The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Takeaways from Hunter Biden's testimony to panel
WASHINGTON >> After years of pursuing Hunter Biden, the president’s son, Republicans finally got their chance to question him during a more than six-hour interview Wednesday, as they hunted for evidence to try to impeach his father.
Republicans quickly released a 229-page transcript of the interview, which depicts Hunter Biden as eager to confront GOP lawmakers over their accusations that he and his father had committed wrongdoing through his international business deals.
Despite pending criminal charges against him, Biden, 54, never invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Instead he sparred with Republicans, criticizing their questions while offering explanations — often ones that were exceedingly unflattering to himself — for his actions.
Throughout the interview, Biden maintained that his father had never been involved in his business deals and insisted that blame for his misdeeds should not fall on the elder Biden.
“My mistakes and my shortcomings are my own and not my father’s,” Hunter Biden testified.
Here are takeaways:. • He described himself as “an absolute ass and idiot.”
Throughout the session, Hunter Biden’s determination to defend his father appeared matched only by his willingness to acknowledge his own personal failings in blunt and sometimes colorful terms.
Addressing one of the most attention-grabbing bits of evidence the Republican inquiry has produced, he offered an innocent explanation — though one that played up his own foibles — for a text from 2017 in which he appeared to use the presence of his father as
a way to pressure a Chinese potential business partner to move ahead with a proposed energy deal.
“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to know why the commitment has not been fulfilled,” Biden wrote in the Whatsapp message.
In the deposition, Hunter Biden said he did not remember sending such a message, but that if he had, he must have been either high or drunk at the time. He added that the message appeared to have been sent to the wrong person and that his father had not actually been in the room.
“I take full responsibility for being an absolute ass and idiot when I sent this message, if I did send this message,” he said.
Days after the message, an entity jointly controlled by Hunter Biden was wired $5 million, according to House Republicans. Biden also criticized the IRS agents who had 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 had sent money to family members.
Hunter Biden testified that the money he had sent to family members was merely him sharing some of his own income to help cover their expenses, including reimbursements. Republicans have said the transactions show that the Biden family received profits from his international business deals.
He said he would typically ask his business partner, Rob Walker, to send portions of the money he had earned to different family members. When Republicans suggested that there was something untoward about the payments, such as those to his uncle and sister-in-law, because the money wasn’t first sent to Hunter Biden, Biden explained that he had only been trying to save money.
“I sometimes can be, oxymoronically, cheap. It’s to save on two wire transfers,” Biden explained, adding he would tell Walker: “Please just wire it directly to Hallie; please just wire it directly to Uncle Jim. But it’s all my money, and it’s none to my dad.”
• There never was any “10 held by H for the big guy.”
Biden told Republicans that the suggestion in a now-famous message sent by a business associate, James Gilliar, that he cut his father in on business deals — “10 held by H for the big guy?” Gilliar wrote — had been quickly rejected.
“I truly don’t know what the hell that James was talking about,” Biden told investigators.
• He defended dining and speaking by phone with his father in the presence of business associates.
Biden acknowledged that his father had occasionally attended meals where business associates were present, but he denied that they had discussed business.
Hunter Biden also defended his habit of putting his father on speakerphone when he was meeting with business associates, a pattern that his former business partner Devon Archer had highlighted in earlier testimony. He said it was something he had done all his life, whether with family members, friends or associates.