'They're trying to kill me' — Hunter Biden sounds off on House GOP

Republican attacks aimed at Hunter Biden are "not about me," the president's son said in an interview published Friday, but are actually intended to "destroy a presidency" by taking painful, personal aim at the first family.

“They are trying to, in their most illegitimate way, but rational way, they're trying to destroy a presidency,” Biden said in a podcast released Friday. “And so it's not about me, and [in] their most base way, what they're trying to do is they're trying to kill me, knowing that it will be a pain greater than my father could be able to handle.”

The release of the podcast comes after a federal grand jury in California indicted Biden on nine charges Thursday, including three felonies, for failing to pay his taxes, understating his income and exaggerating his expenses on tax returns between 2016 and 2019. The indictment accuses the president's son of shirking his tax responsibilities while spending lavishly on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing and other items of a personal nature.”

In his most in-depth public remarks in years, Biden sat down for a two-part interview with musician Moby that was released Friday to discuss Republican attacks. The interview was recorded at the president's son's studio in San Francisco but the exact timing of its recording was not made clear. Biden and Moby have a shared history — the two met while recovering from addiction and the musician has attended Biden's art shows.

Hunter Biden’s comments Friday mirror those of his lawyer, Abbe Lowell, who said Thursday that "[after] five years of investigating with no new evidence — and two years after Hunter paid his taxes in full — the U.S. Attorney has piled on nine new charges when he had agreed just months ago to resolve this matter with a pair of misdemeanors.”

The charges come amid an effort by House Republicans to link President Joe Biden to his son’s business dealings as part of an impeachment inquiry, though the inquiry has produced no evidence that Joe Biden took any actions as president or vice president to corruptly enrich his family.

In the podcast Friday, the president's son said he felt sorry for Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), two of Hunter Biden's most aggressive pursuers on Capitol Hill, and called them “not healthy people.”

In July, Greene held up posters with censored and explicit images of Hunter Biden during an Oversight Committee hearing with two IRS whistleblowers.

“The second thing that I realized is that these people are just sad, very very sick people that have most likely just faced traumas in their lives that they've decided that they are going to turn into an evil that decides that they're going to inflict on the rest of the world,” Hunter Biden said.