President Biden tried Wednesday to downplay House Republican investigations of his embattled son Hunter and the rest of the first family — claiming that voters just won’t be interested.
In an interview with “PBS NewsHour” host Judy Woodruff, Biden was asked how he planned to deal with the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into his son’s shady business interests in China and Ukraine.
“The public is not going to pay attention that,” Biden, 80, insisted.
“They want these guys to do something. If the only thing they can do is make up things about my family, it’s not going to go very far.”
House Republicans have long-promised to wield the power of their new majority to probe the president’s family — including whether Hunter and first brother James Biden used the family name to gain influence and wealth, and whether the president himself was compromised by their dealings.
Lawmakers on Wednesday grilled a trio of former Twitter executives who were involved in the platform’s censorship of The Post’s bombshell October 2020 stories on Hunter’s infamous laptop, which exposed emails tied to the first son’s business dealings.
The committee has also already requested financial information from the Treasury Department about financial transactions by Biden family members that were flagged as suspicious activity as they laid the groundwork for future public hearings.
Biden has long defended his son Hunter when it comes to claims of corruption, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper in October of last year that he has “great confidence in my son.”
“I love him and he’s on the straight and narrow and he has been for a couple years now. And I’m just so proud of him,” Biden added, referring to Hunter’s history of substance abuse.
Biden has also repeatedly insisted that he’d “never spoken” to his son or brother about overseas business deals, despite evidence to the contrary.
Elsewhere in his post–State of the Union interview with PBS, Biden dismissed the classified documents discovered at his Delaware home and former DC office as simply “stray papers” that ended up there because of careless aides who packed up his White House digs over a decade ago.
“The best of my knowledge, the kinds of things they picked up are things that are from 1974 and stray papers – there may be something else, I don’t know,” Biden told the outlet.
He also tried to contrast of his mishandling of material to former President Donald Trump’s document scandal when asked about a comment he made after the FBI raided his predecessor’s Florida estate last year.
At the time, Biden had said that possessing classified documents was “totally irresponsible.”
He argued that unlike Trump, “no one has had to threaten to do anything” and that he didn’t have his vice presidential and Senate documents “laid out” on the floor, with “top secret code word and all the rest” – a reference to the infamous FBI photo of Trump’s classified papers.
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