The success of a congressional investigation shouldn’t be measured by scoring an impeachment, but by getting to the truth, House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer says.
“History will show Joe Biden and his family were the most corrupt occupiers of the White House of any family in the history of America,” Comer, R-Ky., told The Daily Signal in an interview late last week. “And a big footnote will be the investigative work that our committee did and made public.”
During the course of its probe, Comer’s committee obtained records revealing that the Bidens and their associates received over $20 million in payments from foreign entities and individuals, largely through numerous limited liability companies, or LLCs, established by the family. Sources of the millions of dollars include China, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and Kazakhstan, the committee showed.
The committee found a $200,000 check from James Biden to brother Joe Biden written the same day in 2018 that James Biden received $200,000 from a rural health company known as Americore. Comer’s panel also discovered a $40,000 check cut by James Biden to Joe Biden in 2017 that appeared to be tied to the China-linked company CEFC China Energy. Both checks bore the notation “loan repayment.”
“Our investigation was a huge success because we got the truth [for] the American people that no one would have ever known about otherwise,” Comer said. “No one knew about all the different LLCs the Bidens had. No one knew they had all these bank accounts, and no one knew that Joe Biden actually met with these people.”
Biden consistently has denied any involvement in the business dealings of his family, including son Hunter Biden and brother James Biden. Family members have made similar denials.
In June, three House committees made criminal referrals to the Justice Department to investigate Hunter Biden and James Biden for alleged perjury to Congress.
The referrals from the Oversight, Ways and Means, and Judiciary committees will be sent to the next presidential administration as well, Comer said.
“There are criminal referrals that will go to the next administration for charges of perjury against the president’s son and the president’s brother for lying to Congress,” the Kentucky Republican said.
The three committees allege that Hunter Biden wasn’t truthful during his deposition to the panels about his position at Rosemont Seneca Bohai. The corporate entity’s bank account received millions of dollars from foreign individuals who met with Hunter’s father, then vice president under President Barack Obama. The RSB account then transferred funds to Hunter Biden.
The House committees also allege that Hunter Biden wasn’t truthful about text messages he sent to Chinese business partners, invoking his father’s physical presence with him.
The committees also allege that James Biden wasn’t truthful in a deposition when he said that Joe Biden didn’t meet with family business associate Tony Bobulinski in 2017 to pursue a deal with CEFC China Energy. The president’s brother was contradicted in depositions by Hunter Biden as well as Bobulinski.
“The bar has been set,” Comer said, referring to the Justice Department’s prosecutions of two former Trump White House advisers, Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, for contempt of Congress. Both men declined to testify before House Democrats investigating the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021.
Attorneys for the president’s brother and his son have said the two men were truthful during the depositions.
Reason for Impeachment Inquiry
Midway through the Oversight and Accountability Committee’s probe of alleged influence peddling by the Bidens, the House authorized an impeachment inquiry that also brought in the Judiciary Committee and the Ways and Means Committee.
Then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., deemed the three panels’ investigation to be an impeachment inquiry. Later, under new Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., the full House voted along party lines to approve an impeachment inquiry.
Getting a vote to proceed with impeaching Biden was never the priority of the inquiry, Comer told The Daily Signal. As a constitutional process, impeachment makes it difficult for a presidential administration to invoke executive privilege over either documents or witnesses’ testimony.
“This is something that I’ve stated that’s been written very seldom,” Comer said. “When Kevin McCarthy made the decision to go from a regular investigation to an impeachment inquiry, he did so to help give us more leverage in court, because the Biden administration was obstructing our investigation.”
“It was never necessary to impeach. … It was to give us more standing in court because of all the obstruction,” he added. “Every single thing we subpoenaed in the private sector we got. We got every bank record, we got every bank statement. But if it had to do with the government, emails, testimony from people in the White House, we were blocked.”
Comer said he recognizes some angst on the Right over the fact that the House didn’t vote to impeach Biden. But he pointed to the House impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, after which the Democrat-controlled Senate dismissed the charges without holding a trial.
“People say, ‘Well, you didn’t impeach him.’ The Senate was never going to convict,” Comer said. “You saw what happened with Mayorkas.”
“If you can’t even get rid of someone for leaving our southern border wide open, then what can you do?” the Kentucky Republican said. “And no president in history has ever been removed from office because of impeachment.”
The House investigation did gain testimony from Biden business associates who talked about Joe Biden’s in-person or video meetings with family business associates while serving as vice president or as a former vice president.
One associate of Hunter Biden’s, Devon Archer, identified Joe Biden as “the brand” for raking in money by joining meetings and teleconferences related to family business dealings.
