Will Hunter Biden damage his father’s bid for re-election?

I did everything right and they indicted me.

But Donald Trump is not the only high profile figure

connected to the American presidency

who faces federal charges.

investigation.

Hunter Biden has reached a tentative deal

on two tax offenses and one firearm charge.

were quick to react and cry foul.

It embodies cronyism, camouflage, and corruption.

the lack of discussion of the Hunter Biden case

has been noticeable.

So are America's liberals usually so quick

to pour over the legal woes of the former president

wrong to pay so much less attention

to the current president's son?

And how could Hunter Biden affect

the re-election prospects of his father?

I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist for The Guardian,

and this is Politics Weekly America.

He survived a tragic accident

in which his mother and his sister

were killed when he was a small child.

He and his brother, Beau, survived,

and now Beau has passed away.

and the host of the podcast, American Crisis.

And before all that was the public editor

of The New York Times,

writing and observing on the media.

from drug addiction with financial problems

and has been the focus of a great deal

of political commentary on the right for many reasons.

I mean, we should remind ourselves

there is a very sort of human drama

at the center of this.

This is a president who's been multiply bereaved,

who has this son who I think,

you know, for the reasons you've said,

has obviously brought much pain

and his pain has brought pain to the family.

There was this moment, we should hear it,

this voice message that emerged of Joe Biden

leaving a message for his son, Hunter.

I mean, listening to that, Margaret, it is,

well, tell us what you think.

certainly has his flaws as a person

and as a public official,

but we do know that he loves his son

and that he seems to love him unconditionally.

President Biden has expressed many times

that he knows that his son has had troubles

and has struggled,

but that he loves him deeply and stands by him.

I love him and he's on a straight and narrow

and he has been for a couple of years now.

was during the impeachment,

of Donald Trump,

which was about Donald Trump putting pressure on Ukraine.

And Republicans tried to divert attention away from Trump

and say, hold on a minute,

there's something fishy here,

which is when Joe Biden was vice president

under Barack Obama,

his son Hunter got a job with Burisma,

a Ukrainian energy company

for which he was paid $83,000 a month.

What possible skill set was Hunter Biden

offering Burisma that he would be paid that money?

Surely he was only there

because his last name was Biden

and perhaps he promised even implicitly access

to a man close to the center of power.

And I think that it is correct

that Hunter Biden has used the family name.

I mean, I don't think it's right.

I think it's correct to say

that he used the family name

to get on a board like that and make money.

And so the idea of his being something

of an influence peddler,

I think is a justifiable claim.

people heard the name Hunter Biden

was in the lead up to the 2020 election.

And the phrase was part of,

his name was part of a three word phrase

you heard all the time,

which was...

a very important election

in which Joe Biden was running against Donald Trump,

the New York Post,

which is owned by Rupert Murdoch,

published a story about a laptop,

which had purportedly been dropped off

at a Wilmington, Delaware computer repairs shop.

And through many twists and turns,

it was revealed,

if I guess it was said at least,

that this laptop had belonged to Hunter Biden,

that he had dropped it off for repair

and never picked it up.

And now we see that there's a lot of emails on it,

many, many emails that seem to suggest

some dastardly deeds.

In the emails,

they're discussing a meeting

with the then vice president, Joe Biden,

who could, quote,

use his influence in those business dealings.

It was well-timed just before the election,

and it did create something of a stir,

and it's a stir that has never really gone away

because that, as you say,

Hunter Biden's name pretty much now

is Hunter Biden's laptop.

Biden is his middle name.

but just in terms of how

the press covered that at the time,

would it be fair to say

that the media was aware of it

because it landed in the middle of that 2020 campaign,

and there was some nervousness in some newsrooms

that this looked so convenient

that maybe this was another,

you know, disinformation operation

by the Russians who,

you know, one way or another,

we knew they wanted to play a role

in the 2016 campaign,

and that therefore, in some ways,

the media undercovered this discovery,

insufficiently covered this discovery

of the Hunter Biden laptop

because they feared it was a kind of ploy,

an operation by Moscow.

I was working at that time

at the Washington Post.

The Washington Post's top editor

at that time was Marty Barron,

someone who goes after things hard

but is also cautious and rigorous

in the way reporting,

in urging reporting to get done

in that particular way,

and I think it was appropriate.

Did it result in not paying enough attention

to this thing?

Perhaps, because there is a story there,

but it, I think,

would have been much worse

to jump on something

without being able to verify it

and really do the deep reporting

that it deserved.

Yeah.

it's not quite a name

in the way Hunter Biden's laptop is now,

as you say,

his actual name,

but what was the Hunter Biden

investigation?

And just explain to us

how it's played out

when it started

and who's been doing it.

within the U.S. Justice Department,

which has actually resulted,

quite recently,

in Hunter Biden's agreement

to plead guilty

to some charges having to do

with his not filing taxes on time,

and they are misdemeanors.

Hunter Biden will acknowledge his failure

to pay taxes on income

he received in 2017 and 2018

which has to do with his purchasing a gun

without disclosing

that he had had a drug problem,

but that is not apparently going to result

in any kind of direct punishment.

the federal investigation into Hunter Biden

and spare him any possible prison time,

they believe this is only the beginning.

on the Republican side

of the right wing people

thought would be valid.

and we'll go through them in a second,

but do any of them relate

to what was on the laptop

or is that a separate thing?

It's a confusing,

it's a confusing question.

I think that there are emails

on the laptop,

which are said to be,

you know, make him look

as if he was trading

on his father's certainly image,

if not direct help.

