Republicans caught off guard by 'prepared and disciplined' Hunter Biden: sources

Republicans seemed to be caught off guard by Hunter Biden's preparation and discipline during a grueling, closed-door deposition.

President Joe Biden's son appeared Wednesday before the Oversight and Judiciary committees to discuss his foreign business dealings, which have become the focus of an impeachment inquiry, but Washington Post reporter Jackie Alemany told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that Republicans failed to rattle him, as they perhaps intended.

"I've been told by several sources who were in the room for that extended hearing [Wednesday] that Hunter Biden happened to be one of the most prepared, disciplined and on-message witnesses they've had appear before the committee yet," Alemany said. "[He] spoke very eloquently about a broad swath of evidence, some unsubstantiated, some presented in sort of dribs and drabs, text messages and communications, that James Comer and Republicans have cherry-picked from the mountain of records they have obtained so far."

"For anyone who thought this would be the smoking gun, the star witness, it certainly disappointed," she added, "and Hunter Biden instead spoke of a lot of instances that Republicans have pointed to as wrongdoing as examples of him under the spell of addiction, being drunk or high at the time of those communications and, quite frankly, as someone in the room told me in a readout, that he was lying about some of the times where he said his father was present to certain businesspeople, like this one text message that has often been referenced where he was in communications with a Chinese associate that he was doing business with, and texted him in a WhatsApp message that he was with his father right now. He said during that deposition that that was actually a lie, and that he was under the influence."

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The younger Biden has said that he is determined to remain sober and intends to rebut GOP allegations that his father had any involvement in his business dealings, and so far House Republicans have failed to turn up any evidence of that – especially after the revelation that so-called whistleblower Alexander Smirnov was apparently working with Russian intelligence to smear the president.

"Even Fox News has quieted on several fronts of covering some of the accusations Comer's been making," Alemany said, "and he has been facing criticism from his colleagues who have not been happy with his media-centric approach where he has put forward, again, this contextless, cherry-picked evidence, gone and spoken about it, and then the evidence has when you looked into it a little bit further, fallen quite flat."

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