Hunter Biden showed he has his father’s chutzpah Wednesday when he blew off a congressional subpoena to hold a woe-is-me press conference on Capitol Hill.
“I’m here. I’m ready,” he said, and then swept away in his motorcade without answering a single question.
Like father, like son.
Of course, there’s nothing bold or brave about inviting a contempt charge from Congress when you have Daddy’s pardon power in your back pocket.
Hunter could have taken his entourage over to the House hearing room where Oversight Chairman James Comer was waiting for him to testify — and simply pleaded the Fifth, to avoid complicating his twin indictments on tax and gun charges.
Instead, he chose a cocky public-relations strategy to manipulate the public narrative by painting himself as an object of pity and playing on the kind hearts of the American people, a cynical artform his father has employed to great effect throughout his political career.
“MAGA Republicans ridiculed my struggle with addiction. They belittled my recovery and they have tried to dehumanize me, all to embarrass and damage my father who has devoted his entire life to service,” Hunter said.
Son’s outrageous denial
That’s the art. But from Daddy’s point of view, the most important line in Hunter’s five-minute oration was his double denial of the president’s role in his family’s shady influence-peddling scheme in corrupt and adversarial countries where, as VP, he was point man for the Obama administration.
“There’s no evidence to support the allegations that my father was financially involved in my business,” said Hunter. And: “My father was not financially involved in my business.”
Joe Biden was ”not financially involved” is a significant shifting of the goal posts. It is a carefully parsed, legalistic phrase, that looks as if it has been workshopped to death in a campaign war room before being dropped into Hunter’s soup of self-pity.
That is the message from the White House, delivered by a hostage who needs Daddy’s pardon to stay out of jail.
It bears no relation to all the president’s previous denials.
Joe Biden has gone from years of saying: “I have never discussed with my son or my brother or anyone else anything having to do with their business, period” to this summer’s line from the White House: “The president was never in business with his son” — and now to this latest transmutation: Joe “was not financially involved in [Hunter’s] business.”
That’s quite an admission, right there, that the mountains of evidence produced by IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler and the parade of credible witnesses and bank records assembled by Comer and colleagues have become impossible to deny.
Not that Biden and his White House gaslighters will ever stop denying the undeniable.
Unfortunately for the Bidens, just hours before Hunter’s press conference, the transcript of the latest testimony of Ziegler and Shapley was published by the House Ways and Means Committee.
Here, more explicitly than in their previous testimony, they implicate Joe Biden in illegal conduct.
Ziegler is a registered Democrat and is regarded as the most talented criminal investigator in the IRS team described as the “SEAL Team 6” of international tax-fraud investigations.
His supervisor, Shapley, is a registered Republican and equally well-regarded, having managed some of the largest cases in IRS history, and recovered more than $3.5 billion for the US taxpayer.
Dems’ pathetic defense
Their testimony was in response to a barrage of hostile questioning by Democrats on the committee who insist that there is “nothing new,” “no evidence,” that the president did nothing wrong and, anyway, let’s talk about Donald Trump.
Ziegler and Shapley quickly disabused them of their delusions — and how.
Georgia Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ga.) stepped on the first landmine when she asked the knowledgeable pair to point to any evidence “that directly prove[s] that Joe Biden has done something illegal, yes or no?”
Shapley replied: “There is evidence that exists.”
Sewell, flustered: “I just — it is yes or no.”
Shapley: “Yes, there is.”
Sewell, turned to Ziegler: “Please show me the direct evidence . . . that actually proves that Joe Biden did something unlawful, illegal.”
Ziegler obliged: “So in exhibit 1I, Hunter Biden states in his email that his original agreement –”
Sewell cut him off, but soon enough Ziegler was allowed to complete his answer, citing three pieces of evidence.
- An email to an executive of Chinese energy firm CEFC, on Aug. 2, 2017, in which Hunter states the deal “me and my family” had with CEFC was “for introductions alone [at] a rate of $10 million per year for three years [for a] guarantee[d] total of $30 million.”
- A WhatsApp message three days earlier, July 30, 2017, in which Hunter demands a CEFC executive pay up or else: “I am sitting here with my father”.
- An email two months earlier to Hunter from one of his partners in their joint venture with CEFC, suggesting an equity split between four partners of 20% each, with an extra 10% for Hunter’s uncle Jim Biden and 10% “held by H for the big guy.”
(H is Hunter and the “big guy” has been identified as Joe Biden.)
Ziegler said: “So those things altogether, when you put them all together, I mean it says a lot. [They] are kind of painting a picture. [But] We were never able to go down those investigative routes.”
Another Democrat, Lloyd Doggett of Texas, tried to clean up, pointing out the eventual CEFC contract with Hunter and Uncle Jim did not name Joe Biden.
Ziegler agreed but said: “There was a belief in the investigation that James [Jim] Biden was a cover for Joe Biden.”
The Big Guy’s cut
That’s another bombshell, especially when Comer found $240,000 that Jim Biden deposited, via a circuitous route, into his brother Joe’s bank account after receiving money from two deals: 10% for the Big Guy.
It was listed it as a “loan” repayment, but Ziegler testified: “there was nothing to verify that they were loans.”
At one point the whistleblowers were asked if there was evidence that Joe was “involved in any way with the Biden family business dealings with foreign governments or entities.”
Both Shapley and Ziegler answered: “There is evidence of involvement, yes.”
Shapley pointed to evidence that shows Joe attending meetings with Hunter’s business partners.
“You have to understand that someone who is a vice president [and] a senator for years . . . their involvement in a business is not going to be coming up with mission statements and working on Excel spreadsheets. Him coming across to a lunch and having a glass of water would have shown his support for his son Hunter Biden.”
Their testimony was a master class in facts over delusion. If only they had been allowed to follow the investigative avenues that led to the president, Hunter could stop making excuses for his father.
