Hunter Biden Tells Republicans They Have Nothing But Lies

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s son Hunter told Republicans on Wednesday that his father never participated in his foreign business deals and that claims to the contrary are all lies. 

The younger Biden arrived on Capitol Hill for a closed-door deposition in response to a subpoena from congressional Republicans chasing dubious corruption allegations in their impeachment inquiry against the president. 

“I am here today to provide the committees with the one uncontestable fact that should end the false premise of this inquiry: I did not involve my father in my business,” Hunter Biden said in an opening statement. “Not while I was a practicing lawyer, not in my investments or transactions domestic or international, not as a board member, and not as an artist. Never.”

Hunter Biden is likely the last major witness Republicans will interview as part of their impeachment effort, which may never get a vote on the House floor due to lack of unanimous support from Republicans themselves as corruption claims have crumbled under scrutiny. 

The main allegation against the Bidens came from an FBI informant who claimed a Ukrainian businessman said he paid Biden and his son Hunter $5 million each in bribes. Republicans scoured Biden bank records in search of the bribe, but it turns out the informant may not have been a reliable source. 

Earlier this month, the Department of Justice arrested the informant and accused him of making up the bribe, leaving Republicans with a grab bag of less serious allegations against the Biden family. The main one is that Joe Biden participated in his son’s foreign business deals while he was vice president and when he was out of office.

“Our committees have uncovered substantial evidence of President Biden and his family’s corruption,” House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) told reporters before the deposition.

Devon Archer, a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s, told lawmakers that the younger Biden repeatedly put his father on speakerphone in the company of their clients, prompting Republicans to say the president lied when he claimed he was never involved in his son’s work — even though Archer said the conversations were never about business. Archer and a parade of other Hunter Biden associates also said they never witnessed Joe Biden actually talk business or take action on his son’s behalf. 

“Rather than follow the facts as they have been laid out before you in bank records, financial statements, correspondence, and other witness testimony, you continue your frantic search to prove the lies you, and those you rely on, keep peddling,” Hunter Biden said Wednesday. “Yes, they are lies.”

Republicans have pursued corruption allegations related to Hunter Biden since 2019, when then-president Donald Trump claimed Joe Biden pushed for the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor in order to protect Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that employed Hunter Biden on its board. State Department officials have repeatedly said they wanted the prosecutor fired because he was corrupt, partly because he wasn’t investigating Burisma.

Still, State officials said the Burisma job did create the appearance of a conflict of interest. And Hunter Biden has acknowledged his famous last name helped him get the high-paying position, which he held from 2014 to 2019. He wrote in his 2021 memoir that the Burisma money fueled his crack cocaine addiction following his brother Beau’s death in 2015 and his own divorce in 2017.

“To be clear, I have made mistakes in my life, and I have squandered opportunities and privileges that were afforded to me,” Hunter Biden said in his opening statement on Wednesday. “But my mistakes and shortcomings are my own and not my father’s, who has done nothing but devote his entire life to public service and trying to make this country a better place to live.”

After Hunter Biden made his remarks, Republicans repeatedly asked him about the times he had put his dad on speakerphone in the company of business associates, according to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).

“What we saw, I think, was a rather embarrassing spectacle where the Republicans continued to belabor completely trivial points,” Raskin said. “They seem to be obsessively focused on speakerphones and use of speakerphone. I did not know that that was the devil’s technology.”

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) noted that the Bidens had been through “trauma and tragedy,” first when Hunter and Beau’s mother and sister died in a car crash in 1972 and again in 2015 when Beau died of brain cancer.

“Hunter was also very clear that in those sensors, those instances, he was always going to pick up his father’s call,” Garcia said. “They were a family that had been through so much trauma.”

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) said Hunter Biden’s testimony conflicted with accounts from other witnesses but declined to say which.

“Hunter Biden is being defiant and also dishonest,” Mace said.

In response to later questions, Biden brought up Jared Kushner, who struck a $2 billion deal with the Saudi government six months after serving as a foreign policy advisor to his father-in-law, Donald Trump.

“We all noticed, I think, that there were some Republicans nodding their heads when Hunter suggested that it would be worth investigating Jared Kushner and his $2 billion from Saudi Arabia,” Goldman said.