[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good Monday morning, everyone. We'll begin today with Washington Post columnist Philip Bump on the new indictments of Hunter Biden and their relationship or not to the impeachment inquiry that seems to be intensifying among House Republicans aimed at Joe Biden. Later, we'll talk about the resignation of UPenn President Liz Magill this weekend after the viral video from the House anti-Semitism hearing last week that made her look so bad to so many people.

We'll talk to State Senator Zellnor Myrie from Brooklyn about his second-chance law, now signed by Governor Hochul, but a bill for campaign finance transparency that the governor vetoed. Also, some people say Zellnor Myrie is gearing up to challenge Mayor Adams from the left in a Democratic primary in 2025, or at least considering it, so a lot to talk to Zellnor Myrie about today. Toward the end of the show, to lighten things up a little bit, we'll talk about your most and least favorite holiday season movies, but first to Philip Bump. Philip, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Philip Bump: Of course. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with the news for people who didn't hear this on Friday and get into it a little bit. What are these new indictments of Hunter Biden for?

Philip Bump: Sure, so there's a number of them that were obtained by Special Counsel David Weiss, who used to be the US attorney, just solely the US attorney in Delaware, that are centered on Hunter Biden's efforts allegedly to evade taxes. I say "allegedly" there because one should say allegedly. He's innocent until proven guilty. It seems pretty obvious that there were efforts by Hunter Biden to not pay the full amount of taxes he owed. This has been an issue that the government has been looking at for some time.

People may remember the last summer, there was a plea deal that had been reached between Hunter Biden's attorneys and the government that fell apart. It fell apart in part, it seems, likely to say, because of external pressure from Republicans in particular who are very critical of the agreement that had been reached, the judge. That's not why the judges did it, but that agreement fell apart, then created space for there to be further indictments. Now, we have these indictments that are focused on failure to pay taxes and other issues, financial things, along those lines that dropped last week.

Brian Lehrer: There are some sorted things about drugs and relationship with women and things like that that have also emerged, right?

Philip Bump: Yes. Hunter Biden is, depending on how one looks at him, either a tragic figure or someone who doesn't deserve a lot of sympathy. By his own admission, he went through a period in which he was addicted to heavy drugs, was receiving income at that point in time. That seems fairly obviously to have been based in part in his trading on his last name that he was a Biden and that he tried to amplify the idea that he had some sort of access, although that hasn't been established, but then he got a lot of money.

Then he spent that money on drugs and other illicit activities, to put it gently for the Monday morning audience. That's pretty well-established. He wrote an entire book that delves into this and delves into that period in his life. As such, he took in a lot of income, does not appear to have paid the proper taxes on it, and this led to the criminal charges.

Brian Lehrer: There was a Washington Post article recently, November 18th, by one of your colleagues, Matt Viser, called Hunter Biden's Career of Benefiting From His Father's Name. I don't want to soft-pedal this. This doesn't mean Joe Biden did anything wrong, which is really the important political question that we'll get to, but Washington Post article, Hunter Biden's Career of Benefiting From His Father's Name. Then the next line is-- the subhead is, The President's Son Had a Complex, Even Tortured Relationship with the "Biden Brand." Can you talk about that a little bit?

Philip Bump: Sure, so one of the things that has been established over the course of the past year as House Republicans have put a lot of emphasis on trying to dig into Hunter Biden's business activities in hopes that they can find some link to Joe Biden is that they have done a very robust job of demonstrating the extent to which Hunter Biden was willing to use his last name to get business. Hunter Biden has a law degree. He was an attorney. He worked for reputable law firms prior to his descent into addiction, it seems.

There were emails that were uncovered, which he'd sent to his business partners talking about, "We really need to give them the idea that we have access, that I am a Biden, and that means something." Even in the same emails, he would admit that he didn't actually. He was not able to influence his father to any significant extent or at all, but this was the strategy that he and his uncle, James Biden, who's Joe Biden's brother, had built these businesses in which they offered basically consulting services but that they got in the door because their last name was Biden.

