Attorney General Garland testifies before GOP-led House Judiciary Committee

House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan claimed that President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden has, himself, admitted that he was unqualified for his former role on the board of directors of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.

“He wasn’t qualified to be on the board of Burisma. Not my words, his words,” Jordan claimed. “He said he got on the board because of his last name.” 

Jordan made the claim in his opening remarks at a Wednesday hearing at which Jordan and other Republicans pressed Attorney General Merrick Garland about the Justice Department’s handling of investigations into former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.

Facts First: It’s not true that Hunter Biden himself said he wasn’t qualified to sit on the Burisma board. In fact, Hunter Biden said in a 2019 interview with ABC News that “I was completely qualified to be on the board” and defended his qualifications in detail. He did acknowledge, as Jordan said, that he would “probably not” have been asked to be on the board if he was not a Biden — but he nonetheless explicitly rejected claims that he wasn’t qualified, calling them “misinformation.”

When the ABC interviewer asked what his qualifications for the role were, he said: “Well, I was vice chairman on the board of Amtrak for five years. I was the chairman of the board of the UN World Food Programme. I was a lawyer for Boies Schiller Flexner, one of the most prestigious law firms in the world. Bottom line is that I know that I was completely qualified to be on the board to head up the corporate governance and transparency committee on the board. And that’s all that I focused on. Basically, turning a Eastern European independent natural gas company into Western standards of corporate governance.”

When the ABC interviewer said, “You didn’t have any extensive knowledge about natural gas or Ukraine itself, though,” Biden responded, “No, but I think I had as much knowledge as anybody else that was on the board — if not more.”

Asked if he would have been asked to be on the board if his last name wasn’t Biden, Biden said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. Probably not.” He added “there’s a lot of things” in his life that wouldn’t have happened if he had a different last name. 

More context: Biden had served as the board chair for World Food Program USA, a nonprofit that supports the UN World Food Programme, not the UN program itself as he claimed in the interview.