After months of negotiations and contempt threats, President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, testified before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees on Feb. 28, saying that his father was not involved in his business.
The deposition was part of House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry of President Biden to determine if he and his family members sold access to his office and political influence while he was vice 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 obtained by The Associated Press.
“For more than a year, your committees have hunted me in your partisan political pursuit of my dad. You have trafficked in innuendo, distortion, and sensationalism – all the while ignoring the clear and convincing evidence staring you in the face. You do not have evidence to support the baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies about my father because there isn’t any,” he said in the statement.
The deposition took place behind closed doors, despite the younger Biden’s prior insistence that it be conducted publicly. That detail, among others, was hammered out in negotiations over the past month after House Republicans halted efforts to hold Mr. Biden in contempt of Congress.
An impeachment inquiry aide told The Epoch Times that Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) intends to release Mr. Biden’s testimony “as expeditiously as possible” in keeping with his commitment to transparency.
Per House rules, the transcript will first require review by Mr. Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, and the approval of the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland. If the latter does not give his approval, the committee will vote on the document’s release.
“Our committees have unearthed substantial evidence of President Biden and his family’s corruption,” Mr. Comer told reporters before the deposition.
“Biden family associates testified that Joe Biden was the brand. President Biden has repeatedly lied to the American people that he’d never interacted with his son’s associates.” He recounted testimony from Hunter Biden’s former business associates that then-Vice President Biden spoke with them via speakerphone “over 20 times.”
Mr. Comer said the committee will continue to pursue every new lead, but he added that he feels ready to start wrapping up the investigation.
When asked for concrete evidence tying President Biden to his family members’ business affairs, the chairman pointed to two checks the president received from James and Sara Biden. The $40,000 and $200,000 checks, obtained through subpoenaed bank records, can be traced back to the Biden family’s influence-peddling schemes, Mr. Comer said.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the Oversight Committee’s top Democrat, told reporters that the impeachment inquiry was a “shameful spectacle” and an extension of former President Donald Trump’s “election denialism.”
“This absurd impeachment investigation is just a continuation of Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election and I think everybody can understand that for what it is.”
When investigators broke for lunch, Mr. Raskin and other Democrat members approached reporters to comment on what was happening inside.
“The Republicans continue to belabor completely trivial points,” Mr. 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, but apparently it is. And I believe, based on this first hour, that this whole thing really has been a tremendous waste of our legislative time and the people’s resources.”
On the Republican side, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) described Mr. Biden’s responses to investigators as “defiant and also dishonest. And his testimony, some of it, is in direct conflict with other witnesses,” she added—something that she found to be “no surprise.”
One frequent reply she cited from Mr. Biden was that “he doesn’t recall.” Asked if he had invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself, she said he “has not done that yet,” but reiterated that his testimony was inconsistent with that of other witnesses.
At another point, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) also stopped to share with reporters one of the more interesting moments of the day in his view.
“Hunter Biden told us that he joined the Burisma board to counter Russian aggression. I hadn’t heard that one before—that thank goodness we had Hunter Biden on the Burisma board because that was central to his strategy to stand up to [Russian President] Vladimir Putin.”
The congressman also said that he felt it was “a mirage” to believe that the president’s son was involved in international business. “This was a bribe masquerading as an international business transaction, nothing more nothing less.”
Nonetheless, he was noncommittal on the next steps in the probe, holding that he was just looking to establish the facts.
As for whether investigators had found evidence that the president was directly involved in his family members’ business dealings, Mr. Gaetz said he didn’t think such a link was necessary to prove a crime had been committed.
“I believe that you can bribe someone by paying their family members. Like, I don’t get this construct that unless Joe Biden himself received cash that he somehow wasn’t involved in the bribery operation. Joe Biden was doing the bidding of Burisma, he was doing the bidding of Chinese communists, and his family was getting enriched as a consequence. To me, that’s a pretty strong case for bribery.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Comer revealed that a public hearing will be next on the agenda for impeachment investigators. The transcript of the deposition, he added, will likely be made available within the next few days.