Brian Lehrer: For example, the beginning of that article that I just referenced, Hunter Biden's Career of Benefiting From His Father's Name, the beginning of it is, "Hunter Biden worked for years to cultivate high-level relationships in China, flying to the country with his father on Air Force Two," meaning when Joe Biden was vice president, "and serving as a board member of a Chinese investment firm. As he did, he understood the new relationships he was building did not come from his charm alone."

There's a quote of him from 2011 in which he said, "It has nothing to do with me and everything to do with my last name." Okay, so we've established that there's a "there" there about this part of the story. Is Joe Biden named in any of these indictments of Hunter Biden either as an unindicted conspirator or as anything else?

Philip Bump: No. In part, the nature of the charges are focused on Hunter Biden's tax issues. There is no grand conspiracy alleged in general, much less one that involves Joe Biden, so no. No is the short answer to that question.

Brian Lehrer: Who brought these new Hunter Biden indictments? You told us who, David Weiss, special counsel. Why didn't they come originally when he was indicted earlier? Republicans say someone went soft on him.

Philip Bump: Right, so the underlying question here is precisely that one is, what is it about the moment that has changed where Weiss brought these charges? David Weiss, as US attorney in Delaware, had, for years, been investigating Hunter Biden. That had culminated last year in this plea agreement. These are white-collar crimes, if you will, that he's facing charges for. These plea agreements were very heavily adjudicated at the time, whether or not this was an unusual thing.

At about the same time, there were these whistleblowers that came forward and went to the House Republican Oversight Committee, in particular, and the Judiciary Committee, I believe, and began to allege that they were privy to conversations in which the federal government actors had gone soft on Hunter Biden or had suggested that they would not take as robust an approach to Hunter Biden as some of the investigators would have liked. That has been the subject of a lot of back and forth. Weiss was forced to defend his own actions in a hearing before the House Republican-led committees.

All of this was happening at the time that the plea deal fell apart. There is some speculation that Weiss then felt as though he either had the space or had an impulse to push for more robust charges. There were these allegations from whistleblowers that have been contested and been contested pretty robustly, especially because a lot of the allegations of going soft on Hunter Biden date back to the Trump administration in which there were not. It is very safe to say, the President of the United States was not interested in going soft on Hunter Biden. This predates Joe Biden's actual administration, which I think is something people may not recognize.

Brian Lehrer: Now, we get to the impeachment inquiry, which I think with everything going on in the Middle East and George Santos and everything else, may not have broken through very much to a lot of listeners and a lot of news consumers in general. The impeachment inquiry, which is going to bring us to some clips that we pulled that you identified in a couple of your columns from James Comer and from the House speaker, Mike Johnson. Give us the basic lay of the land for people who haven't been paying attention to the state of the House impeachment inquiry.

Philip Bump: Well, we can start at the end. The state of the House impeachment inquiry is that it was announced in September by then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, very obviously in part because Kevin McCarthy was, at that point in time, facing political pressure from inside his caucus, political pressure that then resulted in his ouster as House speaker.

There had been an effort by a number of high-ranking Republicans in the House, particularly ones who had a big audience in conservative media like James Comer, who's often on Fox News, like Jim Jordan, who I'm sure your listeners are familiar with, that were advocating this idea that Joe Biden had done something untoward. McCarthy announces this impeachment inquiry. They proceed to have one hearing, in which they involve a number of purported experts on this but present no actual evidence. Democrats jump in and point out all the holes in their theories.

They have done basically nothing else. They've had a few. They've issued some subpoenas and so and so forth. They have not had any traction on the inquiry itself. They're trying to reboot it. Now that Mike Johnson is House speaker, he has bought into this idea that this is something worth pursuing. Now, they're essentially trying to reboot it. It's important to note that, basically, no progress was made over the course of the past three months. Only limited progress had been made over the nine months preceding that since House Republicans actually took control of that chamber.

Brian Lehrer: You wrote a column on November 28th, which seems like a long time ago now, but it isn't really, called Biden Impeachment Push Nears End of Runway with No Signs of Takeoff. Has it been taking off since like either since Mike Johnson became speaker or because of these new indictments of Hunter Biden, whether there's a relationship there or not?

Philip Bump: It has not. It has from the standpoint that the House Republican Caucus is now once again focused on trying to promote this as a thing that should happen. They're going to have a vote this week, it seems, in which they actually formalize the House impeachment inquiry, which would just been announced by McCarthy without a vote. I think it's really important to note. You've asked about this around the question, but I think it's really worth pointing out.

