House Oversight Republicans accused Democrats on the committee of playing "Biden family defense lawyer" after ranking member Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) released a report on Monday alleging the committee's investigation into the Biden family's business schemes has been an "overwhelming failure."
"Rather than owning up to the fact that the evidence in his ‘top priority’ investigation has established no wrongdoing by President Biden, Chairman Comer has resorted to misrepresenting and distorting this huge body of evidence to make baseless and sensationalistic claims," Raskin’s report claims.
As part of the investigation, Republicans have received more than 12,000 pages of subpoenaed bank records and reviewed over 2,000 pages of suspicious activity reports. The investigation has also included testimony from numerous witnesses.
"Not only does this voluminous evidence fail to even suggest any wrongdoing by President Biden, it in fact proves the opposite," Raskin claims.
The report notes none of the bank records Comer has released show any payments to President Biden and that none of the suspicious activity reports the committee reviewed “alleges, or even suggests, any potential misconduct by President Biden, nor do the SARs show any involvement by President Biden in Hunter Biden's financial or business relationships.”
“Not one of the witness accounts provided to the Committee has shown any evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden, including accounts from two IRS agents and a former FBI Supervisory Special Agent, who were involved in the DOJ's investigation of Hunter Biden,” the report adds. “Former business associates of Hunter Biden who have been interviewed by the Committee— Eric Schwerin and Devon Archer—explicitly stated that they have no reason to believe President Biden had any involvement in Hunter Biden's business deals, much less any reason to believe President Biden took any official action on behalf of his son's business ventures.”
A House Oversight Committee spokesperson refuted these claims in a statement to National Review.
"Mounting evidence reveals that then-Vice President Joe Biden was 'the brand' that his family sold around the world to enrich the Bidens,” the spokesperson said. “Then-Vice President Biden spoke over 20 times by speakerphone with Hunter Biden's foreign business associates, dined with corrupt oligarchs who funneled millions to Hunter Biden, had coffee with one of his son's associates in Beijing, and may have engaged in a bribery scheme.”
“The Oversight Committee has a duty to continue to follow this pattern of corruption and hold President Biden accountable for abusing public office for the financial benefit of his family,” the statement adds. “Unfortunately, Democrats would rather play Biden family defense lawyer instead of working for the American people. We will continue to work to provide the transparency and accountability that Americans demand and deserve."
While Comer’s investigation has also faced criticism from Republicans for its failure so far to directly tie Biden to his family’s business dealings, the investigation has uncovered some damning information about the family’s overseas business dealings.
Hunter Biden’s former business associate Devon Archer testified that then–vice president Biden joined at least 20 phone calls and/or in-person meetings with Hunter's foreign business associates during their time working together. He explained that access to the vice president served as the selling point of the Biden "brand" that allowed he and Hunter several lucrative financial opportunities, including joining the board of Burisma. At the time, Burisma's founder and CEO Mykola Zlochevsky was being investigated by Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, whom the elder Biden later bragged about having fired.
The Biden family and its business associates received millions of dollars from oligarchs in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine while Joe Biden was vice president, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee.
The committee says it has identified more than $20 million in payments from foreign sources to the Biden family and their business associates. Those foreign sources include Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, China and Romania.
The foreign funds were sent to accounts tied to Archer that used the Rosemont Seneca name and were then doled out in incremental payments to Hunter Biden, the records show, in what the committee suggests was an attempt to hide the source and size of the payments.
Those payments included $3.5 million sent from Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina to the shell company Rosemont Seneca Thornton in February 2014. Roughly $1 million was transferred to Devon Archer, while the rest was used to fund a new account Rosemont Seneca Bohai, which was used by both Archer and Hunter Biden to receive other foreign wires.
More recently, the committee sent a letter to NARA requesting unredacted copies of communications between the office of then–vice president Joe Biden and Hunter Biden or his business associates, including a December 4, 2015, email in which longtime Biden family business associate Eric Schwerin sent quotes to Biden's then–communications director Kate Bedingfield that he said the White House should use in response to media outreach regarding Hunter Biden's role on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
Schwerin sent the email at 10:45 a.m. that day. Bedingfield responded hours later at 2:30 p.m. saying, "VP signed off on this."
Schwerin formerly served as the managing director of Rosemont Seneca Advisors, a now-defunct financial advisory firm which Hunter Biden co-founded. Schwerin also worked in Hunter's lobbying shop Oldaker, Biden & Belair from 2002 to 2008, according to financial disclosure forms. He visited the White House and the Naval Observatory at least 36 times while Biden was serving as vice president, Fox News reported.
Emails found on Hunter's abandoned laptop and reported by the New York Post show that Schwerin was deeply involved in the Biden family's finances, often moving money around for Hunter and his father.
Raskin, meanwhile, said Democrats had achieved significant progress in the first six months that they held a majority in the House in 2021, by passing the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips and Science Act.
"By contrast, the first MAGA-directed Congress is by far the most reckless and least productive in decades,” he said. “After holding the American economy hostage by threatening to default on America's financial obligations, House Republicans are now eagerly pushing the government to the brink of a shutdown. Instead of working on legislation to promote the common good or even just keep the government running, House Republicans are weaponizing their offices and exploiting congressional power and resources to promote debunked and outlandish conspiracy theories about President Biden.”
He called the investigation a “transparent effort to boost Donald Trump's campaign by establishing a false moral equivalency between Trump—the four time-indicted former president now facing 91 federal and state criminal charges, based on a mountain of damning evidence for a shocking range of felonies, including lying to the FBI, endangering national security by illegally keeping classified documents, and conspiring to subvert the U.S. Constitution— and President Biden, against whom there is precisely zero evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever.”
"In the face of Republicans' shameful perversion of congressional power and misuse of taxpayer dollars for this hopeless wild goose chase, Committee Democrats will continue to defend the truth, the rule of law, and the integrity of our Constitution and democratic institutions," Raskin said.
 |
| |
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
No comments:
Post a Comment