Former First Lady Michelle Obama privately has expressed frustration over how the Biden family largely exiled her close friend Kathleen Buhle after Buhle’s messy divorce from Hunter Biden, two people familiar with the relationship told Axios.
The family tensions — and the former first lady’s disdain for partisan politics — are partly why one of the Democrats’ most popular voices hasn’t campaigned for President Biden’s re-election, the sources said, even as former President Obama has been a willing surrogate.
Michelle Obama also was initially reluctant to campaign for Biden after he became the Democratic nominee in 2020, people familiar with the situation told Axios.
Biden’s team says the relationship between the families is strong, pointing to public displays of camaraderie that continue today. But the sources told Axios that the relationship changed in 2015.
That was when then-Vice President Biden was weighing a presidential run, and President Obama was not encouraging it.
It also was the year Biden’s son Beau died of cancer, setting off years of tumult within the family that included Hunter Biden and Buhle’s divorce in 2017.
This year Barack Obama has attended fundraisers and appeared in videos for President Biden’s re-election effort, but Obama has done so solo, without his popular spouse.
Obama attended a reception at a state dinner for Kenya’s president at the White House in May, without the former first lady.
The former president regularly praises and boosts Biden in posts on X, but Michelle Obama hasn’t posted about Biden’s re-election campaign since he got in the race (she re-posted his announcement).
Instead, she’s largely focused on the non-partisan voter registration group, When We All Vote.
In the fall of 2017, Barack Obama — without Michelle — attended a fundraiser in Wilmington, Del., for the Beau Biden Foundation, a children’s advocacy group.
The fundraiser featured much of the Biden family at a time when Hunter Biden, who was recently divorced from Buhle, was dating Beau’s widow, Hallie Biden.
After the event, the former president privately described the Biden family dynamics there as “weird sh*t,” a person familiar with his remarks told Axios.
Obama’s office initially declined to comment to Axios about the remark, but later denied the former president said it.
Michelle Obama, who had become friends with Buhle during the Obama administration, privately told others that she felt Buhle had been wronged.
Buhle had to deal with Hunter’s drug use and infidelity — and then Biden family members blamed Buhle for some of the salacious details of his behavior becoming public.
Michelle Obama’s absence from the campaign trail to this point in 2024 isn’t just about her relationship with Buhle — it also reflects her longstanding distaste for partisan politics.
Speaking about his daughters at a splashy Hollywood fundraiser for Biden this month, Barack Obama said: “Michelle drilled into them so early that you would be crazy to go into politics.”
The Biden-Obama family relationship is complicated, but there are moments of warmth.
This week, Jill Biden attended the memorial service for Michelle’s mother, Marian Robinson, a source familiar with her travel told Axios.
A spokesperson for Michelle Obama added that Jill Biden “graciously” joined the memorial.
Seven years ago, Joe Biden became emotional when Barack Obama surprised him with a Presidential Medal of Freedom during Obama’s last few days in office.
Despite her initial resistance, Michelle Obama did participate in the 2020 campaign after Democrats privately argued to her that the stakes were too high for her to sit out.
She didn’t go out on the stump like Barack Obama did, but she engaged through When We All Vote, which she launched in 2018, gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention, and posted on social media supporting Biden’s campaign.
The former first lady could still hit the campaign trail this year, and there have been discussions between the two camps about it.
Top White House aide Anita Dunn and top Michelle Obama aide Melissa Winter recently had lunch and talked about specific ways Biden’s campaign could involve the former first lady, two people familiar with the matter told Axios.
Asked whether Michelle Obama would speak at the Democrats’ August convention in Chicago — her hometown — a spokesperson for her declined to comment.
Hunter Biden wrote in his 2021 memoir that Michelle Obama and Buhle became “close” during the Obama administration and “worked out together at the gym and often had evening co*cktails at the White House, at both formal and informal events.”
That friendship has continued.
When Buhle published her own memoir in 2022 she used Michelle Obama’s publisher, and several of Michelle’s former communications aides were hired to coordinate the book’s rollout.
The famously insular Bidens disapproved of Buhle writing the book with some unflattering details about the family, but Buhle’s defenders noted that she wrote it only after Hunter’s own book had included intimate details about their marriage and his addictions.
Michelle appears to mention Buhle in her 2022 book, “The Light We Carry,” writing: “My friend Kathleen and I keep regular morning dates to walk by the river.”
Crystal Carson, a spokesperson for Michelle Obama, reiterated that the former First Lady supports Biden’s re-election and added: “she is friends with Kathleen and with the Bidens. Two things can be true.”
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told Axios: “The Biden and Obama families are like family to one other, and whomever made these claims about that relationship isn’t familiar with it.”
In 2015, the Bidens were all grateful for Barack Obama’s moving eulogy for Beau Biden.
The families’ relationship became increasingly tense over the next two years, however, when the president discouraged Joe Biden from running for president in 2015, and Hunter and Buhle’s marriage began to spiral.
At Hunter’s recent felony gun trial, Buhle testified that they separated in early July 2015 — weeks after Beau’s funeral — when she found a crack cocaine pipe at their home and he confessed to using the drug.
Barack Obama’s aides have long privately argued that he saw his role in 2015 as a sounding board as Biden considered running— and that Obama was focused on being there for Biden as he grieved Beau’s death.
But Biden felt that his boss preferred Hillary Clinton, as Biden suggested in his post-vice presidential memoir, “Promise Me, Dad” — and more explicitly told special counsel Robert Hur in his interview last year.
Biden recalled that in 2015, “a lot of people … were encouraging me to run in this period, except the president …. He just thought that [Clinton] had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did.”
Hunter Biden, meanwhile, had grown to resent the Obama White House over issues beyond Buhle’s relationship with Michelle Obama, according to his memoir.
After Obama picked Biden to be his running mate for the 2008 election, Obama’s team made Hunter quit his job as a lobbyist because of concerns about the optics.
Hunter wrote in his book that quitting that job felt like “riding the escalator without an exit. I once again had huge expenses and no savings, and now I had to bust my ass to build another career from scratch.”
Hunter also noticed how some Obama staffers undercut and subtly mocked his father.
After fuming at some of the slights, Hunter wrote: “I didn’t hang around the White House much; I didn’t want to be in the position of walking into a barbecue on a Sunday with the president and the White House staff after reading about someone throwing my dad under the bus.”
“I knew I couldn’t control my temper and keep my mouth shut.”