There's no evidence to suggest this. Not only is there no evidence to suggest that Joe Biden did anything either to either influence the IRS and the investigation in Hunter Biden's taxes, which is sort of a subset of this, or the bigger allegation that a lot of House Republicans have presented about his taking official actions on behalf of Hunter Biden are being involved in Hunter Biden's businesses.

There's simply nothing that has emerged that actually speaks to that. Not only has there been no evidence that emerged, there's been a lot in a repeated pattern of House Republicans like James Comer, in particular, obviously making claims that are very obviously false to conservative media and to Republicans in order to make it seem as though they're doing a lot, but those things are false.

James Comer has, I think, very seriously damaged his reputation in an objective sense just because he keeps presenting these arguments about what Joe Biden has done that he cannot substantiate. That's really the state of play is that they've been trying for months to show Joe Biden is this bad guy. They have failed to do so. Instead, they make these claims about how he's a bad guy that are very obviously false. Because that's what the market demands in conservative media, they're able to get some traction for it.

Brian Lehrer: Now, we get to your recent article called James Comer's Most Dishonest Biden Attack Yet, and it's about a particular thing that he said publicly. I pulled the clip and a related one that House Speaker Mike Johnson said. We pulled that clip too. I'm going to ask you to set up each of these and then we're going to play them for our listeners. I do want to make sure everybody knows you can call in on this as well.

Anybody have any questions for Philip Bump from The Washington Post about the House impeachment inquiry such as it is at this point, although it does seem like it's going to get formalized this week as Philip is just telling us, and any relationship or not to the Hunter Biden indictments, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text 212-433-9692. Okay, James Comer's Most Dishonest Biden Attack Yet is the headline of this story of yours. You want to set up this clip and then we'll play it?

Philip Bump: Sure. James Comer has, at various times, been asked to talk to the press about his impeachment inquiry. He was essentially talking about what they had discovered that he thought was implicating of Joe Biden. I assume I'm meant to wait for the debunking of it until after the clip, [laughs] so that's the set-up. That's what he's doing here.

Brian Lehrer: Here is House impeachment inquiry leader James Comer.

James Comer: We've also revealed how Joe Biden received $40,000 in laundered China money in the form of a personal check from his sister-in-law.

Brian Lehrer: All right, simple declarative statement. Sounds like you're on debunk control patrol.

Philip Bump: Yes, [laughs] right. James Comer, after the initial impeachment hearing, sent out a bunch of subpoenas to get more bank records from Joe Biden. He uncovered these two checks that had been sent from his sister-in-law, James Biden's wife, Sara, to Joe Biden. The checks were for $200,000 and $40,000. He's referring to the $40,000 check. What he excludes from that commentary is, A, that this was very obviously a repayment of a loan, that there is documentation that Joe Biden had paid his brother $40,000, and that this was a repayment of that loan.

We know that in part because the check says on it "loan repayment." This is a 2018 check. It's not as though this was just presented now. Now, they're trying to cover their tracks. This is something that's written at the time. We have documentation of the prior loan. It's also the case that this idea that this is China money depends upon-- which is, of course, the pejorative that they use.

This depends on the idea that money that was paid into one account and then, a couple of weeks later, it was paid to another account and then after a week was paid to another account and then went to James Biden, then they wrote the check. It's sort of this idea that this is necessarily money from this transaction that involved this Chinese company is, by itself, sketchy, but James Comer knows all of this. That's the thing. He knows that what he's presenting as a fact is not fact. He makes this argument.

He has, at times, for example, argued that Joe Biden benefited from this because of the loan repayment as though if you give someone a loan and get repaid for it, that's a huge benefit for you. It's not like he made money off of this deal, but he knows that this is not the case, and yet he presents it even after it's been shown this is not the case as fact. That fundamentally is the issue with James Comer.

Brian Lehrer: Then you're right, not to be outdone how Speaker Mike Johnson went even further when summarizing the "evidence" against the President that had been accrued to date. Here's that nine-second clip.

