Biden son admits to ‘poor judgment,’ no misdeeds
WESTERVILLE, Ohio — Hunter Biden, former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, said in an interview released Tuesday that he probably would not have been named to the board of a foreign company if his last name weren’t Biden and acknowledged “poor judgment,” but he rejected suggestions by President Trump that he and his father had engaged in wrongdoing.
“Did I make a mistake? Well maybe in the grand scheme of things, yeah,” Biden said in an interview with ABC News. “But did I make a mistake based upon some ethical lapse? Absolutely not.”
“I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden,” he said.
The interview comes two days after Hunter Biden pledged that he would not work for foreignowned companies if his father became president.
His sudden public comments signal the level of concern among Joe Biden’s allies that the overseas dealings of the younger Biden had become a potentially damaging liability to his father’s campaign, and are the latest in a flurry of actions proBiden forces have taken to mitigate the issue this week before the debate.
Trump has seized on Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and China to initiate a series of unfounded attacks against the former vice president, a leading Democratic presidential candidate. Trump also asked the government of Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, helping to trigger an impeachment inquiry that Trump now faces in the House.
There is no evidence that Joe Biden, while serving as vice president, improperly intervened to aid his son, but that has not stopped Trump and other Republicans from raising questions about possible conflicts of interest even as Biden has fiercely defended his son’s integrity, and his own, over the past week.
Hunter Biden recently said he would resign from the board of a Chinese investment company.
Biden, 49, said he had exercised “poor judgment” by getting involved in a situation that he compared to a “swamp.” But he blamed his father’s opponents, including Trump, for spreading a “ridiculous conspiracy idea” involving his work, and repeatedly insisted that he did not discuss his business decisions with his father.