President Biden has a one-word response to the question of whether he lied when he publicly said he never spoke with his son, Hunter, about the latter’s business dealings: “No!”

The elder Biden was asked the question by a Fox News reporter as he left the East Room of the White House after an event Monday devoted to his infrastructure agenda.

The answer was not much more than reporters have gotten from anyone in the White House press office since the president’s antagonists in Congress released transcripts of an IRS whistleblower’s allegation that an investigation of Hunter Biden’s business with overseas clients was allegedly stymied by officials in the Justice Department.

Hours after the allegations surfaced Friday, reporters at the White House tried to pepper the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, and the National Security Council spokesman, John Kirby, on the topic.

Do the allegations “undermine the President’s claim during the 2020 campaign, and the reaffirmations of that claim by his two press secretaries since then, that he never once discussed his son’s overseas business dealings with him?” Mr. Kirby was asked.

“No,” he replied, “and I’m not going to comment further on this … I am not going to address this issue from this podium.  I’m just not going to do it.”

Ms. Jean-Pierre then interrupted and shunted Mr. Kirby off the stage. “Have a great weekend,” he cheerfully told the reporters present on the way out.

Later during the briefing, Ms. Jean-Pierre was asked about a WhatsApp message Hunter Biden is alleged to have sent to a Chinese businessman soliciting payment for unspecified services. In the message, Hunter Biden stressed repeatedly that his father was in the room as he was writing and that if payment was not forthcoming, “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.”

Ms. Jean-Pierre refused to answer the question. “I’m just not going to get into family discussion — personal family discussion,” she said. “As it relates to anything related to — to Hunter, I’m just not going to respond to it from here.”

Media coverage of the allegations, given their serious nature, has been surprisingly subdued beyond the usual conservative outlets, overshadowed perhaps by the events in Russia over the weekend. Those that have weighed in on the debate have tended to turn the story into one of fatherly love and a family’s struggle with addiction instead of corrupt influence peddling by members of the president’s immediate family.

Writing in the New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof said the tale of Hunter Biden is one of the perils of drugs and alcohol and the “unimaginable heartache in families across the country — including the family living in the White House” that comes with addiction.

“The main takeaway is a lesson the country and the president could absorb to save lives,” Mr. Kristof writes. “For now I see no clear evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden himself — but the president does offer the country a fine model of the love and support that people with addictions need.”

Another of the president’s broadcast defenders, “The View” co-host Ana Navarro, waxed emotional in her support of the elder Mr. Biden on Monday’s program. The real story of the Hunter Biden saga, she said, is “the story of a father’s love, and Joe Biden has never and will never give up on his son Hunter … He is a father first; take it or leave it. That’s who he is, that is part of his heart.”

“I think that the reason he’s been able to get out of addiction is because Joe Biden embraced him entirely,” she added.

The messaging from the president’s surrogates and allies seems to be that the substance of the allegations is less important than the context in which they surfaced. It’s a message also being embraced by Hunter Biden’s defense lawyers, who proclaimed over the weekend that any “verifiable words or actions of my client in the midst of a horrible addiction are solely his own and have no connection to anyone in his family.”

A two-term Democratic senator from Missouri now working as a political analyst for MSNBC, Claire McCaskill, was even more succinct in her messaging. Hunter Biden is “suffering from these diseases,” she said in an appearance on the network last week. “Everybody needs to back off.”