On Saturday, Britain’s Daily Mail reported that Hunter Biden’s laptop is a nationally security nightmare, containing contact information for 1,500 powerful or famous people, including the Clintons, most of Obama’s cabinet, and Secret Service officers, all of it protected by this password: “Hunter02.” This security disaster is all on Joe Biden. Despite knowing about his son’s drug problems, Biden still pushed him into business deals and did nothing to secure the critical information he knew his son possessed.

Let me take a moment to discuss Hunter’s drug addiction, which has both private and public aspects. In many ways, Hunter is a tragic figure. He was in a major car accident when he was two, which killed his mother and sister. Significantly, he suffered a severe head injury in the accident, which may have led to his later struggles with drugs and alcohol.

And Hunter has struggled. When you read many of the personal texts and emails from his computer, this is a deeply troubled, unhappy man. Like all such damaged men, he vacillates between delusions of grandeur and an awareness of his terrible failings.

Hunter is also a man who has engaged in debauched and, possibly, morally evil behavior. Despite his addictions, that’s on him. Still, were Hunter a person in a normal situation, those failings, even the moral or criminal ones, would be a matter of local concern, not one of national exposure.

So why am I writing about Hunter if I acknowledge that his failings, no matter how bad, are personal? I have to. Hunter’s dad, Joe, who ostensibly loved him, nevertheless made this fragile, damaged, debauched human being the frontman for the Biden family concerns.

Some might argue that Joe was just trying to help his son by shlepping him all over the world and introducing him to business opportunities with, among others, anti-American Chinese communists or deeply corrupt Ukrainian energy oligarchs. There’s increasingly strong evidence, though, that Joe got cuts from the money flowing to Hunter. Thus, Joe deliberately used his damaged son for his personal profit. That’s obscene.

Moreover, it appears that Joe, by giving his careless son access to corrupt foreigners, anti-American foreigners, along with the inner workings of the American government, created a national security nightmare. It wasn’t only that the Chinese had blackmail material thanks to all the sex and drugs that made up Hunter’s life, it was also that any fifth-grader could hack into Hunter’s computer . . . which brings us to the Daily Mail.

The problem wasn’t just that Hunter, perhaps while high on drugs, abandoned his laptop at a random Mac repair shop in Wilmington. It’s that the computer contained a trove of highly confidential information. The laptop should have gone to a secure government agency for repair, but Hunter couldn’t and didn’t do that.

Here’s just some of what was on the hard drive, according to the Daily Mail, all of it protected by the password “Hunter02”:

• Joe Biden's personal mobile number and three private email addresses as well as the names of his Secret Service agents;
• Mobile numbers for former President Bill Clinton, his wife Hillary and almost every member of former President Barack Obama's cabinet;
• A contact database of 1,500 people including actress Gwyneth Paltrow, Coldplay singer Chris Martin, former Presidential candidate John Kerry and ex-FBI boss Louis Freeh;
• Personal documents including Hunter's passport, driver's licence, social security card, credit cards and bank statements;
• Details of Hunter's drug and sex problems, including $21,000 spent on one 'live cam' porn website and 'selfies' of him engaging in sex acts and smoking crack cocaine;

The Daily Mail quoted IT expert Chris Greany, who said it was “staggering” that no one had encrypted the laptop. That’s entirely Joe Biden’s fault. As Vice President of the United States, with a known drug addict son who got booted from the military, it was up to Biden to make sure that his son wasn’t exposing these secrets to the world. Of course, considering that Biden was carelessly and cruelly using his son, maybe it’s not so surprising that Joe couldn’t be bothered to make sure Hunter was acting responsibly with national security information.

The Daily Mail reproduces just two of the documents giving away phone numbers of people who were at the top of the American government during the Obama administration:

The laptop also contained images of Hunter’s personal information: his passport, social security number, credit cards, driver’s license, and personal writings.

Again, it is a mixture of the tragic and the terrible -- and Joe Biden bears full responsibility for letting someone like this get so close to the upper echelons of the American government. Likewise, he should have acted to protect himself and the Obama administration from the risk of blackmail based upon Hunter acting out his demons. On the evidence, when it comes to the levers of power, Joe Biden was and still is as irresponsible as Hunter.

Image: Hunter Biden endorsing his father. YouTube screengrab.