Hunter Biden sat down with ABC for a hotly-anticipated interview that he really shouldn’t have needed to do, considering the exhaustive profile published in The New Yorker over the summer.
And yet, with his father’s campaign momentum having stalled amid incessant attacks from the White House and a surge in momentum for Elizabeth Warren, the younger Biden decided to address questions around his foreign business interests (again), this time on national television.
Speaking about his decision to serve on the board of Burisma (the focus of the Giuliani conspiracy theory), Biden essentially said that in retrospect it may have been poor judgement, but he was quick to state the obvious – namely that it was impossible for him to predict that the former mayor of New York would one day become a defense attorney for an embattled President Donald Trump and that the two of them would engage in a global smear campaign.
“Did I make a mistake? Well, maybe in the grand scheme of things, yeah”, he said, speaking about his overseas business dealings while his father was vice president. “But did I make a mistake based upon some ethical lapse? Absolutely not”, Biden continued. “However, was it poor judgment to be in the middle of something that is a swamp in many ways? Yeah”.
Over the past several days, Donald Trump has attempted to get “Where’s Hunter?” trending on Twitter, a juvenile effort to enhance the appeal of a conspiracy theory that Rudy Giuliani has put his career (and perhaps even his freedom) on the line perpetuating and which now threatens to end the Trump president early.
We would remind America that many of the web portals and personalities pushing the Burisma conspiracy (and the even less credible China narrative about Biden) likely couldn’t recount the actual story behind these baseless allegations. Most of what pollutes the public discourse around Hunter Biden amounts to the parroting of talking points from the president’s Twitter feed.
Over the weekend, a lawyer for the younger Biden released a statement going back over the actual business arrangements and providing a bullet point summary of the facts.
Read the statement: Hunter Biden Releases Statement Through Lawyer Amid Trump Slander
The bottom line continues to be that Trump’s allegations are baseless. Joe Biden was carrying out stated US policy at the time, and his campaign to remove a corrupt prosecutor in Ukraine was supported by America’s allies and, for what it’s worth, the IMF. Biden attempted to drive that point home this week in an irritated series of comments to the press following Trump’s egregious rally in Minneapolis, where he maligned the Biden family.
As late as Monday evening, the president was still perpetuating the false narrative that the Bidens “took” massive sums of illegal money “out of China”. There is no evidence for that claim whatsoever. Trump has also floated the idea that he may ask President Xi Jinping to investigate the Bidens. Those remarks added fuel to the impeachment fire.
“I gave a hook to some very unethical people to act in illegal ways to try to do some harm to my father. That’s where I made the mistake”, Biden went on to tell ABC. “So I take full responsibility for that. Did I do anything improper? No, not in any way. Not in any way whatsoever”.
The reference to “very unethical people” acting “in illegal ways” is obviously to Giuliani.
For his trouble, Rudy is now reportedly under investigation by Manhattan prosecutors for his lobbying efforts in Ukraine after his fixers in the country were arrested on campaign finance charges tied to a scheme that resulted in the ouster of former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Yovanovitch gave a damning account to lawmakers on Friday. Trump’s anti-Biden ads were banned last week by NBC Universal and CNN for containing baseless allegations against the Bidens. The president’s campaign has not, to date, provided any proof or evidence to back up Trump’s claims about Hunter’s business activities in Ukraine or China.