But I would say,

just as Hunter Biden benefited

from his father being prominent

vice president,

he has also, I think,

suffered from that

because the way he's being persecuted

if he weren't the son

of a very prominent person.

So it has cut both ways.

about the investigator,

because if you listen,

as I actually did this week,

to conservative talk shows

and podcasts about this subject,

they are not placated by the fact

that the prosecutor

or the investigator

who looked at this

for the Department of Justice

in Delaware

was actually appointed

they even say this man,

David Weiss,

they still somehow cast doubt

on his fairness in this case.

He was appointed by Trump.

He was very well regarded

on both sides of the aisle

as being impartial

and non-political.

There is a complication,

which is that there's

a whistleblower involved,

a former IRS official.

The whistleblower is accusing

of providing preferential treatment,

which the department denies.

Who has said that he thinks Weiss

didn't have the power

that he should have had.

that U.S. Attorney Weiss

was blocked from bringing

stronger charges.

But U.S. Attorney General

Merrick Garland said last week

that Weiss was not.

complete authority

to make all decisions on his own.

the tax collecting authority,

of course.

And then in this odd twist this week,

Gal Luft, the co-director

of a Maryland-based research group

who had claimed to have

damaging information on Hunter Biden,

has now himself been charged

with arms trafficking,

sanctions violations,

and acting as an unregistered agent for China.

We should say that Mr. Luft

has denied any wrongdoing,

claims he's being targeted

because of what he told prosecutors

about Hunter Biden.

I mean, I'm just thinking,

having listened, as I said,

to some of the sort of chatter

in the right-wing infosphere,

this is absolutely going to lead

to just feed the conspiracy theories,

won't it?

Right.

They're removing him

because he actually would be

such a great witness for our side.

But I don't think that is the case.

what are you hearing?

What are the sort of Fox News,

as it were, talking points

about Hunter Biden

and about this investigation?

I mean, you might have thought that,

you know, the combination

of him being charged,

entering a plea,

not going to jail,

that might wrap it up.

But in Fox News world,

what are they saying about Hunter Biden

and on this whole business?

politicians and media

don't really have a lot

to talk about with Biden,

with President Biden,

other than the fact that he's old

and that he has a son

who's been something of a ne'er-do-well.

So they will never let this go.

every corporate media outlet

is saying it's all wrapped up,

it's Hunter's fault,

he's the little scapegoat,

now be done with it.

This is disgraceful

and it is not the rule of law

in our country.

The latest wrinkle in this case,

even if there isn't much of one,

it's in the conversation all the time,

as is the idea that Joe Biden

is senile and is, you know,

barely functional.

And that is not the case either.

Biden crime family.

You know, what are they basing,

what's the sort of material

they use to make that claim?

I really do.

I don't think there's anything there,

but it, you know,

it makes a good hashtag.

that somehow the job

for the Ukrainian natural gas company,

that must have been something corrupt.

selling access to daddy,

access to really shady foreign characters,

or corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs.

He made millions.

but they've never been able to find

any exchange or any decision

by Joe Biden that seems

to have been influenced

by the fact that his son

was receiving money

from this big company.

If anything, as I understand it,

as vice president,

he was actually quite tough

and gave a few decisions

that would have hurt those,

his son's employers.

So I think it doesn't work.

But I think that's where

the case seems to go.

of representatives committee

or subcommittee on oversight,

which has been looking

into president Biden's

supposed financial corruption

for several months.

He is.

then there's nothing

we have to talk about.

Our investigation is about Joe Biden.

So that is also an out,

of all of this, that, you know,

there's been an effort

at different levels

to try to find something

that maybe Biden

could be impeached for,

whether it's his policies

about immigration

at the southern border

near Mexico or something else.

But they don't seem

to get much of a purchase.

is this all about Republicans

seeing that there's multiple

criminal investigations

into Donald Trump

a kind of symmetry

and that Hunter Biden

is their sort of tool for that?

is the most political

attorney general

our country's ever seen.

He entered DOJ

wanting to and intending

to indict Donald Trump.

He needed to indict

Hunter Biden as camouflage

to say, look how fair and even I am.

the indictments

that have been lodged

against Hunter Biden,

do they compare

with the charge sheet

against Donald Trump?

Hunter Biden is not

president of the United States

and never has been

and never has had a job

in the White House.

So let's let's set that straight.

But even if you compared them

in some sort of equal way,

they are they don't compare.

President Trump was impeached twice

and you can say

that that was political.

But there was there was meat there.

These different indictments,

these different charges

that are that are happening,

whether in whether in Washington,

D.C. or in Georgia,

where he insisted

that the secretary of state

find some votes

because he needed them

to take Georgia

in the 2020 election.

There are very serious

kinds of investigations,

indictments and criminal prosecutions

that involve Donald Trump.

And I don't think

that there is any symmetry

between him and Hunter Biden,

who, again, is not

and never has been the president.

because we know that Donald Trump

doesn't scruple to go hard

in on even people's vulnerabilities.

I'm just imagining

if it is a matchup again,

a rematch of Biden and Trump

on the debate stage in 2024

and Donald Trump brings up Hunter Biden.

Just from what you've seen,

how does Joe Biden respond to that?

want to go there at all.

He may simply say

that this has nothing to do

with my campaign or my presidency.

And it's a family matter

and a personal matter.

Meanwhile, according to three people

familiar with the discussions

inside the White House,

President Biden has made it clear to aides

he doesn't want to hear any suggestions

about limiting his son's visibility.

In fact, we've actually noticed