House Republicans fresh off securing a majority immediately turned their attention to probes into the foreign business dealings of President Biden’s son Hunter Biden and brother James Biden.
The ultimate goal of of the probes is to question whether the president is “compromised” by foreign governments as the GOP shifts its focus from a disappointing midterm to oversight — and the 2024 presidential race.
“We will evaluate the status of Joe Biden’s relationship with his family’s foreign partners and whether he is a president who is compromised or swayed by foreign dollars and influence,” House Oversight Committee ranking member James Comer (R-Ky.) said in a press conference Wednesday morning.
“I want to be clear: This is an investigation of Joe Biden. And that’s where the committee will focus in this next Congress,” Comer said.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, said that his panel will aid Oversight in its investigation of the Biden family with its own probes into alleged politicization at the FBI and Department of Justice.
House Oversight Committee Republicans also released a 32-page interim staff report on their Biden family investigation on Thursday. Staff has reviewed a copy of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop, but Republicans are consciously trying to stay away from its more salacious contents in their investigation.
The final pages of the report say that the investigations into Biden family businesses will continue in order to inform legislation “regarding government employees’ family members’ ability to lobby or engage government officials for financial gain.”
They also said the probes will concern “elected officials’ mandatory disclosure of financial interests held in trust by family members or associates and interests held in businesses controlled or funded by America’s adversaries.”
A Washington Post investigation of Hunter Biden’s arrangement with a Chinese energy conglomerate found no evidence that President Biden personally benefited from the transactions or knew about the details, though House Republicans think there is information that indicates otherwise.
The Biden campaign in 2020 said the then-candidate “has never even considered being involved in business with his family, nor in any overseas business whatsoever.”
The Thursday press conference was pre-planned since before the election, but came the morning after election projections forecasted the GOP winning a 218th House seat, making their majority official. Six House races have yet to be called.
It underscored the heavy focus that Republicans plan to put on oversight and investigations of the Biden administration over the next two years, since Democratic control of the Senate and the White House makes the chances of passing conservative priorities into law slim, if not impossible.
Other Republican investigative priorities include probing the origins of the COVID-19 virus, the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, and policies at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The press conference was the first that House Oversight Committee Republicans have held in the last two years.
Comer said that the committee would “love to talk to people in the Biden family,” but his first priority is obtaining suspicious activity reports from the Treasury Department connected to transactions from the president’s son and his associates.
CBS News reported in April that U.S. banks flagged for review more than 150 financial transactions related to the business affairs of either Hunter or James Biden, the president’s brother.
The reports do not necessarily mean illegal activity occurred, and only a small percentage of the millions of reports from banks filed each year lead to law enforcement investigations.