“That’s kind of incriminating evidence that his dad was involved,” Comer said, referring to Hunter and the president. “The mainstream media didn’t think so.”
That Bribery Accusation
One sticking point that the committee didn’t prove emerged from an FBI form known as an FD 1023, which records raw, unverified statements from informants. One such form shows that a longtime FBI informant alleged that the head of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid a $5 million bribe to Joe Biden.
The potential of a bribery case gave public momentum to the impeachment inquiry, Comer said, but it was never a necessary aspect of it.
An FBI whistleblower—not the informant—turned the document over to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. The FBI did not name the informant.
“When that document was discovered, we wanted to investigate it. You investigate every aspect,” Comer said, adding that the committee discussed the FD 1023 form with FBI Director Christopher Wray.
“Christopher Wray said that this informant was one of our highest-paid and most successful informants we have used in prior convictions, because we wanted to interview the informant,” Comer said. “We just wanted to interview the informant. And then, lo and behold, they indicted him.”
The name of the informant, Alexander Smirnov, became known in February when he was indicted for allegedly lying to the FBI.
Comer noted that it wasn’t clear what the informant was charged with lying about.
“I don’t know if the informant was telling the truth or not, but I know the way that Christopher Wray told everyone that he was credible and highly paid and then turned around and coordinated with the mainstream media that he lied. That was as shady as hell,” Comer said.
The FBI didn’t respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal before publication of this story.
Democrats Claim ‘Fruitless Investigation’
The White House also didn’t immediately respond to The Daily Signal’s inquiries for this story.
However, Ian Sams, senior adviser to the White House counsel’s office and spokesperson on investigations, has been dismissive of the impeachment inquiry on several occasions.
“Comer knows 20+ witnesses have testified that POTUS did nothing wrong,” Sams posted on X in March, after the committees invited the president to testify. “He knows that the hundreds of thousands of pages of records he’s received have refuted his false allegations. This is a sad stunt at the end of a dead impeachment. Call it a day, pal.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., ranking member of Comer’s committee, blasted the criminal referrals in June as the end of a “fruitless investigation.” That probe, Raskin said, showed the president “was not part of, did not profit from, and took no official actions to benefit his family members’ business ventures.”
“Of course, the chairmen’s 60-page letter is a last-ditch effort to distract from the exoneration of President Biden by offering ‘gotcha’ accusations against the president’s son and brother based on their efforts to recollect years-old financial transactions, text messages, and conversations in the course of this interminable fishing expedition,” Raskin said in a public statement.
Regarding the criminal referrals to the Justice Department alleging perjury before Congress, lawyers for Biden’s son and brother scoffed in their own written statements.
In June, Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said the criminal referral regarding the president’s son “is nothing more than a desperate attempt by Republicans to twist Hunter’s testimony so they can distract from their failed impeachment inquiry and interfere with his trial.”
James Biden’s lawyer, Paul Fishman, said: “This baseless partisan action is a transparent and cynical attempt to distract from and retaliate for Donald Trump’s recent criminal conviction.”
Truth vs. Media Narrative
Legacy media outlets generally joined Democrats’ narrative during the Biden probe.
The legacy media narrative consistently portrayed Joe Biden as completely outside family business activities.
“All along the way, the media said ‘Well, Joe Biden didn’t know anything about it,’” Comer told The Daily Signal. “Then we proved Joe Biden knew everything about it and that he was the central figure in the influence peddling scheme. Joe Biden was the brand that they were selling.”
Comer said the most biased media coverage of the investigation came from “The Associated Press, The Washington Post, [and] MSNBC, in that order.”
“When we started the investigation, the media narrative was that [Hunter Biden’s abandoned] laptop was Russian disinformation. We’re the ones that pushed that narrative to the wayside when we had the Twitter hearings,” Comer said. “We’ve done a great job getting the truth out there, and that’s all we can do.”
Media coverage became worse after the investigation officially became an impeachment inquiry. And, without naming names, Comer said some Republicans weren’t helpful.
“People in our conference that are obsessed with impeachment felt like they could get retweets on impeachment,” Comer said.
“The mainstream media fueled impeachment because they knew in the end no one would ever be impeached.”
Only after the June 27 presidential debate between Biden and Trump did media outlets begin to raise concerns about the clout that Biden’s son had with him.
“The media says, ‘Why are you picking on Hunter Biden? Hunter Biden’s not got anything to do with the administration,’” Comer added. “Well, then The New York Times, when they’re trying to get rid of Joe Biden, they start saying, ‘Yeah, Hunter Biden is calling the shots up there.’”
