Here's how Hunter Biden rebutted the allegations that his father was involved in his business, in his own words.
No paywall, so even members of Congress have no excuse not to read it. https://t.co/R5gr4wcg32— Philip Bump (@pbump) March 1, 2024
Philip Block, at the Washington Post, gives us all another free chance to catch up on the D-R-A-M-A — “Hunter Biden’s point-by-point rebuttal of allegations against his father”:
It has been abundantly clear for months that the House Republican case suggesting that President Biden was corruptly involved in his son Hunter’s business engagements was a function of frenzied cherry-picking. When Hunter Biden came to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to answer questions from legislators and investigators working on the impeachment inquiry targeting his father, he was presented with a number of those assertions.
In each case, he offered credible responses. You can read them below, in his own words.
What emerges when reading the transcript of the interview is how dependent the Republican effort is on three tactics. You’ll see those play out in the rebuttals Hunter Biden offered, but it’s useful to articulate them specifically.
First and most obvious is that cherry-picking. Republicans have gained access to countless financial and personal documents involving the Bidens and business associates of Hunter Biden and James Biden, the president’s brother. Sifting through that material like amateur internet sleuths, they’ve picked out a dozen or so things that might be framed as suspicious. This is how all investigations work, of course, with a few clues scattered among a lot of distractions. But when the allegations include such things as Joe Biden showing up at a dinner involving his son and a business partner, the frequency of his joining his son for dinner matters.
This is the second point: Republicans are trying to weaponize the schmoozing that politicians do. The allegations of Joe Biden meeting Hunter Biden’s partners centers on things like shaking hands at a reception or Hunter Biden’s associates being invited to White House events.
Third, the allegations center on two key conflations. The first and better known is using “the Biden family” as a proxy for “Hunter and James Biden.” Claiming that Hunter Biden’s income was going to “the Biden family” is a way to loop in the president unfairly. The same thing happens with “payments.”…
There were other issues presented to Hunter Biden, but those didn’t centrally allege wrongdoing by his father. This was the intent of the hearing after all — and as Biden and his attorney had to remind Republicans at times — not to tear down Hunter Biden but to show how Joe Biden allegedly benefited from these business deals.
Now more than ever, there’s no evidence he did.
If you read the whole thing, it’s obvious how frantically the GOP is scrabbling around, digging through the bottom of the barrel and deep into the Russian-fostered swamp muck, looking for a Magic Weapon that simply doesn’t exist.
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