President Biden snapped at Fox News’s Peter Doocy on Wednesday over a question about the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and his business dealings.
“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,” Doocy told Biden at a public event in Belen, N.M.
“I never talked business with anybody,” Biden shot back. “And I knew you’d have a lousy question.”
Doocy pressed the president, asking him “what makes it a lousy question?”
“Because it’s not true,” Biden responded.
The question was an apparent reference to a recently released transcript of a House Oversight Committee interview with Devon Archer, a former business associate of Hunter Biden.
Archer told the panel that Hunter Biden put his father, then the vice president, on speakerphone during some meetings with business associates, and the interview with the committee covered the Biden “brand” at length. But Archer described the phone calls he witnessed as “generally about the weather and, you know, what it’s like in Norway or Paris or wherever he may be,” and said he didn’t hear any discussion of the substance of Hunter Biden’s business dealings during the calls.
Republicans in Congress and leading pundits in conservative media have expressed outrage over Hunter Biden’s business dealings for months and are accusing the president’s son of benefiting financially from his father’s status as a longtime senator and vice president.
Doocy, who returned to Fox’s airwaves this week after a stint on paternity leave, has gotten under the president’s skin with his line of questioning on multiple occasions.
Last year, Biden was caught on a hot microphone calling the Fox’s lead White House reporter a “stupid son of a bitch” after he had asked the president a question about the economy.
The relationship between Biden’s White House and Fox News, the top-watched cable news channel, has been rocky for months.
Earlier this month, the administration issued a scathing rebuke of the network after one of its top prime-time hosts, Greg Gutfeld, made remarks about the Holocaust that the White House called “an obscenity.”
Biden is in the midst of a West Coast trip he is using to tout his economic agenda and other key legislative initiatives during his first 2 1/2 years in office.