As of: March 1, 2024, 11:22 a.m
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Hunter Biden is in the Republican crossfire.
The son of the US President is doing brilliantly.
Can Biden opponents be convinced?
Washington, DC - Hunter Biden's appearance before investigators and members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committee in the US was a bit like a Bruce Lee film.
Republican lawmakers and questioners challenging the president's son on behalf of the House majority made an accusation that has often been floating around in the right-wing media world for a year or two.
And Biden invariably brushed them off.
He peeled back the layers of innuendo made by Donald Trump and Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Kentucky), or Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), or any of the countless
Fox News
commentators had been applied.
This also included epic battles against well-known opponents, such as an exchange between Hunter Biden and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) or repeated, extended verbal battles with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida).
Hunter Biden counters all questions – setback for supporters of impeachment proceedings
But at no point was any question left unanswered - not even by invoking the Fifth Amendment - or, to an objective observer, answered in a way that appeared to be incomplete.
The discussion centered on Republicans' effort to prove, as part of the ongoing impeachment trial, that President Joe Biden benefited financially from Hunter Biden's business ventures - and, they hoped, that the elder Biden used his position as vice president to that end.
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Even in the first moments of the hearing they failed to make this claim.
“I did not involve my father in my dealings,” Hunter Biden said in his opening statement, “not during my time as a lawyer, not in my investments or transactions, neither domestically nor internationally, not as a board member, not as an artist , never."
His position never deviated from this;
instead, he repeatedly invoked the same claim to interrupt one of the familiar lines of questioning presented to him.
Reading the transcript of Wednesday's hour-long interaction, one gets the impression that a man is repeatedly trying to get his accusers to see the forest rather than just a few trees.
Hunter Biden's tactics: family unity instead of corrupt business
Hunter Biden's statement also largely focused on the closeness of his family, which has grown closer due to the tragic death of his mother and later his brother.
For this reason, he always answered his father's calls and he always invited his father to dinner.
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“I can’t count how many times my father had dinner with me and my family,” he said – including at a café between the White House and the vice president’s residence.
The other thing was that Joe Biden was a career politician.
“My dad has been a United States senator since I was 2 years old,” Biden said at one point.
“My whole life is this.”
What does he mean by that?
That it was part of his father's everyday life - and therefore his own - to shake hands with strangers and stop by events.
A questioner pressed Biden to admit that there was a suspicious pattern when his father met people with whom Hunter Biden or his associates ended up doing business.
Biden rejected this portrayal.
“The pattern that I see is that you have literally no evidence of any corruption on my father’s part,” he said.
“So they’re trying to portray every single business activity I’ve ever been involved in as corrupt.”
Republican Gaetz is looking for points of attack - and fails because of Hunter Biden
During his lengthy questioning of Biden, Gaetz attempted to portray several occasions when Joe Biden called his son during a meeting or stopped by at a dinner as implicating the president in his son's business dealings.
Hunter Biden turned the question around.
Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden's son, answered hours of questions from investigators and members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
© Craig Hudson/The Washington Post
"If my father sat down here today and he called me right now and I was there and put him on speaker, would that mean that he had a meeting with you, Mr. Gaetz?" Gaetz answered in the affirmative.
Later, Gaetz tried to suggest that since Hunter Biden sometimes footed his father's bill, his and his father's finances "were pretty intertwined." ("Will the record show that we're all laughing?" interjected Biden's attorney, Abbe Lowell. ) “No, our finances are not intertwined,” Hunter Biden responded.
“What connects us is that we are a family.”
Convincing through details – Hunter Biden is open in questioning
Hunter Biden was repeatedly confronted by his interlocutors with the suspicious-sounding details that have been at the core of Republican arguments for months.
And time and time again he gave credible answers.
For example, Biden was asked whether he knew that the money he transferred to his uncle James Biden could have been used by him to repay a loan to his father.
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard so far,” Biden replied.
“Are you telling me that I understand the fungibility of dollars?
Do I understand that there is a - I mean, what is it?
Post hoc ergo propter hoc?
It’s all based on a fallacy?”
Hunter Biden and his lawyer Abbe Lowell, left, arrive before testifying before a House committee as part of a Republican-led impeachment trial against his father, President Joe Biden.
© Jack Gruber/Imago
He noted that the deal in question involved the construction of a liquefied natural gas terminal in Louisiana, which he said would have created 17,000 jobs.
In doing so, he pursued a different purpose: he wanted to underline his credibility and thus the justification that he had been commissioned to take part in these agreements in the first place.
Similarly, he delved into the details of several of these agreements, giving details of his relationships with potential partners that were both close and contentious.
“I would compare my resume to that of any of you when it comes to my responsibilities,” he urged lawmakers at one point.
Submission by Republican Questions: Jared Kushner and Tony Bobulinski in Hunter Biden's sights
Those who have delved deeply into the history of Joe Biden's alleged corruption will find a number of allegations denied in Biden's statement, not that they would believe his (sworn) statement if they even read the transcript.
You would also note two particular targets of Hunter Biden's ire: Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and Hunter Biden's former aide Tony Bobulinski.
Kushner served as a repeated point of comparison for Biden: Republicans asked him if his father stopped by a dinner one night when Kushner pocketed $2 billion after leaving the White House?
A lawmaker asked him if he had worked for foreign governments.
“I have never worked for a country,” he replied.
“I’m not Jared Kushner.”
Bobulinski, whose statements were repeatedly cited by Republicans during their investigation, was dismissed by Hunter Biden as only briefly involved in his ventures - and sidelined as unreliable.
Among the transgressions was that Bobulinski hoped to influence the Biden family's name, which Hunter Biden found particularly offensive.
He had "no trust in this person I had just met, Tony Bobulinski," he said, "who was introduced to me as a Wall Street whiz kid who was throwing around my name and my family's name."
“It’s not her name to mess up,” he added at one point.
"It's mine."
A weak point in Hunter Biden's argument: situation contradicts distance from Joe Biden
This is where Hunter Biden's testimony was the shakiest.
He hinted that he was careful to keep his father at a distance thanks to the decades spent immersed in his father's world.
"One thing I've been aware of my whole life is that my father was an official in the United States government," he said, "and there were very clear boundaries that I abided by and that I was very, were very aware.
And I made sure that I never asked my father to do anything on my behalf or on behalf of any of my clients.”
That may be so, but it has also been proven that he sometimes specifically referenced his father, including in a text message in which he falsely implied that his father was sitting next to him.
(He said that he was probably drunk when he sent that message, and that if it actually came from me, he was more ashamed of that text message than any other text message I've ever sent.)
Republicans continue to look for evidence undeterred - discussion about impeachment proceedings continues
Near the end of his testimony, Biden dodged a question from Gaetz about the details of picking up a bill for his father by noting how deep his questioners had to dive to find things that looked suspicious.
“It’s not my job to point out something that doesn’t exist,” Biden said.
“It is incumbent upon you to create something, to find something, based on the extensive evidence that you have collected that shows no involvement.”
The forest remains uninteresting to those trying to build a case for impeachment against President Biden.
In his testimony, Hunter Biden also did a good job of explaining why the trees Republicans had focused on weren't that important either.
To the author
Philip Bump
is a Post columnist based in New York.
He writes the newsletter How To Read This Chart and is the author of The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on March 1, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.