House GOP digs in on Biden family dealings without directly connecting president

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and the panel’s Republicans on Wednesday dug in on their attacks on President Biden, unveiling new details alleging that more than $10 million flowed from foreign entities to companies associated with the Biden family and family members themselves.

But the 36-page report released by the panel’s Republicans on Wednesday that was based on bank records did not show any foreign money flowing directly to Joe Biden. 

Biden has previously denied knowledge of his family’s business dealings as they were happening, and the report did not provide hard evidence that his family’s finances influenced any policy decisions.

But in a press conference presenting the findings — complete with a flow chart documenting the flow of funds through multiple individuals and entities — Republicans reiterated their suspicions.

“We’re pretty confident that the president was very knowledgeable of what his family was doing,” Comer said, adding that he is still in the “beginning stages” of his investigation.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), another Republican on the panel, said the transactions appear to show that “Chinese Communist Party-affiliated entities may have bought influence with the Bidens that they couldn’t get otherwise.”

“The Vice President during the last year of the Obama administration traveled around the world. He talked a lot about foreign aid in different countries, talked a lot about American policy, American assistance,” Comer said. “You look at some of the decisions that Joe Biden made as president, there are many decisions that we would make a strong argument – that put China first and America last.”

Some of the business and financial connections explored in the panel’s report had been previously reported. Connections between Hunter Biden and his associates and CEFC China Energy Co., for instance, were explored in a 2020 Senate GOP report. And business connections between Hunter Biden and Romanian business executive Gabriel Popoviciu, who was convicted in a fraud and corruption case in 2016, had also been reported before the 2020 election.

Republicans say that they plan to craft legislation to strengthen reporting requirements related to foreign transactions by senior business officials’ family members, to combat “influence peddling.” And Comer said that he will soon release a new round of subpoenas to banks seeking specific targeted information.

The White House and House Oversight Committee Democrats aggressively counter-messaged against Comer’s report and press conference.

House Oversight Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said in a statement that Republicans are engaging in a “tiresome and aging smear campaign.”

“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,” Raskin said.

A separate memo from the committee’s Democrats pushed back on the GOP’s representation of bank reports that flag suspicious activity.

And a memo from Ian Sams, Special Assistant to the President and White House Oversight Spokesperson, “long pattern of making absurd claims” about the president “using baseless claims, personal attacks, and innuendo to try to score political points.”

“Comer keeps insisting he will provide evidence – but it hasn’t stopped him from a cascading barrage of innuendo and insinuations in the meantime,” Sams said in the memo.

Abbe Lowell, counsel for Hunter Biden, also dismissed the findings in a statement, saying that Comer “has spent the last five months making wild predictions without proof, asking inane questions out loud and falling short every time – including today.”

“Today’s so-called ‘revelations’ are retread, repackaged misstatements of perfectly proper meetings and business by private citizens,” Lowell said, calling on Comer to investigate former President Trump’s family business dealings.