President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden is the focus of an investigation by House Republicans into the family’s business dealings, and a new report concludes that they’re trading off the Biden name for profit with transactions that suggest the main family business is influence peddling.
Biden family members received millions in suspicious money transfers before Biden became president, Republicans said as part of an effort to portray Biden as corrupt.
A memo from the House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer says the Biden family’s and associates’ “activities in coordination with Chinese nationals and their corporate entities appear to be an attempt to engage in financial deception.”
From 2013 through 2018, Hunter Biden and his company brought in about $11 million via his work as an attorney and a board member with a Ukrainian firm accused of bribery and his work with a Chinese businessman now accused of fraud, according to an NBC News analysis of a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive and documents released by Senate Republicans.
Comer says the committee identified at least nine Biden family members that accepted foreign money, including Hunter, the President’s brother James Biden, James’s wife Sara, Hallie, Hunter’s ex-wife (Kathleen Buhle), Hunter’s current wife (Melissa Cohen), and three children or grandchildren of Joe or James.
The committee claims that the Bidens and their associates “established a network of over 20 companies” that collected at least $10 million from abroad, Wall Street Journal reported. “The Bidens took steps to hide, confuse, and conceal payments they received from foreign nationals.”
The investigation by Congressional Republicans has focused on ties between President Biden, his son and China. In April, Comer released information indicating that from 2015-2017 — a period that includes two years when Joe Biden was vice president — President Biden’s family members, including Hunter Biden, were paid $1.6 million by a Chinese energy company, CBS News reported.
Hunter Biden’s finances, especially his tax payments to the IRS, have been under investigation by federal prosecutors in Delaware since 2018, during the Trump administration, before his father was elected president. He has repeatedly denied doing anything wrong.
Democratic White House staff issued their own memo to Democrats on the committee hours after Comer’s memo was released, accusing the Republicans of gossip and conspiracy mongering.
“Unable to implicate the President directly, Committee Republicans have resorted to using cherry-picked bank records, misrepresentations about confidential and unverified bank reports known as SARs, and baseless conspiracy theories to attack the President’s family, including his grandchildren,” the memo said.
The memo alleged that Comer has “intentionally mischaracterized SARs documents, presenting unverified tips from financial institutions as facts.”
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, a key witness in a criminal case against Donald Trump, criticized Comer’s memo on a call with reporters Wednesday. “The irony of Comer’s claims about the Biden family should not be lost on the fact that the Trump children profited more off their father’s presidency than anyone in history,” Cohen said.
Comer “has failed to provide factual evidence to support his wild accusations about the President,” said Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the ranking member of the committee. “He continues to bombard the public with innuendo, misrepresentations, and outright lies, recycling baseless claims from stories that were debunked years ago.”
Libertarian author James Bovard, who writes about waste, failure, corruption, cronyism and abuse of power in government, is buying Comer’s claims.
“Americans would have learned little or nothing about Biden’s foreign money machine if Republicans had not captured the House of Representatives in November,” Bovard wrote in a New York Post opinion piece.
Biden announced in June 2021 that the U.S. “will lead by example” to “fight the scourge of corruption” and support “courageous citizens around the globe who are demanding honest, transparent governance,” Brovard wrote. “A White House statement promised to ‘crack down’ on ‘illicit financing’ that generates ‘pernicious foreign influence.’
“Was there a secret asterisk exempting anyone named Biden? Denouncing corruption is the easiest way for rascally politicians to appear honest,” Bovard added.
Ian Sams, the White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations, said in a statement, “For going on five years now, Republicans in Congress have been lobbing unfounded, unproven, politically-motivated attacks against the President and his family without offering evidence for their claims or evidence of decisions influenced by anything other than U.S. interests.
“When it comes to President Biden’s personal finances, anybody can take a look: he has offered an unprecedented level of transparency, releasing a total of 25 years of tax returns to the American public.”
A spokesperson for Hunter Biden’s legal team said in response to Comer’s latest memo that the president’s son had “every right to pursue his own business endeavors” and had “joined several business partners in seeking a joint venture with a privately-owned, legitimate energy company in China.
“As part of that joint venture, Hunter received his portion of good faith seed funds which he shared with his uncle, James Biden, and Hallie Biden, with whom he was involved at the time, and sharing expenses,” the spokesman continued. “The accounts so dramatically listed by Rep. Comer belonged to Hunter, his uncle and Hallie — nobody else.”
Photos: President Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden leave Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Johns Island, S.C., after attending Mass, Aug. 13, 2022. (AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta) / James Biden attends a state dinner at the White House, October 2011 (Haraz N. Ghanbari/AP) / Ukraine flag: Adam Śmigielski on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/@smigielski
