Hunter Biden admits he shouldn't have taken Burisma board seat when pressed on accusations related to role

Hunter Biden, son of former President Joe Biden, said in an interview Monday that he should not have taken a job on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Host Dax Shepard said on his podcast, "Armchair Expert," that Hunter Biden was being accused of brokering deals with a Ukrainian oligarch and more, adding, "Certainly your behavior couldn’t have been above board for 15 years while your own desperation was raging."

Shepard asked if there was any validity to some of the accusations regarding Biden's role on the Burisma board.

"Here’s the validity. The validity is that I should never have taken the board seat with Burisma. That’s the validity of it," Biden said.

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Hunter Biden joined Burisma in April 2014 and, at the time, reportedly connected the firm with consulting firm Blue Star Strategies to help the natural gas company fight corruption charges in Ukraine. During the time Hunter Biden was on the board of the company, his father Joe Biden was vice president and was running U.S.-Ukraine relations and policy for the Obama administration.

"It was not with Ukraine. Was not with a foreign government. It was not with an oligarch," Hunter Biden told Shepard on Monday. "I was public about going on the board. I served on 14 other boards before that. I was chairman of the board of the US World Food Program, the largest humanitarian organization in the world. I was vice chairman of the board of the largest railroad company in the world, which is the national passenger rail system, which is Amtrak. I was chairman of the board of the Truman National Security Project. Chairman of the board of the Center for National Policy."

"I was a professor of at Georgetown’s master’s program of the school of foreign service for four years," he continued. "I had my own business in consulting, and I had been in more places in the world than 99.9% of people." 

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Biden argued that he wasn't recruited out of nowhere and that he had legitimate credentials as counsel at Boies Schiller Flexner LLP.

He told Shepard he initially declined a board seat and instead represented Burisma as a lawyer, but after a few months, former Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski persuaded him to join the board. Hunter says the company was under pressure because of Russia’s incursion into eastern Ukraine, where Burisma had natural gas interests, and that the board role was presented to him as public and transparent.

"It obviously turns out to be a mistake. But not because of anything that I did, and not because of anything that my dad did," he said.

The former president's son said there was no proof of him using his dad to advance interests.

"I mean there's a text message in which the board secretary of Burisma says it was nice meeting your dad and I know we were at a restaurant together, and he sat down and there were 10 other people at the table," Biden said. "He was in from Ukraine. I introduced him to my dad and that's it. Now they had an impeachment hearing over that. And so I take responsibility for doing something that could ever cause the perception of that."

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Hunter Biden previously admitted it was a mistake to join the Burisma board in December 2025.