Predictably, after Republican staffers asked the expected questions in Wednesday’s Hunter Biden deposition (and Democratic staffers caught their colleagues leaving out pertinent pages, twice), individual members of Congress launched their gotcha questions, with Matt Gaetz trying to base bribery allegations in the fact that Hunter paid a shared cell phone bill 14 years ago.
There was one interesting gotcha question, though — because it demonstrated how Biden men peg events to things that happened with Beau’s cancer, and as a result get fuzzy about the timeline.
To set up a question about a business deal with a hedgie named Jonathan Li, a staffer asked Hunter to read a passage from his book describing a trip to China where then-Vice President Biden briefly met Li. While reading, Hunter observed that he might have the date of the trip wrong.
Q You can read the next full paragraph.
A Okay. “In 2013 –” I think it was 2014, but I’m not sure, because — I think this is a mistake because I’d learned of Beau’s tumor just months before, it would be 2014, and I went on this trip, I believe, it was in 2014.
“In 2014, Dad asked –” it says, in 2013, but it should say 2014 — “Dad asked my then teenage daughter, Finnegan, to join him on Air Force Two to Japan and then onto Beijing, where he was meeting with President Xi Jinping. Dad often asked his grandkids to accompany him on overseas trips. It was his chance to catch up. I jumped on the plane from Japan to China to spend time with them both. While we were in Beijing, Dad met with one of Devon’s Chinese partners, Jonathan Li, in the lobby of the American delegation’s hotel, just long enough to say hello and shake hands. I was meeting with Li as a courtesy call while I was in the country; the business deal had been signed more than a week earlier. Li and I then headed off for a cup of coffee.”
That was in the first hour.
Two hours later, after Andy Biggs attempted to claim that Devon Archer had testified that Hunter had called his father with Mykola Zlochevsky (Archer testified that he didn’t witness any call), Biggs tried to make a major deal about Hunter’s earlier uncertainty about this date.
Mr. Biggs. Right.
So you also testified that the book — that the book was wrong, your book was wrong, it’s printed with the wrong date. You testified that —
Mr. Lowell. No, no. Actually, it was right.
The Witness. Oh, it was right?
Mr. Biggs. But that’s not what he testified to, Mr. Lowell.
Mr. Lowell. He said he wasn’t sure.
The Witness. I wasn’t sure. I thought because —
Mr. Biggs. No, no. Well, we’ll have the transcript to look back. I mean, you like to rely on the transcript.
Mr. Lowell. Well, luckily we’re still here, so let’s ask the question: When is the date that is in his book in which he’s talking about? It’s either 2013 or 2014.
Is that the one you’re talking about?
Mr. Biggs. Yeah.
Mr. Lowell. Let’s go back to the book.
The Witness. Yeah.
Mr. Lowell. Can we go back to that exhibit?
The Witness. But regardless is this: is that, I’m sorry I missed, in a 270-page book, a typo of — if it is such a typo. I have no idea.
Mr. Lowell. What is the 2013 date?
Mr. Biggs. Unbelievable.
The Witness. How is it unbelievable, Mr. Biggs? I really don’t understand.
Mr. Biggs. Well, I’m not surprised you don’t understand, so —
The Witness. Why are you not surprised? I really — is that —
Mr. Biggs. So here we go. Do you have the book?
Mr. Lowell. Yeah, we do.
Mr. Biggs. Okay. What’s the right year?
Mr. Lowell. “In 2013, Dad asked my then-teenage daughter, Finnegan, to join him on Air Force Two to Japan” —
The Witness. So this isn’t even — we’re not even talking about the same time.
This is the — this is the transcript. I thought that that 2013 — I was confused. I thought that it happened in —
Mr. Biggs. So you’re —
The Witness. — 2014. But —
Mr. Biggs. I don’t want to interrupt you, but I’m going to. You are confused — you were confused earlier today —
The Witness. About your —
Mr. Biggs. — when you testified?
The Witness. By your questioning. You’re telling me — you were just talking about a board meeting with Burisma in Dubai.
Mr. Biggs. Yeah, and then we moved on to this.
The Witness. Oh. We hadn’t even moved on to it yet, though. What’s —
Mr. Biggs. Yeah, we had.
The Witness. — the question?
Mr. Biggs. You said this morning — I want to make this as clear as I possibly can.
This morning, you testified, my understanding, that your book was in error. In fact, I wrote it down when you said that, that the date was in error —
The Witness. No —
Mr. Biggs. — in your published book. Is that — was that wrong?
The Witness. If we — we will, I’m sure, have the transcript in 24 hours. But to clarify, I will make absolutely clear, we were doing questioning here. We were asking other questions related to other dates. There have been many, many dates thrown around today. I think probably a thousand times someone has asked me about a date, time, this, this, and the other.
Mr. Biggs. This was —
The Witness. When I was reading this, it said in 2013, and I said, “Is that right?”
Mr. Biggs. Okay.
The Witness. “I’m not sure if that’s right. I thought the trip to China occurred in 2014.”
Mr. Biggs. All right.
The Witness. I’m still not certain of exactly the date that it happened. But it’s not a —
Mr. Biggs. You don’t view it as materiality. I get it.
The Witness. Whether it happened in 2013 or 2014?
Mr. Biggs. So I want to — I want to ask you —
The Witness. Do you view that as materiality?
Mr. Lowell. I’m sorry. Now we have to tell you that you’re over your hour, and I’ve given you 2 or 3 more minutes. And I’m just — according to Ms. Greene, rules matter.
Mr. Biggs. Thank you.
Mr. Lowell. We’re done.
They weren’t done, by the way. Biggs moved on to attempting to claim Hunter had vouched for Tony Bobulinski’s pictures of Blackberry messages, even though Abbe Lowell had specifically said they did not vouch for those messages. There was a lot of claiming that up was down from the members of Congress.
But the exchange about dates is instructive. Biggs thought he had scored a great big gotcha. He was (and probably will) attempt to use Hunter’s uncertainty about the date of the trip to China — uncertainty that stemmed from Hunter trying to map it onto Beau’s illness — to claim that Hunter’s certainty that he did not call his father on Zlochevsky’s behalf is unreliable because he couldn’t remember the date of the trip to China.
Biggs was attempting to use Hunter’s uncertainty about something that’s not material as a way to claim his certainty about something material cannot be trusted.
It looks pretty ridiculous on paper, doesn’t it?
But it sounds remarkably similar to what Robert Hur did with Hunter’s father — using Joe Biden’s uncertainty about the timing of Beau’s death to suggest Joe’s certainty that a reference to a 40-page handwritten memo could not be trusted, and that instead one must infer something more nefarious.
Of course, when Hur pulled this ploy, he concluded that Joe’s uncertainty about the date reflected not the stress of dealing with October 7 nor the muddiness created by pegging life events to grief, but that Joe is an old geezer who should not be President.
It turns out that both Biden men — 81-year old Joe and 54-year old Hunter — got similarly uncertain when they tied life events to Beau’s illness in a deposition.