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This includes interactions between Hunter Biden and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and repeated and extended back-and-forth with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). It included an epic battle against a well-known enemy. But no questions were left unanswered at any point, including the invocation of the Fifth Amendment. Nor were we left with incomplete answers that would be obvious to an objective observer.
The debate centers on Republican efforts in the ongoing impeachment inquiry to prove that President Biden benefited financially from Hunter Biden’s business activities, and that the elder Biden I expected him to take advantage of his position as vice president. They failed to make that case from the first moment of the hearing.
“I kept my father out of my business,” Hunter Biden said in his opening comments. “During my time as a lawyer, I was not involved in any domestic or foreign investments or transactions, nor was I involved as a board member or board member,” the artist, never. ” His position did not deviate from that at any point. Instead, he repeated the same argument over and over again as a means of cutting off one of the familiar lines of inquiry presented to him.
The effect, read a transcript of Wednesday’s hours-long exchange, is that one man repeatedly tries to get his accusers to see the forest and not the trees.
Hunter Biden’s testimony centered around two major themes. First, there are the family ties bonded by the tragic deaths of his mother and later his brother. This, he said, was why he always answered his father’s calls and why he always welcomed his father to join him for dinner.
“I can’t count the number of times my dad stopped by to have dinner with me and my family,” he testified. That included a cafe between the White House and the Vice President’s residence.
The other thing is that Joe Biden is a career politician.
“My father has been a U.S. senator since I was two years old,” Biden said at one point. “My whole life has been like this.”
What’s his point? Greeting strangers and participating in events were part of the father’s daily life, and therefore his own daily life.
At one point, questioners pressed Biden to acknowledge that there was a suspicious pattern in his father’s meetings with people with whom Hunter Biden and his partners ended up doing business. Biden rejected that framework.
“The pattern that I saw was that there was literally no evidence of any corruption on my father’s part,” he said. “So what you’re trying to do is somehow corrupt every business that I’ve ever been involved in.”
During his lengthy interrogation of Biden, Gates described several scenes in which Joe Biden called his son during a meeting or stopped by a dinner, and the president was involved in his son’s business. I tried to describe it. Hunter Biden flipped the question.
“If my dad was sitting here today and he was supposed to call me right now and I was there and put him on speakerphone, does that mean he was meeting with you? , Mr. Gates?” he asked.
“Yes,” Gates replied.
Gaetz later tried to suggest that his and his father’s finances were “very intertwined,” as Hunter Biden sometimes covered his father’s taboo topics. (“Will the record show that we are all laughing?” interjected Biden attorney Abby Lowell.)
“No, our finances are not complicated,” Hunter Biden responded. “What’s intertwined is that we’re a family.”
Over and over again, interlocutors presented Hunter Biden with questionable-sounding tidbits that have been at the heart of Republican debates for months. And time and time again, he gave us reliable answers.
For example, Biden was asked whether he was aware that funds he sent to his uncle, James Biden, may have been reused by his uncle to repay loans to his father.
“This is the most ridiculous thing by far,” Biden responded. “Are you trying to tell me that you understand the fungibility of the dollar? Do you understand that there is a thing? I mean, what is it? post ergo property hook? Is it all based on a fallacy?? ”
He said the deal in question focuses on building a liquefied natural gas terminal in Louisiana, which he said would create 17,000 jobs. was.
Mentioning this had another purpose. That is, to strengthen his qualifications and, by extension, the legitimacy of his being hired to participate in these agreements in the first place. He fleshed out details of some of them in a similar manner, including providing details of his close and contentious relationships with future partners.
“In terms of my responsibility, I would submit a resume to any of you,” he challenged lawmakers at one point.
Those steeped in the lore of Joe Biden’s presumed corruption will find any number of dismissed allegations in Hunter Biden’s testimony, but if you read the transcript, his (sworn) testimony I don’t necessarily believe in it. They will also focus on two specific targets of Hunter Biden’s ire: Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Hunter Biden’s former colleague Tony Bobulinski.
Mr. Kushner has been a recurring comparison for Mr. Biden. Republicans had questioned Kushner about withdrawing $2 billion from his father, who stopped by for dinner one night after he left the White House.
The congressman asked him if he had ever worked for a foreign government.
“I have never worked for the country,” he replied. “I’m not Jared Kushner.”
Bobulinski’s testimony has been repeatedly cited by Republicans as the investigation progresses, but Hunter Biden has dismissed it as unreliable due to his brief involvement in the operation. He said the violations included Bobulinski hoping to use Biden’s name to gain influence, something Hunter Biden found particularly offensive. said.
He “absolutely had no faith in this person, Tony Bobulinski, whom I had just met,” he said. “He was presented to me as a Wall Street genius kid who went around brandishing my name and my family’s name.”
“Failure is not in their name,” he added at one point. “That’s mine.”
This relates to where Hunter Biden’s testimony was most shaky. He said he was sensitive to keeping his father at arm’s length, having been immersed in his father’s world for decades.
“One of the things we were very aware of throughout our lives is that our father was an official in the U.S. government,” he said. very aware of. And he confirmed that he never asked his father to do anything for me or for my clients. ”
That may be true, but there is also evidence that he specifically tried to call out his father from time to time, including text messages in which he falsely implied that his father was sitting next to him. (He said he was probably drunk when this text message was sent, and said, “If this text message was actually from me, it was more embarrassing than any text message I’ve ever sent.”) Ta.)
Toward the end of the deposition, Biden questioned one of Gaetz’s questions about the details of picking up his father’s bills, noting how deep the questioner had to dive to find anything suspicious. Then I turned away.
“It’s not my duty to point out to you something that doesn’t exist,” Biden said. “It is your duty to create something and come up with something based on the vast amount of evidence you have collected that shows no involvement.”
The woods remain of no interest to those trying to build a case to impeach President Biden. In his testimony, Hunter Biden also effectively explained why the trees Republicans were focusing on weren’t all that important.
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