Speaker Mike Johnson: The oversight committee recently released two checks. You see the graphics up here today. These checks are to Joe Biden. One is for $40,000 from China--

Brian Lehrer: Keep going, Philip.

Philip Bump: Yes, so you see how Johnson presents that, right? These are checks to Joe Biden, $40,000 from China. I just made clear and we should have been known by Mike Johnson that that's not true. This was not money that flowed to Joe Biden from China. There was money that was paid to a business entity that ended up paying money to James Biden. After that like a week after that, then there was a check cut from Sara Biden to Joe Biden in repayment of the loan.

Now, I think the really fundamental question here is, does Mike Johnson know that James Comer is selling him a line? James Comer is selling America a line? There's no question about that. Does Mike Johnson know that? Has Mike Johnson been paying close attention to the developments in this or does he simply believe James Comer? It seems like a lot of Republicans do.

You'll see them get on Fox News or you'll see them even get in mainstream outlets and be presented. It'll say, "Oh, well, James Comer's uncovered." Then on mainstream outlets, people say, "Well, that's not what he uncovered," and they get very defensive. I'm not sure that Mike Johnson knows that what he's saying is false because the Republican Party has invested so much effort in presenting what James Comer and Jim Jordan say as accurate.

Brian Lehrer: Is it fair to say that Joe Biden has also lied? Because one of the things that comes up, and this doesn't necessarily make it impeachable, but one of the things that comes up is that Joe Biden says some version of, he's had no involvement with his son's businesses, no contacts with his son's business clients or business partners, but that's been demonstrated to be false.

Philip Bump: Yes, this is a challenging one for me to answer because I was a philosophy major in college. I literally took a seminar course on what constitutes a lie. It's easy to not to get too pedantic about it, but it's very easy to go back and compare the statements Joe Biden has made with things that have been uncovered. Do you, for example, think that when Joe Biden says X about having no familiarity with his business, with Hunter Biden's business, that that means that when he sent a letter to Hunter Biden's business partner, Devon Archer back in, I don't know, whatever, 2014, something like that, saying, "Hey, it was nice to meet you the other day," does that count?"

Does it count if he called his son Hunter Biden and Hunter Biden put him on speakerphone as Hunter Biden was in a meeting with some of his foreign business partners? Is that Joe Biden's familiarity with the business? I think it is safe to say that Joe Biden painted with a broad brush on this. I think if you look at specific examples compared to the evidence at hand, it gets very murky very quickly, which is the nature of these sorts of allegations.

Brian Lehrer: We have a caller on exactly that. You may have just answered this caller's question, but let's see how Matt in Manhattan wants to put it. Matt, you're on WNYC with Philip Bump from The Washington Post. Hi.

Matt: Hi. Good morning. Yes, I see that you just covered this, but it's very disappointing for me as somebody who really believed the official line of Joe Biden that he had no association, no contact with his business associates, and then later to find out that, in fact, he not only was on speakerphone, he actually showed up at meetings, shook the hands of these people. He must have known that his son and his brother apparently were influenced peddling. He must have also known that his son was not in a good place in terms of addiction, and yet he did it. He showed up. He shook the hands of these people. It's not clever. It's disappointing to me as somebody who actually believes the story.

Brian Lehrer: Matt, thank you very much. Philip, anything more on that?

Philip Bump: I think there's a couple of interesting points. The first is the idea that Joe Biden should have known that Hunter Biden and James Biden were influenced peddling. That is correct. He should have known that. It's fairly obvious that that was what was undergoing. He was actually warned. People may remember this from the impeachment of Donald Trump back in 2019. He was warned by the State Department once Hunter Biden went to Ukraine and started working with this Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.

He was warned, "Hey, this is a bad look. This is not good." He brushed it off in part, he said at the time, because his other son, Beau, had just died of cancer and so he was dealing with all of that. Now, that's one issue. The other issue though is that a lot of this stuff really is cherry-picked, right? We have no idea how many times Joe Biden called and talked to Hunter Biden when there weren't business partners in the room. We have no idea how many events that Hunter Biden may have gone to in which he didn't bring with him business partners.

