Hunter Biden Told Republicans He Has A Better Resume Than They Do
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WASHINGTON ― For years, Republican members of Congress have described the president’s son as a corrupt wastrel with no business on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
On Wednesday, Hunter Biden came to Capitol Hill and told Republicans that not only was he qualified for his job with Burisma, but he had a more impressive business background than any of them.
“You guys have gone out and said I had no credibility, no ― that there’s no way that I should’ve been serving on the board of Burisma,” Biden said, according to a transcript released Thursday.
“I just read you my resume,” he said. “I’d put my resume up against any of you, in terms of my responsibility.”
It was one of several combative moments from a seven-hour deposition Republicans held Wednesday as part of their impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. Republicans have not uncovered any official wrongdoing by the president despite months of searching for bribes and improper participation in his son’s business deals.
During questioning, Republicans sought to undercut Hunter Biden’s insistence that he was qualified for the job, and they repeatedly asked him to detail the timeline of his addictions to alcohol and crack cocaine ― something he detailed in a 2021 book that Republicans have apparently never consulted. In response to their questions, Biden suggested Republicans were being hypocritical about their own problems with drugs and alcohol.
Biden created an instant controversy when he took a high-paying position on Burisma’s board in 2014, while his father, then the vice president, served as the face of U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine.
State Department officials privately complained that the job created the appearance of a conflict of interest, and Donald Trump pressured Ukraine to announce an investigation, withholding military aid in an extortion scheme that triggered his first impeachment. Those same officials said, however, that Hunter Biden’s Burisma job had no effect on U.S. policy.
Republicans have resurrected Trump’s corruption allegations and made them Exhibit A in their impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden, claiming his son was useless to Burisma except as a conduit for bribes to his father.
The younger Biden has had it both ways with Burisma. On the one hand, he admitted his last name helped him get the board position, saying high-profile Western board members allowed Burisma to send a defiant message to Vladimir Putin, who had launched an invasion of Ukraine. But he’s also insisted that he was qualified ― and he seemed to relish the chance to say so to Republicans directly, citing his Ivy League degrees and previous positions on corporate and nonprofit boards.
“I don’t know anybody that was, at that time, that was teaching the No. 1 rated course at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in the master’s program in terms of foreign policy and advocacy,” Hunter Biden said. “I literally was on 17 ― like, 12 different boards. I only listed like, you know, 10 of them. And so I had an enormous amount of reasons to be on it.”
He repeatedly asked his own questions during the deposition. In response to queries about his father meeting his business associates for dinner, he asked Republicans if they had a problem with Donald Trump’s son-in-law landing a $2 billion deal with the Saudi government shortly after serving as an advisor to the president.
“When Jared Kushner flies over to Saudi Arabia, picks up $2 billion, comes back, and puts it in his pocket, OK, and he is running for president of the United States, you guys have any problem with that?”
(Democrats claimed that several Republicans nodded in agreement in response to the Kushner remark.)
When Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) asked if Biden was on drugs when he was on the Burisma board, Biden asked a loaded question of his own.
“Mr. Gaetz, look me in the eye. You really think that’s appropriate to ask me?”
“Absolutely,” Gaetz said.
“Of all the people sitting around this table, do you think that’s appropriate to ask me?” Biden said, seemingly alluding to allegations of drug use that have swirled around Gaetz.
Biden wrote a month-by-month account of his addiction to crack cocaine in his 2021 memoir, “Beautiful Things,” which included a chapter specifically about Burisma ― but it seemed as though Republicans had no familiarity with the material.
“Yes, I was an addict,” Biden said. “What does that have to do with whether or not you’re going to go forward with an impeachment of my father other than to simply try to embarrass me?”
Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) followed Gaetz with more questions about the timeline of his addiction and his work for Burisma, asking if Biden should have disclosed his problems to the company. Biden said that’s not how addiction works.
“I can guarantee you, at least 30% of the people that you serve with suffer from alcoholism,” Biden said. “Do you think it’s incumbent upon them, if they suffer from alcoholism, that they immediately resign?”
Biden said he had good days and bad days struggling with his addiction, and that his close associates knew about his efforts to recover ― as they themselves have testified in their own interviews with lawmakers.
As for his actual board work, Biden said he brought expertise on corporate governance to a company that wanted to elevate its financial standards.
“My responsibilities were like any other board member, to attend board meetings, to be aware of what the management was doing to try to strive for, you know, accountability, transparency, openness in terms of the reporting, to go through the financials and make certain that the financials were certified by a [certified public accountant],” Biden said.
Republicans have repeatedly held up an anecdote from Devon Archer, a business associate of Biden’s who recruited him to Burisma’s board, as evidence that Biden got his father to help the company. Archer told lawmakers in a transcribed interview last year that he witnessed Burisma executives ask Biden to “call D.C.” in December 2015 and that he thought he might have called his father, though Archer admitted he did not witness such a call.
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has suggested the call resulted in Joe Biden pressuring Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was supposedly investigating Burisma. But Hunter Biden said there was no such call.
“I know there was never a phone call to my father. I can say that under oath,” he said. (Separately, Hunter Biden testified that he did help Burisma connect with a Democratic consulting firm that helped the company’s executives with visa and other issues.)
Biden initially refused to sit for a closed-door deposition when Republicans sent him a subpoena last year, insisting instead on public testimony, before changing his mind and sitting for Wednesday’s interview.
House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said this week that he still wants to have a public hearing, but it’s not clear if Biden remains willing. His attorney, Abbe Lowell, noted in a statement after the deposition that the source of a key bribery allegation has been charged with fabricating the claim and lying to the FBI.
Bribes had supposedly been paid by the head of Burisma to both Hunter and Joe Biden, and Republicans had touted the informant’s dubious claim as their very best piece of evidence.
“This illegitimate inquiry should have ended long before their star witness was indicted for lying but it wasn’t,” Lowell said. “Now that Hunter has put this partisan conspiracy to the lie that it is ― on the record and under oath ― this political charade should finally come to an end.”
