Katie gets intel on the impact Hunter Biden could have on the 2024 presidential campaign.
On Tuesday, Hunter Biden was expected to plead guilty to two charges of failure to pay taxes as a part of a plea deal he agreed to with the government last month. Instead, when the judge at the hearing posed questions about the details of the arrangement, the deal unraveled and the president’s son pleaded not guilty to both charges.
It was a stunning moment for a man who’s become famous for creating or being associated with plenty of stunning moments already. And because of it, the media news frenzy surrounding Hunter will likely continue to hold center stage for weeks to come.
In a turn of good timing, Katie spoke with Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) earlier this week about all things Hunter Biden. Raskin’s a member of the House Oversight Committee, which recently held a hearing with two IRS agents on supposed corruption in the Biden family. Though Katie spoke with Raskin before news of the derailed plea deal, their conversation about Hunter is very illuminating. You can watch the full video conversation here, or read a condensed version below.
Katie Couric: Why is Fox News covering Hunter Biden night after night?
Jamie Raskin: Well, some people would say it’s just the traditional attempt to nail your political opponents, but I think it’s much more specific than that. Donald Trump is the front-runner for the GOP nomination in 2024, and he may be the most significantly damaged and impaired presidential candidate in American history. He’s basically a one-man crime wave, and yet he exercises some kind of spell-binding control over a small minority of the American people.
The Republicans are in a terrible situation, politically — so what is their political imperative? Well, whatever people think about Trump, they’ve gotta get people to think about Joe Biden. So if Trump is perceived as an incorrigibly corrupt and self-interested politician, they’ve gotta say that about Biden, too, which is a difficult claim to make for a man who has devoted his whole life to real public service.
The Republicans don’t have a program, they don’t have a platform, but at least they can say the other guy is just as bad as the person who’s been impeached twice. It’s a very sinister, cynical program, but that’s what they’re doing. Whatever people think about Trump, they’re gonna try to get the public to think about Biden.
Can you talk about the role Hunter Biden’s laptop is playing in all this?
During one of his drug-induced periods, Hunter dropped off his laptop someplace and then failed to pick it up in time. And then it fell into the hands of Biden’s political enemies, the way these things happen. As of now, the Democrats on the Oversight Committee have not seen the hard drive of the Hunter Biden laptop, which is what the Republicans claim to have. They refuse to give it to us, which is a total violation of the traditions and rules of the House Oversight Committee.
In any case, at a recent hearing of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, our colleague, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) did something utterly outrageous and unprecedented: She projected pornographic images into the theater.
It’s utterly unprecedented for somebody to show nude pictures of people engaged in pornographic acts in Congress. If that were in a book, Greene and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) would want to ban it. But instead, they projected it, which shows you the seriousness of their convictions.
It was also completely irrelevant because the purpose of the hearing was to allege and to demonstrate, which they did not do, that somehow there was political interference brought to bear to limit the charges against Hunter Biden.
So it was completely gratuitous. It was sensationalistic. It was voyeuristic. And it demonstrates a desperate effort to raise money online and to be famous and to be in the news, or just to try and humiliate people on the other side. And that kind of political strategy is basically a form of fascism, where instead of talking about issues and programs and what we want government to do for the people, you just try to humiliate and ridicule your opponents.
How much of a liability do you believe Hunter is for his father as he seeks reelection in 2024?
The American people have a lot of common sense, even with all of the propaganda, disinformation, and lies that Trump and his team promote. They’ve falsely claimed that Trump won the 2020 election. And of course, everything flows out of that big lie. So I think that people are able to hold two thoughts in their head at once. One is that Joe Biden has been an excellent president. He’s a man with great sense of purpose and integrity and public life. And two, he has a son who has a very serious drug problem. What does it have to do with the real problems facing the country? The Republicans simply have not laid a glove on Joe Biden. So that’s the critical thing for people to understand.
How can Democrats more successfully refute some of these allegations that are being circulated in right-wing media?
Well, I think the excellent Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are demolishing these allegations on a daily basis. There’s great frustration on the Republican side that nothing they’ve said is broken through. Now, it’s true that they are repeating their deceptions and their propaganda on Fox News for that audience of people who are already willing to believe anything Trump tells them. But it has remained quarantined there, and we’re just trying to get the truth out to the whole country.
It’s not that we’re claiming that Hunter Biden is an Eagle Scout or anything like that. We want people to understand him for who he is and what he did. But we also want them to understand it’s got nothing to do with President Biden and the Biden administration and the successes they’ve been having.
