Jim Geraghty of National Review Online assesses the latest pieces of information about Hunter Biden’s dubious business behavior during his father’s tenure as vice president. A former business partner of the younger Biden testified this week before a congressional oversight committee. That former ally offered an unusual explanation of the Bidens’ questionable activity.
Relax, everyone! … CNN reports that a source familiar with the closed-door interview of Devon Archer by the House Oversight Committee says that Archer’s former business partner, Hunter Biden, was selling the “illusion” of access to his father. But not real access!
Representative Dan Goldman, a Democrat on the panel, told reporters that Archer told the committee that Hunter Biden “did put his father on speaker phone in the presence of business partners, but that business was never discussed.”
First, this means Biden’s previous pledge, “I have never discussed, with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses, period,” was at minimum misleading. The position of the Bidens is that Joe Biden got on the phone with Hunter Biden’s business partners more than 20 times, but business was never discussed in any of those discussions. When White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre suddenly shifted the explanation to “the president ha- — was never in business with his son,” it was significant, a concession that, indeed, Biden had talked to his son’s business partners.
Second, how is the ability to put clients on the phone with the vice president an illusion of access, and not, you know, access?
Perhaps holograms were involved. Or Hunter Biden would ask his clients to pick a card, any card. Apparently, it was all smoke and mirrors, an illusion that would marvel Houdini and stump David Copperfield. Penn and Teller would be left scratching their heads.
