President-elect Joe Biden called a reporter a “one-horse pony” as he left his Tuesday press conference after being asked whether he still thought reports about his son were Russian disinformation.
“Mr. President-elect, do you still think that the stories from the fall about your son Hunter were Russian disinformation and a smear campaign like you said?” asked the reporter, identified as Fox News’s Peter Doocy.
“Yes, yes, yes. God love you, man — you’re a one-horse pony, I tell you,” Biden responded.
.@JoeBiden calls @pdoocy a “one-horse pony” after Doocy asks a question about Hunter Biden. pic.twitter.com/dhB2Lg3lHz
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) December 22, 2020
Weeks ahead of the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post published a series of stories based on emails and other data recovered from a laptop and hard drive that allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden. Critics said the reports raise concerns about the Biden family’s foreign business dealings that present possible corruption and national security issues for him and the incoming president.
The “smoking-gun email” report stated that the elder Biden met with an executive at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which employed Hunter, while he was vice president and suggested he directed U.S. foreign policy to protect his son.
The Biden campaign released a statement that said the former vice president’s “official schedules from the time” showed no meeting with Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, as was described in the report, but otherwise did not deny the validity of the hardware’s contents.
The aspects of the story have since been called into question, and back-to-back reporting claimed that New York Post insiders were skeptical of the story, so much so that one reporter allegedly refused to have his byline appear on the article.
At the time, Biden called the reports “a desperate smear campaign.”
The FBI has since confirmed that there is an open investigation involving Hunter Biden, and Attorney General William Barr “has known about a disparate set of investigations involving Hunter Biden’s business and financial dealings since at least this spring.”
Biden added after the verbal slip-up that he would not interfere with the course federal investigators decide to take regarding his son.
“I promise you, my Justice Department will be totally on its own making its judgments about how they should proceed,” Biden said.