Contempt Resolution Sidelined
The initial subpoenas the committees issued Mr. Biden in November compelled him to testify privately in a Dec. 13 deposition. When that date arrived, he defied the orders and held a press conference on the U.S. Capitol steps instead, decrying the impeachment probe as “illegitimate.”
A month later, he sent the House Oversight Committee into an uproar when he abruptly walked into a Jan. 10 meeting where members were finalizing a resolution to hold him in contempt. He sat for a few minutes, watching silently as infuriated Republicans raked him over the coals before he got up and left.
At the time the subpoenas were issued, the House had yet to hold a formal vote on the impeachment inquiry—a fact Mr. Lowell cited in defense of his client’s noncompliance.
In a Jan. 12 letter, the attorney recounted how House Republicans—including Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio)—had cried foul when Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) launched a 2019 impeachment inquiry of then-President Donald Trump before a formal House vote.
“On November 8 and 9, 2023, history repeated itself. You noticed an impeachment deposition a month before an impeachment inquiry vote was held to authorize such a deposition,” he wrote.
However, in light of the House’s Dec. 14 vote authorizing the inquiry, he added that Mr. Biden would comply with “a new proper subpoena” for a hearing or deposition.
The contempt resolution was ultimately approved by both the Oversight and Judiciary committees. But as it was poised to head to the House floor on Jan. 16, committee leaders pushed pause “to give the attorneys additional time to reach an agreement.”
The deposition date was announced on Feb. 23.
Impeachment Impacts
Mr. Biden will be testifying at a crucial juncture in the investigation into his father as the credibility of a key witness has been called into question.
One of the biggest discoveries of the probe was the claim that President Biden and his son each received $5 million in bribes from Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings to get the prosecutor who was investigating the company fired.
The allegations first surfaced last year after a whistleblower revealed the existence of an FBI informant’s report detailing the scheme to Congress.
That informant, Alexander Smirnov, was indicted earlier in February on charges that he fabricated the allegations. That fact, coupled with prosecutors’ claims that he had Russian intelligence contacts, was enough evidence for Mr. Raskin that the entire impeachment probe was “based on a lie.”
“It is an undeniable fact that Republicans’ allegations against President Biden have always been a tissue of lies built on conspiracy theories, and I formally call on Speaker Johnson, Chairman Comer, and House Republicans to stop promoting this nonsense and end their doomed impeachment inquiry,” he said in a Feb. 15 statement.
But House investigators say that the evidence they’ve compiled is damning, with or without Mr. Smirnov’s claims.
Mr. Jordan, in a lengthy X post, asserted that the firing of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin was still suspicious given the Obama administration’s previous praise for his anti-corruption agenda and Mr. Biden’s position on Burisma’s board.
The congressman also highlighted the testimony of Mr. Biden’s former business associates, who contradicted President Biden’s claims that he had no involvement in his family members’ business affairs. The younger Biden’s own WhatsApp messages also told another story—especially one exchange in which he told a Chinese businessman, “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment has not been fulfilled.”
Mr. Comer likewise told The Epoch Times in a statement that House investigators had collected enough evidence to establish that President Biden was the brand his family sold to enrich themselves.
“Joe Biden knew of, participated in, and benefited from these schemes. Joe Biden attended dinners, spoke on speakerphone, showed up to meetings, and had coffee with his son’s foreign business associates. In fact, we’ve documented how Joe Biden has met with nearly all of his son’s foreign business associates as they were collectively funneling millions to the Bidens,” he said.
“Our committees have the opportunity to depose Hunter Biden, a key witness in our impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden, about this record of evidence. This deposition is not the conclusion of the impeachment inquiry. There are more subpoenas and witness interviews to come. We will continue to follow the facts to inform legislative reforms to federal ethics laws and determine whether articles of impeachment are warranted.”
The deposition comes as the president’s son is fending off two federal indictments on alleged tax offenses—three felonies and six misdemeanors—and three alleged felony firearms offenses.
He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
From The Epoch Times
