Shady business deals, drugs and women: Hunter Biden has lived a turbulent life under two shadows -- that of his father, President Joe Biden, and his older brother Beau, who died of cancer in 2015.

The 53-year-old Hunter Biden's efforts to put his lurid past behind him suffered a setback on Friday as Attorney General Merrick Garland named a special counsel to look into his affairs.

Hunter Biden's legal and personal troubles have made him a vulnerable target for Joe Biden's Republican political opponents and the attacks have ramped up with the Democratic president now seeking a second term in office.

Republicans in Congress have launched multiple probes into business deals Hunter Biden entered into in China and Ukraine while his father was vice president under Barack Obama.

A plea deal Hunter Biden reached with the Justice Department to avoid prison on tax and gun charges fell apart in July and Garland on Friday elevated the prosecutor who brought those cases to special counsel status.

If some see Hunter as the family black sheep, his father has stuck by him.

"My son has done nothing wrong. I trust him. I have faith in him," Joe Biden said recently as Republicans lawmakers embarked on a new investigation.

Alcohol and crack

A graduate of the elite Yale law school, Hunter drifted between jobs in government, banking and lobbying before landing in a family-controlled hedge fund and his own international business consultancy in the late 2000s.

But his life was marred by alcoholism and addiction to crack cocaine and stints in rehabilitation.

Hunter ties his addictions to the car crash that killed his mother and sister when he was three years old and hospitalized him with a fractured skull.

But he also lived in the shadow of Beau, who had a sterling military career and went into politics before being felled by brain cancer in 2015.

Joe Biden frequently speaks publicly about the loss of his elder son, who he had predicted could become president one day.

Meanwhile Hunter rarely got a mention.

Hunter wrote in his memoir that after Beau's death his drug usage only got worse, hitting bottom around the time his father's vice presidency ended in 2017.

His marriage fell apart and he lost custody of their three daughters.

He had an affair with Beau's widow, had a daughter with a woman in Arkansas who later sued him for child support, and then saw his files, emails and lurid photos from his laptop computer made public by his father's enemies.

And he came under investigation by the Justice Department over millions of dollars he earned from his overseas investments.

But if Joe seemed to favor Beau, he defended Hunter when challenged, like during the 2020 presidential race when Trump raised Hunter's drug use and business deals during a debate.

"My son, like a lot people ... had a drug problem,” Joe Biden said on national television.

"He's overtaken it, he's fixed it, he's worked on it. And I'm proud of him. I'm proud of my son," he said.

'Never judged me'

In his 2020 memoir "Beautiful Things," Hunter Biden recounted his days chugging vodka from the bottle, wandering around seedy neighborhoods at night searching for crack, and multiple failed attempts to get clean.

He said that in 2019 he was able to pick himself up after an intervention by his father and his second wife Melissa.

The one thing that helped him, he wrote, was his father's unconditional love.

"He never abandoned me, never shunned me, never judged me, no matter how bad things got," Hunter wrote.

"There were times when his persistence infuriated me -- I'd attempt to fade to black through alcoholism or drug addiction, and then there he was, barging in again with his lantern, shining a light, disrupting my plans to disappear," he said.

Today Hunter says he is clean. He had a son with Melissa, whom he named Beau.

He took up painting, though that brought fresh controversy when unnamed collectors bought his works for prices in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

© Agence France-Presse