Biden rips reporter Peter Doocy’s ‘lousy question’ about speakerphone calls with Hunter
WASHINGTON — President Biden insisted Wednesday that he “never talked business with anybody” after his son Hunter’s former business partner Devon Archer told Congress last week that he was on speakerphone during roughly 20 business meetings and even met his son’s foreign patrons at in-person events.
“There’s this testimony now where one of your son’s former business associates is claiming that you were on speakerphone a lot with them, talking business,” Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy told Biden after a wind-power event in New Mexico.
“I never talked business with anybody. I knew you’d have a lousy question,” Biden scoffed.
“Why is that a lousy question?” Doocy asked.
“Because it’s not true,” the president replied as he walked away.
It was Biden’s first public comment on Archer’s July 31 deposition with the House Oversight Committee, which tied him more closely to his son’s international business dealings as House Republicans led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) move closer to launching an impeachment inquiry.
In addition to revealing that Joe Biden often spoke on the phone with his son’s partners from countries where he held sway as vice president, Archer revealed that Joe Biden attended two separate dinners at Washington’s Café Milano — in 2014 and 2015 — with his son’s Russian, Kazakhstani and Ukrainian patrons, rather than one as previously reported.
Archer also said that in December 2015, Hunter stepped away from a dinner in Dubai to call his father.
The then-second son was joined by Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian oligarch whose natural gas company Burisma Holdings paid Hunter up to $1 million per year to sit on the board, and Burisma adviser Vadym Pozharskyi, whom Joe Biden had met at Café Milano.
That call is potentially significant due to an FBI informant’s report that Zlochevsky claimed in 2016 that he was “coerced” into paying $10 million in bribes to Joe and Hunter Biden in order to secure Joe’s help in ousting Ukrainian prosecutor-general Viktor Shokin, who was fired in March 2016.
Joe Biden has tried to laugh off the allegation, asking in June, “Where’s the money?”
Archer told the Oversight Committee in the transcribed interview that Hunter Biden “would sometimes make it apparent that he spoke to his dad, and sometimes he put him on speaker.”
Joe Biden wouldn’t directly talk about business on the phone, Archer said, but would demonstrate his son’s ability to reach him when needed.
The president would ask, “how’s the weather, how’s the fishing, how’s the — whatever it may be, whatever — but — you know, it was very, you know, casual conversations,” Archer recalled.
House Democrats led by Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) have emphasized Archer’s testimony that Joe Biden discussed the weather with his son’s partners.
However, Archer said that the substance of Joe Biden’s remarks was unimportant because his mere presence demonstrated that “there was brand being delivered along with other capabilities and reach.”
Archer said he specifically recalled Hunter Biden putting his father on speakerphone during a meeting in Beijing with Jonathan Li, the CEO of BHR Partners, a Chinese state-backed investment fund co-founded by Hunter in 2013 just 12 days after he arrived with his dad in China’s capital on Air Force Two.
Archer told the Oversight Committee that Joe Biden had coffee with Li during his late 2013 visit to Beijing and that Hunter put his dad on speaker during a subsequent trip to China.
Hunter held a 10% stake in BHR until at least 2021 and neither he nor the White House have provided transparency into the terms of his alleged divestment from the company.
Archer said that he also recalled Hunter Biden putting his dad on speakerphone during a dinner meeting with a French company in Paris from 2011.
Archer told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in an interview published Friday that it was “categorically false” to say that Joe Biden had no role in his son’s dealings.
“He was aware of Hunter’s business, he met with Hunter’s business partners, I mean you found a letter that illustrates that he knew me,” Archer said, referring to a Jan. 20, 2011, note from then-Vice President Joe Biden expressing his pleasure that Archer was partnering with Hunter and thanking him for attending a luncheon with visiting Chinese President Hu Jintao.
Joe Biden said in June that he didn’t lie when he claimed in September 2019 that he’d “never spoken” with his son about “his overseas business dealings.”
Biden similarly said in August 2019 that “I have never discussed, with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses.”
Hunter wrote in emails retrieved from his former laptop that he had to give “half” of his income to Joe Biden and the Oversight Committee in May identified nine Biden family members who allegedly received foreign revenue.
IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, who investigated Hunter over potential tax crimes, said Justice Department officials blocked them from investigating Joe Biden’s role in business dealings — despite communications directly implicating him, including a threatening July 30, 2017, WhatsApp message in which Hunter wrote he was “sitting here with my father” and threatened retribution if a deal was aborted.
Soon after, $5.1 million was transferred from CEFC China Energy to Biden-linked accounts.
At his first dinner with Hunter’s oligarch associates at Café Milano, which Archer said happened sometime in spring 2014, the sitting vice president dined with Russian billionaire and former Moscow first lady Yelena Baturina, with whom Hunter Biden sought out US property investments; Kazakhstani businessman Kenes Rakishev, who wired $142,300 for a luxury car for Hunter Biden; and former Kazakhstani Prime Minister Karim Massimov.
The second meal featured a different lineup including Pozharskyi of Burisma, which added Hunter Biden and Archer to its board in early 2014 as Vice President Biden assumed control of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.
The attendees included “Vadym, Hunter, Joe, myself, Karim Massimov, a Greek Orthodox priest, maybe someone from World Food Program,” Archer said. Although Archer didn’t name her, Baturina was discussed as an invitee and a different attendee of the dinner told The Post this year he saw her there.
Baturina and another Russian billionaire with whom Hunter partnered on US real estate shopping, former military contractor Vladimir Yevtushenkov, remain unsanctioned by the Biden administration, which has imposed stiff sanctions on Russia’s business elite in a bid to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Hunter later brought Mexican business associates in 2015 to meet with his father at the official vice presidential residence in Washington.
The following year, Hunter and US associate Jeff Cooper joined Joe Biden on a taxpayer-funded trip to Mexico, with Hunter apparently emailing a Mexican associate from Air Force Two complaining about the lack of reciprocal business favors after “I have brought every single person you have ever asked me to bring to the F’ing White House and the Vice President’s house and the inauguration.”
“There was no business-deals specifics discussed ever at any of these things, but it was — it was a nice, you know, conversation,” Archer told Carlson about Joe Biden’s engagements with partners.
Hunter sold his ability to navigate the “regulatory environment” in Washington, which in practice means “selling access, at the end of the day,” Archer said, meaning Joe Biden’s voice on the line was “prize enough” to demonstrate Hunter’s pull.
“In the rear view,” Archer told Carlson, “it’s an abuse of soft power, I’d say.”