We simply don't have a sense of scale. We do know that there were incidents there. There's this very famous dinner at Cafe Milano in DC in which Hunter Biden was there and Joe Biden was there and someone, I believe, from Burisma was there. We don't know how often Hunter Biden went to events like that. It is not a good look. It certainly does not help Joe Biden politically. I think it's very safe to say. I do think there's an element of cherry-picking here, which is worth considering.

Brian Lehrer: On that $40,000 check that you say is the source of the biggest lie yet that James Comer has told about Joe Biden, Christopher in Manhattan has a call. Christopher, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Christopher: Hello. I was just wondering. I'm just trying to play devil's advocate to try to help to explain Comer's position. Could it be that your guest said that Joe Biden doesn't profit from getting repayment of a loan? If he thought that he was never going to get repayment of the loan, the $240,000, and the only way to get that-

Brian Lehrer: $40,000.

Christopher: -to help his son and-- $40,000, but I think maybe your guest said, he had initially loaned $240,000, then came back two payments. I'm just wondering. Could the Republicans be thinking that the only way that Joe Biden thought he was going to be able to get his loan back was to help his son and brother raise the money through China?

Philip Bump: Sure. No, look, there were two payments. There was a $200,000 and $40,000. Each of them was repaid independently. The $40,000 is the one that Comer has focused on because they can draw a line back to money that came from China, which is what they're trying to do. The $200,000, very obviously, came from a payment that was made by a healthcare company that ended up going out of business.

They ended up suing James Biden because they wanted to get this money back. That was messy. They don't focus on the $200,000 ones. They're trying to tie this to China. Your point is fair. I can see how one could view this through the lens of, "Well, if he was going to get nothing at all, then this was better than getting nothing at all." That's true. I think if you're in the habit of loaning people $200,000 or $40,000, you may be less concerned about getting that money back because it's certainly foreign to me.

It's very important to remember. This is one incident in which James Comer has made a false claim that he knows is false, or at least very wildly misrepresented. He's done it consistently since he took over the House Oversight Committee. It is impossible to grant him the benefit of the doubt on this simply because, so many times, he's made false claims in bad faith very obviously.

Brian Lehrer: To take a step back and talk about what the standard for the impeachment of a president would have to be, I imagine for it to be a high crime or misdemeanor. They would have to establish that somehow President Biden, when he was vice president or at any other time, was acting corruptly, was undermining the interest of the United States taking money from China and therefore going to bat for China in US policy against the interest of the United States. That's the kind of thing that Senator Menendez from New Jersey is charged with, with respect to Egypt. We could cite other examples like that, but what would it even take out of this whole Hunter Biden-Joe Biden relationship for something to even rise to the level of an impeachable offense?

Philip Bump: When we talk about impeachment in very practical terms, they're there. They have it because all you need in order to impeach is political support for impeachment. That's it. Ostensibly, you need high crimes and misdemeanors, but you don't. You just need people who are willing to vote and say that they committed high crimes and misdemeanors. It is already the case that Republicans broadly think Joe Biden is a bad actor here. They believe that he did these things.

I believe that James Comer thinks he did these things and they're just trying to backfill the evidence for it, right? They do not need to do anything more than what they've done. They already have the Republican base. Frankly, a lot of Americans broadly think that Joe Biden did something that is sketchy here. They have already done enough to build the support they need, especially within the Republican Party, to move forward with impeachment regardless of whether or not they have proven high crimes and misdemeanors.

Brian Lehrer: Is a Donald Trump comparison apt here? Trump explicitly promoting his brands, including golf courses in countries that the US has complicated relationships with, or I remember that time that Kellyanne Conway, when she was working for the Trump administration, went out and said, "Oh, people should buy stuff from Ivanka Trump's company and help her profit." Is there a people-live-in-glasshouses issue here?

Philip Bump: Yes, absolutely. One of the things that I think has haunted Comer in particular over the course of the year is that the things that he repeatedly points to as having been problems by the Bidens are another factor of things that were done by the Trumps. See, Comer constantly talks about shell companies, which is itself a misrepresentation of the information he's got.

Donald Trump had hundreds of corporate entities, which I've documented in the past, that he would have to report as president. He complains about how Hunter Biden is taking $20 million also in exaggeration. The real figures were around $7 million, which is obviously still a lot of money. Jared Kushner leaves the White House and signs $2 billion deal for funding.

