President Joe Biden snapped at a journalist who asked him about claims that he talked about business with his son Hunter‘s associates.
Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy caught up with the president at an event on Wednesday, broaching the issue of the Biden family’s financial entanglements — which may soon lead to an impeachment inquiry.
“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? Is that what …” Doocy said before Biden interjected.
“I never talked business with anybody,” Biden shot back. “I knew you’d have a lousy question.” Asked why it was a “lousy question,” the president added: “Because it’s not true!”
The back-and-forth was the latest in a series of tense exchanges between Doocy and Biden.
Devon Archer, a former business associate of Hunter, recently testified to the House Oversight Committee, a lightly redacted transcript of which was released last week.
Hunter Biden put his father on speaker phone roughly 20 times during meetings with business associates, according to Archer, who said these calls were “signal enough to be powerful” despite the conversations sticking to casual topics such as the weather or fishing. Archer also said the elder Biden attended some dinners with his son’s foreign business associates.
For years, Joe Biden claimed to have never spoken to Hunter about his business dealings, a claim that was challenged by another one of the first son’s former business associates, Tony Bobulinski, who came forward in the final weeks of the 2020 campaign to say he had “firsthand” knowledge that the assertion was untrue.
Lately, amid GOP inquiries spurred by concerns about a pattern of millions of dollars flowing to members of the First Family from foreign nationals under suspicious circumstances, the White House has taken to saying the elder Biden never did business with his son. This shift in messaging was noted in a new memo from Republican House Oversight Committee staff that alleges Hunter Biden received millions of dollars from oligarchs in foreign countries.
In a section called “The Biden White House’s Attempt to Move the Goalposts Shows They Have No Answers,” the memo said: “The White House’s latest claim that the ‘President was not in business with his son’ is a marked departure from previous attempts to counter the Committee’s investigation. President Biden and White House spokespersons previously stated that the President had no knowledge of his son’s business and did not discuss business with his son.”
Although White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has insisted to reporters that “nothing has changed,” the oversight panel’s memo said the “Office of White House Counsel refuses to answer questions about this departure from previous statements.”
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