert Biden” account was set up with a credit payment a little more than a year ago, in June 2014.
The date of birth, Feb. 4, matches Biden’s, but it made him 10 years younger, with a birth year of 1980 instead of 1970.
Biden said he’s been told “it is very easy to set up an account without someone’s knowledge as there is no requirement that an email address be verified and I am certain that is what happened in this case.”
Biden previously was involved in controversy when he joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a gas company based in Ukraine, just as his father was working to “help Ukraine lessen its dependence on fuel from Russia.”
The Daily Mail of London reported a credit card registered to Biden at his Washington address was used.
The newspaper said the charge was $268.89 on a card listing Biden’s name and home address.
Breitbart said Biden’s representatives have said Hunter Biden’s Twitter account previously was hacked.
Biden, a partner at Rosemont Seneca Partners law firm, is one of two living children of the vice president. His brother, Beau, died of brain cancer in May and sister Naomi died in the same car crash that killed their mother, Jean, years ago.
The vice president, with his second wife, Jill, also have a daughter, Ashley Biden.
Hunter Biden was discharged from the Navy just last year after testing positive for cocaine.
At that time, he released a statement that “it was the honor of my life to serve in the U.S. Navy, and I deeply regret and am embarrassed that my actions led to my administrative discharge.”
The vice president is meeting with top Democrat operatives and donors about whether he should make a run for the Oval Office. The prospect comes at a time when presumed front-runner Hillary Clinton’s numbers are crashing amid the scandal over her possession of classified information on a personal computer email system that was unconnected to the government.
