Under Oath, Hunter Biden Says He Owns No Car, No Phone, Nothing of Value — Except the Paintings He Sells for $36,000 Apiece.
Hunter Biden’s former law firm wants roughly $17 million in unpaid legal bills. Under oath in February, he told them there’s nothing left to collect. “I don’t have any assets. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a phone,” he testified. “My family doesn’t have any money, and it’s not their debt anyway.”
The transcript, released publicly in late July by Biden’s own legal team, arrived the same week his former firm moved to seize a separate $1.7 million judgment he’d just won — and the same week he did two on-camera media appearances, one of them profane, that a man with no phone would have had some trouble booking.
- $17M roughly what Winston & Strawn says Hunter Biden owes for legal work on his criminal cases and impeachment-inquiry defense — Free Beacon, Fox News
- $36,000 the sale price of the one painting Biden has sold since December 2023, versus a prior average of $54,481 — RedState
- $1.7M a punitive-damages judgment Biden won against Patrick Byrne — immediately targeted for a lien by his former firm — Courthouse News
Winston & Strawn represented Hunter Biden through his two federal criminal cases — the Delaware gun conviction and the California tax guilty plea — plus congressional impeachment-inquiry proceedings and several defamation suits he filed against critics. Lead partner Abbe Lowell billed $1,510 an hour; colleagues billed $795 to $1,945. On June 20, 2025, with the bills unpaid, the firm sued him in D.C. Superior Court for what it later specified as roughly $17 million.
Biden’s current attorney, Barry Coburn, has argued in filings that his client is “effectively broke” and can’t afford the experts discovery compliance would require. The case has stayed contentious: in April 2026 Biden’s team accused the firm of tactics “uncomfortably close to an ad hominem attack”; by July 28, the firm was seeking sanctions, alleging Biden destroyed Signal messages relevant to the dispute.
The February 9, 2026 deposition is the center of the story. Asked about his assets, Biden was direct:
“I don't have any assets. I don't own a car. I don't own a phone. I don't own anything of any value other than — and I don't know the value of it — my paintings which I painted myself.”
Hunter Biden · sworn deposition · February 9, 2026
The art detail cuts against the broke framing on its own terms. Biden has sold paintings for as much as $500,000 apiece since taking up painting publicly in 2021; in the two to three years before December 2023 his average sale price ran north of $54,000. Since then, by RedState’s count, he has sold exactly one — for $36,000. Whether that reflects genuine hardship or a cooled market for the work, the paintings themselves undercut “nothing of value” even as Biden used the same testimony to say he doesn’t know what they’re worth.
In the same window the deposition became public, Biden was doing extensive paid and promotional media. A multi-part interview with DJ Vlad, published in the weeks before the deposition story broke, has him stating his overall debt at “14 to 15 million dollars” on camera and adding, “nobody’s riding to the rescue” — a figure in the same range as, if slightly under, the roughly $17 million the firm says he owes.
The same day the Free Beacon published the deposition story — July 30, 2026 — Biden appeared on the Barstool Sports podcast Macrodosing, telling hosts he’s “not running for anything.” None of this required a car or a phone he doesn’t own; it required, at minimum, willing producers and a booked schedule.
Joe Biden’s December 1, 2024 pardon of his son covers federal offenses from January 2014 through December 2024 — the gun conviction, the tax plea, whatever else might have been charged in that window. It has no bearing on a civil fee dispute filed six months after the pardon was issued. Separately, Hunter Biden had asked the DNC to help cover the Winston & Strawn bills, according to reporting; the DNC confirmed to the New York Post it never paid any of them.
Days after the deposition surfaced, Winston & Strawn moved to place a lien on the one clean asset Biden actually has: the $1.7 million a federal jury awarded him in punitive damages against Patrick Byrne in a separate defamation case, decided July 11, 2026. If the firm collects on that lien, it will be the first real money to move in either direction since the suit was filed — more than a year after the case began.
“No car, no phone, nothing of value” is a sworn statement, made under oath, and it may hold up as a matter of law in a fee dispute. It sits less easily next to a $1.7 million judgment his own lawyers are racing to collect, an art practice still worth $36,000 a canvas, and a media schedule busy enough to include a profanity-laced podcast the same week the transcript went public.
