As we reported, Fox’s Peter Doocy had a bit of an explosive exchange with Joe Biden in Belen, New Mexico, on Wednesday. Doocy finally had a chance to ask Biden about Devon Archer’s testimony that Joe Biden was on speakerphone at some business meetings.
Biden snapped at Doocy, saying, “I never talked business with anybody, and I knew you’d have a lousy question.”
“What – why is that a lousy question?” Doocy protested.
“Because it’s not true,” Biden insisted.
Now, Doocy is providing some funny backstory to the exchange, as well as reporting on the White House’s response to his question.
Doocy said Biden was waving him over to talk, so he tried to climb over a barrier where the press was being held when he was stopped by a White House aide. The aide was trying to stop him, saying Biden didn’t have time to talk. Doocy joked, cautioning the public not to ever jump over a barrier to do what he did in the face of the Secret Service.
Doocy said it was important to get to Biden because Biden has not addressed anything about Archer’s testimony or any of these allegations. I certainly have to hand it to him for his persistence in getting to Biden: neither barriers nor aides shall stop him.
He said the White House then immediately got back to him, even as he was in the parking lot in New Mexico, “as soon as I got back to my rental car” to dispute the “very premise of the question” that he asked. He says they’re disputing it because Archer doesn’t say that they talked “business.” But as Doocy notes, Archer did later come out to say (in Tucker Carlson’s interview, Part 2) that it was “categorically false” that Joe Biden had no role/wasn’t aware of his son’s business.
But both Biden and his team sort of stepped in it with their responses, as Doocy points out, because now they’re admitting that Biden did talk to the business associates, despite what he’s said in the past on the matter. The Biden team keeps having to move the goalposts as more and more comes out to show that what Biden said in the past was not the case. Brian Kilmeade noted the letter that Joe Biden wrote to Devon Archer saying he was glad Archer was in business with his son, and that every deal somehow involved a meeting/speaking/contact with Joe Biden.
Doocy joked it was a “middle of the road” question but that he knows that they “don’t want to talk” about this scandal. He did give Biden credit for calling him over, but I think that’s part of Biden’s psyche, too — he thinks he can handle any reporters, even though his staff knows differently. As Biden special assistant Michael LaRosa admitted to Fox’s Howard Kurtz, the Biden team lives “in a bunker mentality often, they treat the press as a threat, as a hazard and not as an opportunity.” We’ve seen explosive responses from Biden before, including when Biden called Doocy a “stupid son of a b**ch.”
It’s all a window into how much this is getting to Biden too and that he can no longer hold it together when he’s confronted with it. He may find he truly has a hard time when the Bidens start getting subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee, as Chair James Comer (R-KY) promised.
