Who Is Finnegan Biden? The Phone Call That Changed Her Family

She attended the inauguration, stood beside Jill Biden at a royal coronation, and sat in the Oval Office when her grandfather stepped aside. The most consequential thing she ever did happened years before any of it.

Finnegan Biden was 18 in November 2016 when she called her mother to the family therapist’s home. Kathleen Buhle drove over. Naomi, the older sister, joined by speakerphone. The therapist said what the daughters had brought her there to say: Hunter Biden was with Hallie Biden, widow of his late brother Beau, who had died of brain cancer about eighteen months earlier. Buhle’s 24-year marriage ended in that room.

Buhle wrote about that evening in her 2022 bestselling memoir. CBS News reported on it. So did ABC and NPR. The memoir names Finnegan. It gives her age. No published profile of her has mentioned any of it.

She is the second daughter of Hunter Biden and his first wife, Kathleen Buhle, and a granddaughter of President Joe Biden. Born in September 1998, she grew up in Washington D.C., attended Sidwell Friends School, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021. During the Biden presidency, she was among the most frequently present of Joe Biden’s grandchildren at occasions of historical significance.

Quick Facts

Who Are Finnegan Biden’s Parents and Siblings?

Finnegan is the second of three daughters Hunter Biden had with Kathleen Buhle. They married in July 1993 and divorced in 2017 after 24 years together. Her older sister, Naomi Biden, was born in December 1993. Her younger sister, Maisy Biden, was born in 2000. Through Hunter’s later relationships, she also has two younger half-siblings: Navy Joan Roberts, born August 2018, and Beau Biden Jr., born March 2020.

Her first name comes from her great-grandmother, Catherine Eugenia “Jean” Finnegan Biden, Joe Biden’s mother, born of Irish immigrant parents in Scranton, Pennsylvania, who died in 2010 at age 92. Her sister Naomi carries the name of Joe Biden’s first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden, killed in a car accident in December 1972. Both names belong to people Joe Biden lost before the next generation could know them.

Sidwell Friends School and the Dress Code Campaign

Finnegan attended Sidwell Friends School in Washington D.C., a private Quaker institution where daughters of Presidents Clinton and Obama also went. All three Biden sisters went there.

While she was a student, she organized a campaign against the school’s dress code. About twenty girls walked in one morning wearing the same t-shirt. It read: “I’m Not the Distraction.” The faculty hated it. The dress code came down within weeks.

She described it years later in a 2020 interview as the first time she understood that collective action could produce a real result.

University of Pennsylvania: Degree and the Petition That Worked

Finnegan enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 2021 with a degree in History, a concentration in American Studies, and a minor in Art History.

In spring 2020, as COVID-19 shut campuses down, she started a petition on Change.org asking the university to extend its pass/fail grading deadline. She told UPenn’s student paper, 34th Street Magazine:

“I was talking with a lot of my friends. They were expressing this sincere anxiety about the pass/fail deadline, being in a different time zone, and not knowing if their families are going to get sick.”

The petition gathered over 3,500 signatures. The university extended the deadline.

On the 2020 Campaign Trail

During the 2020 presidential race, Finnegan was the most active of Biden’s grandchildren on the trail. She attended events across the country, including a February 2020 rally in Las Vegas, and took part in College Democrats text banking sessions throughout the campaign. Biden publicly described her as his “secret weapon” during the race.

After the election was called, she appeared on NBC’s TODAY with her sisters and cousin Natalie Biden:

“Everyone was crying. We just embraced each other. I think we’ll always remember that moment.”

She also spoke about the Obama daughters, friends from her years at Sidwell:

“Maisy and I and Natalie and Naomi have had the privilege of being able to see two of our friends navigate eight years of what was really difficult, and they did so, so beautifully.”

Kathleen Buhle’s Memoir and What It Records

Kathleen Buhle’s If We Break: A Memoir of Marriage, Addiction, and Healing came out in 2022 and reached national bestseller lists. CBS News, ABC, and NPR all covered it.

The book describes the events of that November 2016 evening in specific detail. It names the daughter who made the call. It records her age at the time. Both facts have been in print since 2022.

Buhle wrote about her reaction in the memoir:

“If anything, I felt a strange vindication. Not only had I not been crazy, but it was so much worse than I could have imagined.”

Buhle has since founded The House at 1229, a private women’s club in Washington D.C. In the year after the divorce was filed, she was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. She is now cancer-free.

The memoir has been available for four years. No major profile of Finnegan Biden has included the detail it contains.

A Seat at History: The Biden Presidency Years

Over four years of the Biden presidency, Finnegan appeared at a series of historically significant occasions.

That coronation carried a distinction of its own. Jill Biden was the first sitting American First Lady to attend a British coronation, and Finnegan was beside her in Westminster Abbey.

Hunter Biden’s Conviction and the Pardon

In June 2024, Hunter Biden stood trial at a federal courthouse in Wilmington, Delaware. The charge: lying about his drug use on a federal form when purchasing a firearm in 2018. On June 11, 2024, he was convicted on all three felony counts, becoming the first child of a sitting U.S. president convicted of a federal crime.

Who was present at the trial and verdict:

• First Lady Jill Biden attended most of the proceedings
• Naomi Biden testified as a witness for the defense
• James Biden and Valerie Biden Owens attended the verdict
• President Biden flew to Delaware that evening to be with his son

Three months later, Hunter entered a guilty plea on separate federal tax charges.

On December 1, 2024, President Biden signed a full and unconditional pardon covering all federal offenses Hunter had committed or may have committed between January 1, 2014 and December 1, 2024. It covered both the gun conviction and the tax plea.

Biden’s statement read in part:

“I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”

Politico described it as the most expansive presidential pardon since Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon in 1974. Before leaving office in January 2025, Biden also issued preemptive pardons to other family members, including his brother James Biden.

Where Is Finnegan Biden Now?

Joe Biden left the White House on January 20, 2025. Hunter’s federal cases are closed. The Biden presidency is over.

Finnegan Biden is 27 years old. The public record since early 2025 shows no confirmed career, no active platform, and no interviews. She has been absent from reported public life since the administration ended.

What she is doing privately is unknown. She has given no public statement about her father’s trial, her grandfather’s years in office, or the years she spent in rooms where significant events happened.

Finnegan Biden organized the Sidwell dress code campaign as a teenager, ran the UPenn petition during COVID, made the phone call in November 2016 that nobody outside the family discussed for years, and showed up in person at more consequential moments of the Biden presidency than any profile of her has properly captured. She never said much while any of it was happening. She has said nothing since the Biden years ended.