Fox News Reporter Peter Doocy made headlines Wednesday by asking Joe Biden about allegations he spoke via speakerphone to Hunter Biden’s business associates about twenty times. Biden snapped that it was a “lousy question.” The video shown of the exchange came from Fox News and only showed one side of Biden as he was surrounded by staff and Secret Service agents. (TGP report by Cristina Laila here.)
The new video shows a staffer walking up to Biden as he is speaking with Doocy, putting her arm in front of Biden and ordering him away with a ‘come with me’ motion and a passive/aggressive, “Thank you, (garbled), thank you”. A dutiful Biden stops talking and walks away from Doocy.
The video was posted by Emel Akan with the Epoch Times who was at the event in Belen, New Mexico where Biden spoke. Akan reported that Biden had stuck around talking with people and posing for selfies for about thirty minutes after his speech before waving Doocy over:
Doocy: “There’s this testimony now where one of your son’s former business associates is claiming that you were on speakerphone a lot with them talking business?”
Biden: “I never talked business with anybody, and I knew, I knew you’d have a lousy question.”
Doocy: “Well, what do you, why is that a lousy question?”
Biden: “Because it’s not true.”
Staffer intervenes and Biden walks way.
Doocy: Thank you, Mr. President.”
Peter Doocy is back and he is holding nothing back! He just walked up to Joe Biden and asked him about Devon Archer's sworn testimony implicating the President in Hunter's business dealings. pic.twitter.com/PtI2d5gjpu
— Kevin Tober (@KevinTober94) August 9, 2023
Fox reporter Peter Doocy shouted a question to the president during the event in New Mexico. When the president could not hear him, he asked him to get closer. Doocy jumped over the barriers to speak with the president. It is hard to hear the conversation, but it was an… pic.twitter.com/dgRxxmTqam
— Emel Akan (@mlakan) August 9, 2023
Doocy reported a White House official contacted him afterward to complain that his question was not accurate because he said Biden spoke about business on the calls with Hunter and his foreign clients. Former Hunter Biden business partner Devon Archer, who broke the news of the twenty phone calls last week in an interview with the House Oversight Committee, said that Biden spoke in generalities during the calls but that he knew these people were Hunter’s clients.
Doocy spoke Thursday morning about the Q&A with Joe Biden, noting that staff initially tried to prevent him from climbing over the bike rack fencing so he could speak to Biden face to face. Biden had called him over so the staff relented. However, the new video shows that another staffer shut down the interview and ordered Biden to leave.
Excerpt from CBS News report on the Devon Archer transcript from the House Oversight Committee:
Asked what the Bidens talked about when Joe Biden was on speaker phone, Archer responded, “Say, where are you, how’s the weather, how’s the fishing, how’s the — whatever — but, you know, it was very, you know, casual conversations.”
Archer was also asked if then-Vice President Biden regularly “checked in on his son, who’s admitted he’s had issues with drugs.”
“Every day,” Archer replied. But asked whether he had ever heard them discuss the “substance of Hunter Biden’s business,” he responded, “No.”
While the speakerphone calls were described as casual conversations, Archer also testified he believed there may be more involved. “I think that the calls were — that’s what it was. They were calls to talk about the weather, and that was signal enough to be powerful.”
