Six lessons from Hunter Biden’s testimony

After years of pursuing Hunter Biden, the president’s son, Republicans finally got a chance to question him Wednesday in a more than six-hour interview as they hunted for evidence in an effort to oust his father.

Republicans quickly bailed a transcript of 229 pages of the interview, which depicts Hunter Biden as eager to confront Republican lawmakers about their allegations that he and his father committed wrongdoing through his international business deals.

Despite pending criminal charges against him, Biden, 54, has never invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. Instead, he engaged Republicans, criticizing their questions while offering explanations for his actions — often ones that were deeply unflattering to himself.

Throughout the interview, Mr. Biden insisted that his father had never been involved in his business deals, and insisted that the blame for his misdeeds should not fall on the elder Mr. Biden.

“My faults and shortcomings are mine and not my father’s,” Hunter Biden testified.

Here are six lessons from his long-awaited testimony.

He described himself as ‘an absolute bastard and idiot’.

Throughout the session, Hunter Biden’s determination to defend his father seemed matched only by his willingness to acknowledge his own personal shortcomings in blunt and sometimes colorful terms.

Addressing one of the most glaring pieces of evidence to emerge from the Republican investigation, he offered an innocent explanation — albeit one that highlighted his own weaknesses — for a 2017 text in which he appeared to use his father’s presence as a way to pressure a Chinese potential business partner to move forward with a proposed energy deal.

“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to know why the promise has not been kept,” Mr Biden wrote in the WhatsApp message.

In the statement, Hunter Biden said he did not remember sending such a message, but that if he had, he must have been high or drunk at the time. He added that the message appeared to have been sent to the wrong person, who had the same last name as the potential business partner, and that his father had not actually been in the room.

“I take full responsibility for the fact that I was an absolute idiot when I sent this message, if I sent this message at all,” he said.

Days after the report, an entity jointly controlled by Hunter Biden was transferred $5 million, according to House Republicans. Mr. Biden also criticized the IRS agents who brought the WhatsApp messages to Congress, saying they had conflated two different sets of messages to produce misleading evidence.

He explained why and how he sent money to relatives.

Hunter Biden testified that the money he sent to family members merely consisted of sharing some of his own income to help cover their expenses, including reimbursements. Republicans have said the transactions show the Biden family received profits from his international business deals.

He said he would normally ask his business partner, Rob Walker, to send some of the money he made to various family members. When Republicans suggested there was something untoward about the payments, like those to his uncle and sister-in-law, because the money had not been sent to Hunter Biden first, Mr. Biden explained that he had only been trying to save money.

“I can be, oxymoronically, cheap sometimes. It is to save on two transfers,” Mr. Biden explained, adding that he would tell Mr. Walker: “Please just transfer it directly to Hallie; Please forward it directly to Uncle Jim. But it’s all my money, and it’s nothing for my father.”

There has never been a ’10 of H for the big man’.

Mr Biden told Republicans that the suggestion in a now-famous message from a business associate, James Gilliar, that he had involved his father in business deals – “10 in the hands of H for the big man?” Mr Gilliar wrote – was quickly dismissed.

“I really don’t know what James was talking about,” Mr. Biden told investigators, adding: “I think it was a pipe dream. Like, “Joe Biden is out of office. Maybe we can get him involved.” ”

But Hunter Biden said he thought the idea was “absolutely ridiculous,” adding, “And so I shut it down.”

He defended eating and speaking to his father on the phone in front of business associates.

Mr. Biden acknowledged that his father occasionally attended meals where business associates were present, but he denied that they had discussed business. For example, he said, the elder Biden attended a dinner at Café Milano, a presentation for the U.N. World Food Program, where he sat next to Father Alexander Karloutsos of the Greek Orthodox Church.

“My father didn’t come to eat; he came to sit at the presentations. He sat down next to Father Alex, whom he had known for almost 42 years and was a close friend of the family,” Hunter Biden said. “And I think he probably had a Coca-Cola and a bowl of spaghetti.”

Then he said his father had finished eating, shook hands, hugged a few people and walked out.

Hunter Biden also defended his habit of putting his father on speakerphone when meeting with business associates, a pattern his former business partner Devon Archer had highlighted in previous testimony. He said it was something he had done all his life, whether with family members, friends or acquaintances.

“I’m surprised my dad hasn’t called me by now, and if he did, I would put him on speakerphone to say hi,” Hunter Biden said during the statement, adding, “You always take the phone up. It’s something we always do.”

He said he could not remember or did not know key details.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given his admissions of drug use over the years, Hunter Biden testified that he could not remember key details at the heart of Republicans’ accusations against him. He said he could not remember certain events or details about 20 times during the more than six-hour interview.

For example, Biden said he didn’t remember delivering a laptop at the heart of the Republicans’ case to a repair shop in Delaware — and suggested he might not have done so — or having lunch at the Four Seasons with business associates who his father had reportedly been present.

He also suggested that he had been kept in the dark about some of his and his partners’ business practices, such as who paid for a $142,000 sports car he received. Mr Archer previously testified that it was paid for by a Kazakh businessman.

“I received a car and I know why I received a car,” Hunter Biden said, adding: “It was a payment. It was a crazy way to do it, but that’s what I understood.

He sparred fiercely with the Republicans.

Long parts of the interview focused on Hunter Biden’s well-documented drug addiction, but he took particular umbrage when Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican who is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for allegations including illegal drug use, tried to interrogate. about the.

‘Did you use drugs when you were on the board of Burisma?’ Mr. Gaetz asked, referring to a Ukrainian energy company at the center of the Republican accusations.

“Mr. Gaetz, look me in the eye. Do you really think that is appropriate?” Mr. Biden responded, adding: “Of all the people sitting around this table, do you think it’s appropriate to ask me?”

It was one of the many confrontational moments during the interview behind closed doors.

In another, Mr. Biden criticized Republicans for not subjecting former President Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has significant international business connections, to the same investigation.

“Unlike Jared Kushner, I have never received money from a foreign government,” he said. “If Jared Kushner flies to Saudi Arabia, raises $2 billion, comes back and pockets it, okay?” He continued, referring to Mr. Trump: “And he is running for president of the United States. Do you have any problem with that?”

Mr. Gaetz interjected that the deposition clock had stopped.

“No, the clock has not stopped,” Mr. Biden insisted. “Do you have any problems with that? I’m asking.”

Republicans shifted the interview to another topic.