There are so many ways in which Comer has tried to argue that this is about maintaining accountability for presidential families but then very much shies away from it and, in fact, killed a probe that was ongoing involving Donald Trump's accountant as soon as he became head of the oversight committee. He has pivoted on that. One of the things he does is he evolves his arguments. His new evolution is, "Well, at least we know what the Trumps did." They were building buildings, whatever. What was Hunter Biden doing? He was just putting his name on stuff. That's his argument.

Brian Lehrer: George on the Upper West Side, you're on WNYC with Philip Bump from The Washington Post. Hi, George.

George: Good morning. My question is the following. You have a House committee that has issued a subpoena, but it calls for testimony in private. Abbe Lowell comes as the lawyer for Hunter Biden and says, "My client is willing to testify, but he would like to testify in public, not in private." My question then is, can contempt of Congress be upheld if the client is willing to come but doesn't want to do it in secret?

Philip Bump: I think that this is, to a large extent, similar to impeachment that if the House chooses to hold someone in contempt of Congress, they can hold him in contempt of Congress. I don't think they're going to have the votes to do so. Comer has argued that he's happy to do the private deposition and then the public one. He did say, and this is something that I was the first to report.

He did say in a private conversation with folks that he didn't want to do more public hearings because he made these arguments about how it takes a lot of time and the Democrats then grandstand. Of course, the point is that what you have at the public hearing, then you have both sides being able to weigh in and be able to shape what the testimony is going to be and ask questions that get to different directions.

We did see over the course of the summer, there was private testimony offered by Devon Archer, who I had mentioned before, who had been a business partner of Hunter Biden. What we saw come out of that, I think, was revealing, which is that Republicans, including Comer and including Jim Jordan, cherry-picked a lot of information from Devon Archer's testimony, including this very famous now line about how Hunter Biden would put Joe Biden on speakerphone in these meetings.

That came from Devon Archer's closed-door testimony. What they didn't highlight and which didn't get as much attention is that Devon Archer also admitted that he'd received an email from Hunter Biden, which Hunter Biden says, "I know we can't actually get my father to do stuff on this, but we should get him do it." Devon Archer told the investigators that he had been told that Burisma did not want this one prosecutor in Ukraine fired, which really undercuts a lot of the Republican claims.

They just didn't mention it and because it happened in this transcript, the way down to the bottom in text, news articles like ones I write elevate it, but it's not what everyone's talking about all the time. It shifts the balance of the attention that's paid to this testimony in a way that favors the Republicans. I think that's fundamentally why Comer wants to take this tack.

Brian Lehrer: As we start to run out of time, put on your political analyst hat and foresee, if you can foresee, what might be happening during the 2024 presidential campaign. It certainly looks like Donald Trump. Let's assume for the moment that he's going to be the nominee. It certainly looks like Donald Trump is going to be standing for multiple criminal trials at the same time. Do you think that the House at the same time is going to impeach Joe Biden and make him stand trial for removal from office in the Senate?

Philip Bump: I don't know about the time frame. My guess is that the House will vote to impeach Joe Biden very narrowly if they do so, obviously, because Republicans have a very narrow majority. It's possible that such a vote fail, but I do think it'll come up for a vote. If that happens, I think that'll all be resolved in the early months of 2024. I think one of the benefits politically to the right from all this, and I think this is very intentional, is that it muddies the water in exactly the way you would articulate it. Previously, it makes it seem like, "Well, everyone's up to no good in Washington, and so here we are, let's just choose between the lesser of two evils."

I think that's exactly what they want to do. It's really important to remember. Kevin McCarthy is the one who announced this impeachment inquiry. He very famously, right at the time when Hillary Clinton's starting to run in 2016, pointed to the Benghazi investigations as the reason that her numbers were going down. Her poll numbers were going down. People can say these investigations aren't successful, but look at Hillary Clinton's poll numbers. I'm paraphrasing. This was the mentality that drove them in the Benghazi hearings. I think it's very, very safe to say that a lot of this is about 2024 from the outset of the Republicans taking over in January.

Brian Lehrer: Washington Post columnist Philip Bump. Thanks for so much context. We always appreciate it.

Philip Bump: Of course. Thank you.

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