This included epic battles against well-known foes, like an exchange between Hunter Biden and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), or repeated, extended back-and-forth with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). But at no point was a question left unanswered — including through an invocation of the Fifth Amendment — or, to an objective observer, left answered with obvious incompletion.
The discussion was centered on the Republican effort in the ongoing impeachment inquiry to demonstrate that President Biden had benefited financially from Hunter Biden’s business endeavors — and, they hoped, that the elder Biden had used his position as vice president to that end. They were unsuccessful in making that case from the hearing’s first moments.
“I did not involve my father in my business,” Hunter Biden said in his opening comments, “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.” His position did not diverge from that at any point; instead, he frequently invoked this same claim over and over again as a means of cutting off one of the familiar lines of inquiry with which he was presented.
The effect, in reading a transcript of Wednesday’s hours-long interaction, is of a man repeatedly trying to get his accusers to see a forest instead of a smattering of trees.
Hunter Biden’s testimony centered heavily on two themes. First, the closeness of his family, having been drawn together by the tragic deaths of his mother and, later, his brother. This is why he always took his father’s calls, he said, and why he would always welcome his father to join him at dinners.
“I can’t count the number of times my dad stopped to have dinner with me and my family,” he testified — including at a cafe that was situated between the White House and the vice-presidential residence.
The other was that Joe Biden was a career politician.
“My dad has been a United States Senator since I was 2 years old,” Biden said at one point. “My whole life has been this.”
His point? That glad-handing strangers and dropping into events was part of his father’s daily life — and therefore his own.
At one point, a questioner pressed Biden to admit that there was a suspicious pattern in his father having met people with whom Hunter Biden or his partners ended up doing business. Biden rejected that framing.
“The pattern I see is that you literally have no evidence whatsoever of any corruption on the part of my father,” he said. “And therefore what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to make every single thing in business that I was ever involved in somehow corrupt.”
Gaetz, during his lengthy inquisition of Biden, attempted to portray several occasions in which Joe Biden called his son during a meeting or stopped by a dinner as implicating the president in his son’s business. Hunter Biden turned the question around.
“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…
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