WH excuses so phone-y
DEVON Archer’s testimony shows that Joe Biden lied to the American people time and again.
He lied that he knew nothing about his son Hunter Biden’s international influence peddling scheme. He lied that he never spoke to Hunter about his overseas deals.
What has leaked so far about Archer’s closed-door testimony is that Hunter, once his best friend and business partner, put then-Vice President Joe Biden on the speakerphone more than 20 times during meetings and invited him to dinners with his overseas business associates.
Joe was there to add value, said Archer, to “the brand” of corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma — which paid Hunter $83,000 a month while his father was VP, after which it cut his salary in half.
Family business calls
Don’t be fooled by the line being run by New York Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman, acting as Biden defense attorney, that these phone calls and dinners with Hunter’s benefactors were simply innocent interactions during which Joe talked about “the weather.”
Joe’s role was one of power and influence, “the Big Guy,” the chairman of the board, who doesn’t discuss mundane details.
As Uncle Jim told Tony Bobulinski, another former business partner of Hunter’s, Joe is big on “plausible deniability,” a term coined by the CIA during the Kennedy administration to describe the practice of keeping the president only vaguely informed about illegal or unsavory activity — so he can plausibly deny he knows anything if it becomes public knowledge.
It’s why Hunter and Jim instructed Bobulinski before he met Joe to keep any business discussions at a “high level.”
The very point of getting Joe on the phone was to demonstrate to the shady oligarchs who showered Hunter with cash and diamonds that his very important father was available at a moment’s notice.
The phone calls and dinners were a signal that everybody understood, especially in the most corrupt countries in the world.
That’s how influence peddling works. The product being peddled was Joe Biden. That’s why Hunter and his uncle Jim Biden were paid millions of dollars by Ukrainians, Chinese, Russians, Romanians, Kazakhs and so on.
Doting dad ploy
Another cynical defense, which a sweaty Goldman tried out on the press pack after Archer’s testimony, was that Joe Biden is just a good family man who called his son every day.
Goldman also made sure to insert the “devastating” impact of the death of Hunter’s older brother Beau, pulling the familiar sympathy card Joe Biden has used his entire career.
The president reinforced the message in a podcast episode released Monday to coincide with Archer’s testimony, making sure to say he talks to family members on the phone “every day.”
That was no accident, but a deliberate attempt to prebunk Archer’s testimony.
Don’t buy it. Joe Biden was the vice president of the United States. He had been the calculating senator from Delaware for almost four decades, living high on the generosity of deep-pocketed donors. He is a creature of the swamp.
He knew exactly what he was doing.