Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, said in closed-door testimony in Congress that it was his “skill” that got him on the board of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma—and other numerous boards—rather than the Biden family name.
“I'd put my resume up against any one of you, in terms of my responsibility,” Mr. Biden told lawmakers during the Feb. 28 hearing before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, according to a transcript of his interview, released on Feb. 29.
“When people engage with me ... they are engaging with me because of my skills,” he continued, pointing to his stacked resume, which he said includes teaching a masters-level course at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.
“I literally was on 17—like, 12 different boards,” he continued, adding, “so I had an enormous amount of reasons to be on” the Burisma board.
His remarks came in response to a line of questioning by lawmakers about whether he was offered well-paying jobs and contracts because he was the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden and those offering the younger Biden lucrative pay were, in fact, hoping to gain influence with his father.
“I mean, you’ve said yourself, I believe to ABC, that the reason you were picked for the Burisma board was because you’re a Biden,” said one of the lawmakers, who was not identified by name in the transcript.
Mr. Biden was on the Burisma board from April 2014 to April 2019.
“I was the chairman of the board of the U.N. World Food Program. I was a lawyer for Boies Schiller Flexner, one of the most prestigious law firms in the world,” he told ABC.
“I think that I had as much knowledge as anybody else that was on the board—if not more,” he insisted at the time.
Republicans have accused Mr. Biden of leveraging his family name for profit, peddling influence, and effectively selling access to his father while he was vice president.‘The Brand’
The chairman of the GOP-led House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), said in January, after testimony from one of Mr. Biden’s former business partners, that it was clear that “the Bidens sold the ‘Biden Brand’ to enrich the Biden family.”After Mr. Biden testified on Feb. 28, Mr. Comer alleged in remarks to reporters that 10 members of the Biden family, including President Biden, “either participated or benefited from the family’s influence-peddling schemes.”
Mr. Comer added that President Biden was “the brand” that the Biden family was selling and that his holding of high office was the only reason that any of the international business transactions that saw tens of millions of dollars flowing to the Biden family took place.
President Biden has repeatedly denied any involvement in his family’s business dealings.
During the testimony on Feb. 28, Mr. Biden was asked if it was fair to say that Burisma wanted him on their board “because your dad was the Vice President.”
“No, I don’t think that it’s fair,” Mr. Biden replied.
He said he was encouraged to take the Burisma job by then-President of Poland Aleksander Kwasniewski, who Mr. Biden said saw Burisma as a “bulwark against Russian aggression” and that it needed all the support it could get to survive.
“President Kwasniewski said to me, if that is—ends up being the result, it if shows that me, President Kwasniewski, who is literally the symbol of democracy in Eastern Europe, and you, Hunter Biden, whose name is also a symbol of freedom and democracy and standing up for the Ukrainians’ desire for a democratic state against Vladimir Putin, then I was comfortable with that,” Mr. Biden said.
“I was completely comfortable with that,” he added.
At the same time, Mr. Biden said he was always aware that “in many instances, somebody may have an ulterior motive.”
Deeper Into Burisma
Mr. Biden said that his role on the Burisma board was to oversee what management was doing to ensure “accountability, transparency, openness in terms of the reporting” and to go through the financials and make sure they were properly certified.“The whole idea was that it was a private company that was operating in Ukraine for a very long period of time in that part of the world, which doesn’t have the same high standards that the West does,” he said.
“And that was my goal in trying to provide a more Western-looking and acting company,” he said.
Asked why his salary was cut after his father left the vice presidency, Mr. Biden said that his “salary changed when all the board members’ salaries were renegotiated.”
While Mr. Archer said that then-Vice President Biden wasn’t directly involved in Burisma, he said the company (which faced scrutiny from investigators) “was able to survive for as long as it did ... just because of the [Biden family] brand.”
Mr. Archer also told the House panel that Hunter Biden “called D.C.” to discuss pressure that Burisma was facing, with the alleged phone call coming after a Burisma board of directors meeting in December 2015.
Not long afterward, then-VP Biden traveled to Ukraine and threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid unless Ukrainian officials agreed to fire then-prosecutor-general Viktor Shokin, who was accused of corruption.
At the time, Mr. Shokin was leading an investigation into Bursima and its founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, while Mr. Biden was serving on the company’s board.
