As it stands, there is a lot of information addressing the less-important questions and very little evidence pointing at those most-important ones. So Biden’s critics, like House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), often conflate the two. Hunter Biden’s work earns benefits accrued to “the Biden family,” a bit of wordplay meant to implicate Joe Biden in what his son did, even without any financial connection being made. (There’s some irony in how both Comer and Hunter Biden have sought benefit in implying Joe Biden’s undemonstrated involvement.) Of course, Comer often goes further, explicitly claiming that Biden was explicitly involved and benefited — though he has offered no robust evidence to that effect.
Comer’s central challenge is that his eagerness to make the case against Biden often trips him up, deteriorating his credibility as he levels severe allegations against the president. Just this week, The Washington Post’s fact-checker dismantled Comer’s assertion that email messages sent to Hunter Biden from a pseudonymous government account were evidence of Biden’s involvement in his son’s business. Earlier this summer, he suggested that Joe Biden took a trip to Ukraine in late 2015 after being cajoled by his son — but the trip was scheduled weeks prior to the phone call in which that cajoling purportedly occurred.
That phone call is back in the mix as Comer picks up a new line of attack. The only problem is that, once again, the new information may actually weaken his past rhetoric.
In July, House Republicans deposed Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer. They focused heavily on Dec. 4, 2015, on which date the Ukrainian energy company Burisma held a dinner for its board members in Dubai, a group that included both Hunter Biden and Archer.
Archer testified that, after the dinner, he and Hunter Biden went to the hotel where Hunter Biden was staying. Two representatives of Burisma and a manager at the hotel eventually joined them for an informal coffee, including Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky.
Archer testified that the Burisma executives were seeking Biden’s assistance.
“The request was I think they were getting pressure and they requested Hunter, you know, help them with some of that pressure,” he testified. He said pressure was “kind of a theme” for the company.
Hunter Biden and the Burisma executives called Washington. This was the call that Comer would later falsely suggest on Fox News was related to then-Vice President Biden’s trip to Ukraine.
On Wednesday, Comer mentioned this meeting again in a letter sent to Archivist Colleen Shogan of the National Archives and Records Administration. He’d obtained a copy of an email sent from a business associate of Hunter Biden’s to a staffer in the White House in which they shared proposed press statements about Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma.
The first message from the associate, Eric Schwerin, to Biden’s staffer Kate Bedingfield came at 10:45 a.m. She replied at 2:30 p.m. with a quote that the vice president was planning to offer.
“The timing of this email traffic is concerning to the Committee,” Comer’s letter stated. “According to Devon Archer (another longtime Biden family business associate), after a Burisma board of directors meeting in Dubai — on the evening of December 4, 2015 (midday in Washington, D.C.)—Hunter Biden ‘called D.C.’ to discuss pressure that Burisma asked him to relieve.”
It’s not clear when this call took place; there would have been a nine-hour difference in the times between the two locations. But Comer’s implication is that the statement from Biden followed the phone call — meaning that Hunter Biden had called his father (something Archer wasn’t able to assert) and, therefore, that he was involved in the business.
But it’s useful to pull out a bit.
Emails among those included in the cache of material attributed to Hunter Biden’s laptop show that there was a lengthy chain related to the press outreach — a chain that included Burisma staff, Hunter Biden and Archer.
At issue was a series of questions introduced by New York Times reporter James Risen, who was writing an article about the apparent conflict between Joe Biden’s anti-corruption efforts and Hunter Biden’s Burisma work. (The 2015 article notes that the government was frustrated by the sitting prosecutor general’s failure to aid investigations into Burisma, contradicting claims from Comer and others.) Schwerin sent the questions to the group.
Archer responded that replies should be drafted but should be “[o]bviously all [the] same.” This is likely a reference to statements the group was discussing the day prior in relation to a request from the Wall Street Journal. Those statements, in fact, were the ones sent to Bedingfield on the morning of Dec. 4. This was all in process before the board dinner.
The email exchange between Bedingfield and Schwerin includes a request that the White House staffer call him at 1:43 p.m. Soon after, she shares the statement Biden had approved and that she planned to give to “both reporters.”
So now we have at least two possible scenarios. In one, the one Comer offers (but Archer didn’t), Hunter Biden calls his father from Dubai to talk about “pressure” Burisma was facing. In the other, the board meeting was underway at a time that Hunter Biden’s team was scrambling to reply to two negative articles from major American newspapers. A call is placed to D.C., where Schwerin is located (according to his email footer). At 10:43 p.m. Dubai time, he asks Bedingfield to call him. The statements are shared with the reporters and versions included in the reports.
One scenario demands that we start from the assumption that Hunter Biden’s call was suspect. The other fits neatly with a broader set of details.
There is a valid discussion to be had over the extent to which Vice President Biden’s staff was interacting with Hunter Biden’s business partner. But that falls into the middle tier of questions outlined at the beginning of this article. Comer’s focused on the unsubstantiated upper tier.
To that end, he appeared on Fox Business Wednesday evening in a pre-recorded interview.
That Biden was “coordinating with his son’s legal team about spinning false narratives to the American people should be concerning to everyone,” he argued, though the presentation of the statements discussed in the email change as “false narratives” is hard to substantiate.
“Hunter Biden is a private citizen and a lawyer,” the White House statement began. “The Vice President does not endorse any particular company and has no involvement with this company.” To assume that’s false is to beg the question. To assume the statement was offered after Biden was on the phone with a Burisma official is to assume a remarkable willingness on the part of the vice president to proactively lie.
Kudlow and Comer went back and forth for a bit. Eventually the Fox Business host asked Comer a follow-up on a past unsubstantiated allegation from Comer: that Joe and Hunter Biden had received substantial bribes from Zlochevsky.
“I don’t have anything new to report about the subject,” Comer said after blaming the lack of news on a “cover up” by the government.
So we’ve moved on to something else.