The House Oversight and Judiciary committees published on Thursday a transcript of their deposition with Hunter Biden, revealing the contents of an hourslong interview in which the first son contradicted his former business partner and denied his father’s involvement in his foreign business ventures.
Republicans on the committee had grilled the first son one day prior about his business dealings in China, Ukraine, and elsewhere as part of their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.
They dove into meticulous detail about some of these ventures, and at times Hunter Biden also said he could not recall key details the Republicans were interested in examining. The first son, however, remained adamant that he did not include his father in any of his work.
“I did not involve my father in my business, not while I was a practicing lawyer, not in my investments or transactions, domestic or international, not as a board member, and not as an artist, never,” he said during his opening remarks to the committees.
Hunter Biden was questioned on the multiple entities containing “Rosemont Seneca” branding. He, along with his former business partner Devon Archer, founded Rosemont Seneca Partners in 2009 as an investment firm. Archer told Congress in his own interview that Archer owned a separate entity founded in 2014 called Rosemont Seneca Bohai, which was a vehicle established to invest in a Shanghai-based entity that was intertwined with the Chinese government.
While Hunter Biden received payments out of Rosemont Seneca Bohai’s bank account, according to bank records obtained by the Oversight Committee, he firmly denied any inside knowledge about the account’s financial activity. Hunter Biden said he was always under the impression that the payments he received came from Archer and that he was not in tune with the actual names on the accounts that provided him with payments.
Archer, however, testified that while neither he nor Hunter Biden controlled the banking of Rosemont Seneca Bohai, they owned it together under a “handshake” agreement.
“Hunter was a corporate secretary of RSB [Rosemont Seneca Bohai]. We had a handshake 50-50 ownership. And he conducted, you know, business with the COO,” Archer had said.
Asked if this was the case, Hunter Biden told lawmakers, “Not that I remember at all, no.”
“It obviously was not a 50/50 handshake based upon the documents that I see here because I did not receive 50 percent of what I’ve seen in documents that have been shown to me,” Hunter Biden said.
Hunter Biden was also questioned about a heavily scrutinized WhatsApp message he wrote in 2017, apparently to an executive of a Chinese energy conglomerate, in which he claimed he was sitting next to Joe Biden and leveraged his father’s political influence as a warning if the first son did not receive money he was owed. Hunter Biden, days later, received $100,000 from the energy company. The company then funneled $5 million into a firm Hunter Biden opened with Chinese business partners.
Hunter Biden testified that he had no recollection of sending the message, that his father was not sitting with him, and that he had, in fact, sent it to the wrong person.
“I would say two things about this message. The first thing is this. Is that the Zhao that this is sent to is not the Zhao that was connected to CEFC. … Which I think is the best indication of how out of my mind I was at this moment in time,” Hunter Biden, a recovering drug and alcohol addict, said.
He added that his addiction was “not an excuse” and that he was “embarrassed” by the message. He was “drunk and probably high” when he wrote it, he said.
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“I take full responsibility for being an absolute ass and idiot when I sent this message, if I did send this message,” Hunter Biden said.
Pressed on which “Zhao” he would have sent the message to, Hunter Biden said he believed it was intended to go to a man named Henry Zhao, “who had no involvement, who had no understanding or even remotely knew what the hell I was even Goddamn talking about. Excuse my language.”
Republicans said at the conclusion of the first son’s deposition that they plan to hold a public hearing with him to clear up “discrepancies” in his testimony, such as the remarks that contradict Archer’s testimony.
When Hunter Biden left the deposition room on Wednesday, he did not answer questions from reporters about whether he would agree to appear for the hearing.
Read a copy of the full transcript here.
