Hunter Biden, in the latest salvo in his public relations battle with Congressional Republicans, writes in a new opinion piece that he is the victim of an orchestrated smear campaign meant to take advantage of his struggles as an addict in order to tear down his father. He also takes shots at the federal prosecutor who has charged him with three felonies related to his purchase of a handgun.

In an opinion piece published by USA Today, Mr. Biden describes himself as a proud addict in recovery, and portrays attacks on him as attacks on the millions of American families in a life and death struggle with addiction. He makes no mention, or defense, of his years of questionable business deals with foreign entities that underlie the impeachment inquiry into his father. 

“My struggles and my mistakes have been fodder for a vile and sustained disinformation campaign against [President Biden], and an all-out annihilation of my reputation through high-pitched but fruitless Congressional investigations,” the first son writes. He says that he, like 20 million other Americans, suffers from a deadly but treatable substance abuse disorder. The only difference, he writes, “is that I’m the son of the president of the United States.”

“What troubles me is the demonization of addiction, of human frailty, using me as its avatar and the devastating consequences it has for the millions struggling with addiction, desperate for a way out and being bombarded by the denigrating and near-constant coverage of me and my addiction,” he continues. 

Mr. Biden fils has been accused of being involved in an “influence peddling scheme,” to use the parlance of the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Congressman James Comer, who is leading the impeachment investigation. Since the beginning of the year, the committee has uncovered tens of millions of dollars in payments to the Biden family that originated overseas, much of which went to the first son himself, who aggressively sold the illusion of access to his father, according to his business associate, Devon Archer.

WhatsApp messages uncovered by House investigators show the younger Mr. Biden in 2017 aggressively shaking down a business associate from Communist China, threatening to hold a grudge, and demanding millions of dollars while mentioning that he was “sitting here with my father.” The House impeachment probe has been investigating allegations by a “confidential human source” who told the FBI that the president and his son were both taking multi-million-dollar bribes, which both father and son have denied.

In his USA Today essay, the first son, who says that his daily consumption used to include a bottle of vodka and “as many hits on a crack pipe as possible,” says, with some grandiosity, that the attacks Republicans have levied against him cause damage not only to himself and his family, but also to the millions of people that struggle from addiction. “The weaponization of my addiction by partisan and craven factions represents a real threat to those desperate to get sober but are afraid of what may await them if they do,” he writes.

Mr. Biden has taken a more aggressive tack in his public relations battle against the House GOP in recent months. In July, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene held up enlarged photos of Mr. Biden naked that barely blurred out his genitalia. In his opinion piece, Mr. Biden accuses Ms. Greene of peddling “revenge porn.” He also accuses former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and the exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui of posting “altered” nude photos of him with “editorial creativity,” citing a Mother Jones article in which Mr. Bannon spoke gleefully about publicizing explicit nude photos of Mr. Biden found on his abandoned laptop.  

Shortly after Ms. Greene displayed the nude photos at a Congressional hearing and accused Mr. Biden of sex trafficking, the first son’s legal team filed a complaint with the House Ethics Committee asking that she be reprimanded as she had “lowered herself, and by extension the entire House of Representatives, to a new level of abhorrent behavior that blatantly violates House Ethics rules and standards of official conduct.” 

Before that, in April, Mr. Biden had filed another ethics complaint against Ms. Greene for her social media posts about him. The Georgia Congresswoman’s “unethical conduct arises from her continuous verbal attacks, defamatory statements, publication of personal photos and data, and promotion of conspiracy theories about” the first son, his lawyers argued. 

In his USA Today essay, Mr. Biden makes his first public defense of the felony charges he’s facing in Delaware for lying about his drug use to buy a gun. He refers to his crime as the peccadillo of “possessing an unloaded gun for 11 days five years ago.” 

The gun charges against Mr. Biden stem from a bizarre incident in 2018 when his then-girlfriend Hallie Biden, the widow of his brother Beau, found a handgun in his truck and threw it out in a garbage bin outside an upscale food market in Wilmington, Delaware. The gun, which Mr. Biden had purchased illegally a few days earlier when he signed a form falsely stating that he was not addicted to drugs, eventually made its way to law enforcement. 

Earlier this year, Mr. Biden reached a plea agreement with prosecutors whereby he would avoid a felony conviction on the gun charge by entering a judicial diversion program that involved staying sober. The plea deal collapsed, however, when Mr. Biden’s attorneys demanded that their client be absolved of all other past misdeeds in addition to the gun charge. Mr. Biden was eventually charged with multiple gun felonies, charges, he complains in his USA Today essay, “that appear to be the first-ever of their kind brought in the history of Delaware.” He is expected to go to trial next year and faces a possible prison sentence.