On Dec. 17, 2018, Hunter's money managers warned of his extremely low balance, according to records obtained by the Daily Mail. That's exactly when, according to Hunter's Memoir, he was in his "penultimate odyssey through full blown addiction," when he was dropping thousands of dollars on prostitutes and crack cocaine.

In response to the warning, Hunter ordered the bankers to transfer $20,000 from his daughter Maisy's educational savings account, early withdrawal  consequences be damned.

"liquidate what you can' and 'Live [love] you both," Hunter wrote.

At the time, Maisy, now 22, was in her final year of high school. She and her two older sisters, along with Joe Biden and First Lady Jill, had tried to stage an intervention just weeks earlier at the President's Delaware home to get Hunter to go back to rehab.

He promised to go, but instead ended up smoking crack in a hotel, he confessed in his 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things.

Emails and messages from his laptop show money he took from Maisy's educational savings account went in part to paying various suspected prostitutes who visited him at hotels in the following days, his Porsche 911 car loan, sex webcam subscription fees, and other personal expenses. 

Hunter's assistant Katie Dodge plaintively emailed him on December 28 that year that he had University of Pennsylvania tuition bills of $27,945 due (likely for his eldest daughter, Naomi), a $1,700 payment for his Porsche, $4,244.70 for Maisy's high school Sidwell Friends, her $3,000 paycheck and $1,000 for another employee.