The House Oversight Committee released a 229-page transcript of Hunter Biden swatting down accusations featured in right-wing fantasies like a skilled ninja assassin.
Republicans alleged corruption and influence peddling that benefitted the “Biden Crime Family,” and Hunter Biden turned the tables on those accusations, suggesting, “I’m not Jared Kushner.”
When Republicans accused him of accepting payments from foreign companies and transferring those funds to other family members, he countered each accusation with detailed accounts of those business arrangements, never invoking his Fifth Amendment rights.
One of the highlights of the deposition was a battle between two (alleged) drug addicts, one of them in recovery.
Hunter’s testimony often focused on the closeness between the two Bidens, Hunter and Joe, following the tragic deaths in their family, as well as the fact that Father Biden had been a career politician since Hunter was two years old.
His point? That glad-handing strangers and dropping into events was part of his father’s daily life — and therefore his own.
“If my father was to sit down here today and he was to call me right now and I was in and I put him on the speakerphone, does that mean that he had a meeting with you, Mr. Gaetz?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Gaetz replied.
Gaetz later tried to suggest that since Hunter Biden sometimes covered his father’s tab, that his and his father’s finances “were pretty interwoven.” (“Will the record show that we’re all laughing?” Biden attorney Abbe Lowell interjected.)
WaPo
And about those business dealings… Hunter came with credibility.
When Hunter Biden was asked whether he knew the money transferred to Uncle James Biden might have been used to repay a loan to Joe Biden:
“This is the most ridiculous thing that — I mean, so far,” Biden replied. “Are you saying to me, do I understand the fungibility of dollars? Do I understand that there is a — I mean, what is it? Post hoc ergo propter hoc? It’s all based upon a fallacy?”
Hunter explained that the deal was centered on building a liquefied natural gas terminal in Louisiana that, according to him, would have created 17,000 jobs.
On Tony Bobulinksi:
Hunter explained that Bobulinski was only briefly involved in his endeavors — and as having been bounced for being unreliable. Among the transgressions, he said, was that Bobulinski had hoped to gain leverage over the Biden family name, something that Hunter Biden found particularly offensive.
He had “no faith in this person that I had just met, Tony Bobulinski,” he said, “who was presented to me as some Wall Street whiz kid that was going around, throwing around my name, and throwing around my family’s name.”
“It’s not their name to screw up,” he added at one point. “It’s mine.”
Did Hunter Biden deal with a foreign government (China)???
“Unlike Jared Kushner, I’ve never received money from a foreign government,” he testified.
Republicans insisted his business ventures with a Chinese energy company were essentially deals with Beijing, which controls much of the country’s industry.
“The anomaly of the CEFC was this: Is that they were not state-owned,” Biden testified.
What’s next?
According to Chairman Comer, a public hearing — “the sooner the better.”