Incoming House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) and incoming House Judiciary Chair Rep. Jim Jorden (R-Ohio) said Thursday morning House Republicans will open an investigation into President Joe Biden’s involvement in his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings.
“Was Joe Biden directly involved in Hunter Biden’s business deals, and was he compromised? That’s our investigation,” said Comer.
Hunter Biden has been in the spotlight since even before his father won the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2020. At issue are a series of business deals with foreign entities in which Hunter is suspected of leveraging his father’s position as Vice President to former President Barack Obama in order to extract payments he would not have received if his last name was Smith.
In one instance, Hunter Biden received $11 million for his work with Ukrainian natural gas giant Burisma from 2013 to 2018 despite having no experience working in the energy sector or Ukraine.
In another instance, Biden negotiated lucrative deals with a Chinese energy company, CEFC China Energy, that has direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party. A 2017 email obtained by the New York Post concerning that particular deal fueled Republican claims that President Biden was involved in Hunter’s suspect business dealing. The email, written by Biden family associate James Gillar, outlined the terms of a potential deal with CEFC including the line, “10 [percent] held for the big guy?”
Tony Bobulinski, Hunter’s former business partner, has said numerous times that the “big guy” was President Biden.
While the true extent of President Biden’s involvement in Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals remains unknown, the implications of any involvement — especially with Communist China — would be severe. If Chinese Communist Party officials had incriminating information about the Biden family, that would raise the question of whether they ever used that information to extract foreign policy concessions from the Biden administration.
Jordan and Comer released an interim report prepared by GOP committee staff on Thursday detailing the information that has already become public about President Biden’s role in his son’s deals. The 31-page report concludes that President Biden has, on several occasions, misled the public about the extent to which he was involved in those deals. The report also looks at the role of large social media companies in helping to cover-up stories about Hunter Biden, offering a preview of what avenues of investigation an empowered majority committee might pursue.
Information about the Biden family’s foreign business deals has circulated primarily in conservative media outlets owing in large part to a concerted censorship campaign directed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Well-sourced stories about Hunter Biden’s personal life and business dealings emerged in the New York Post following their acquisition of data from a laptop computer Biden had abandoned at a repair shop. But when the paper began reporting on the contents of the computer, the stories were censored by social media companies, including Facebook and Twitter. Users who attempted to share those stories found they could not. The stories turned out to be 100 percent factually accurate, leading to questions as to whether the social media companies censored the stories to “fight disinformation” or to help President Biden defeat former President Donald Trump.
In an interview this year with podcaster Joe Rogan, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed that his company had been warned by the FBI to be on the look out for stories that might be Russian disinformation, and that those warnings contributed to their decision to censor the story. Zuckerberg also admitted the company was wrong to censor the story.
At the time, more than 50 current and former intelligence officials signed an open letter calling the factual information printed in the New York Post “disinformation.” Those officials included CNN pundit James Clapper — who famously perjured himself in front of Congress by lying about the extent of domestic spying happening in America (he was never charged) — and Mike Hayden, a former CIA Director who also turned CNN pundit.
Of major American media outlets, only the New York Post has endeavored to hold accountable those intelligence officials who deliberately sought to downplay a factually accurate story in order to influence an election. On the two year anniversary of the letter and the resulting big tech censorship campaign, the New York Post contacted the letters signatories for follow up. The vast majority of the election interferers declined to comment.
With Republicans taking control of the House for the first time in Biden’s presidency, they may finally have the juice needed to get to the bottom of what role President Biden played in his sons business deals.
“As part of our investigation, we have evidence that the finances, credit cards, and bank accounts of Hunter and Joe Biden were co-mingled, if not shared. And on some accounts at least, red flags were raised by banks to the account owner or owners indicating suspicious or illegal activity,” said Comer.
You can watch Comer and Jordan’s full press conference here.