White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre's response to a Fox News reporter's question Monday marked a subtle but very significant shift in the Biden administration's position on whether President Biden was privy to or involved in Hunter Biden's business deals in China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and elsewhere, a former federal prosecutor said.

After news that Devon Archer, a former top business partner of Hunter's who will soon report for a one-year jail term on securities fraud charges, will testify in a transcribed interview before a House committee, Fox News correspondent Gillian Turner asked the White House about its current position.

"I'm curious if the White House and the president still stand behind his comment that he's never been involved or never even spoken to his son about his [business dealings]," Turner asked. This prompted Jean-Pierre to claim she's answered such questions "a million times" and the response "is not going to change … the president was never in business with his son."

On "The Story," former New York federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said White House messaging indeed did shift with Jean-Pierre's "never in business with" comment, In the past, Jean-Pierre said Biden had no knowledge of his son's business deals.

MCCARTHY: BIDEN CASE WILL RISE TO IMPEACHMENT, AS 16 ROMANIAN PAYMENTS WENT TO ‘SHELL COMPANIES’

"That it's a significant shift. I think it's significant that they're looking you in the eye and saying, 'I've said this a thousand times,' and then they say something that they're actually saying for the first time," McCarthy said.

"[T]he next evolution of this is that 'they were never formally in business together – you know, there's no certificate of doing business where they registered in some state'. It's going to get more and more narrow," he predicted.

President Biden has long denied discussing his son's business dealings, telling reporters as far back as 2019 in Spartanburg, S.C. that he "never discussed with my son or my brother anything to do with their businesses."

In that exchange, Biden appeared to reference his brother James, who, when approached by Fox News Digital reporters a few years ago at his home near St. Michaels, Md. "d[id]n't want to comment about anything."

JORDAN ROASTS DEMS AFTER RFK JR HEARING: PARTY TURNED AGAINST ITS MOST FAMOUS NAME

Biden was notably photographed during a 2014 golf outing with Hunter and Archer. An unverified 2019 photograph published in the New York Post in 2020 purported to depict father-and-son Biden alongside Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakh oligarch with reported business ties to Hunter. 

On "The Story," Andrew McCarthy said that Archer's forthcoming testimony along with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's suggestion of a potential impeachment inquiry are creating a "kind of crescendo of information."

He said, however, that top Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin disclosed financial records prior to the 2020 election appearing to show money flowing from foreign sources to the Bidens.

CLICK TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Weiss and the Bidens

David Charles Weiss (L), Hunter Biden (C), and Joe Biden (R). (Fox News)

"To my mind, what's happening here is the media has tried not to cover this the three years. In the meantime, it's been building, building, building, and now suddenly it's like Mount Everest and somebody is finally saying, maybe we ought to look at this," he said.

If there is an impeachment inquiry against Biden, McCarthy argued, there is already more evidence than what Democrats accumulated when they drafted an actual article of impeachment against former President Donald Trump.