According to a memo obtained by AWN, House Oversight Chairman James Comer provided new details to support allegations that members of Joe Biden’s family, including his son Hunter, received millions of dollars in payments from foreign entities in China and Romania while Biden was vice president.
The committee got new bank documents highlighted in the report through a request, including payments made to entities associated with Hunter Biden. Republicans also claimed that Hunter Biden exploited family ties to broker a meeting in 2016 between a Serbian candidate for UN Secretary-General and then-national security adviser to Vice President Colin Kahl.
The overseas payments raise concerns about Hunter Biden’s business operations while his father was vice president, but the committee finds no evidence of wrongdoing in the payments. The bank records, on their own, do not show the purpose of the payments made.
The letter is Comer’s most direct attempt to verify his claims that Biden family members have profited from the family name. Comer has indicated that Biden’s financial connections, notably with his family’s overseas business associates, may have improperly influenced him.
However, no payments were provided directly to Joe Biden as vice president or after he left office, according to the most recent report.
Comer has been publicly teasing details about the paper trail that Republicans have discovered through subpoenas delivered to numerous institutions and trips to the Treasury Department to review records for months.
Comer and the committee’s other Republicans staged a press conference Wednesday morning to trumpet their findings.
“These people did not come to Hunter Biden because he understood world politics, was experienced in it, or understood Chinese business.” “They wanted him for the access his last name gave him,” South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace said during a news conference.
Comer was questioned on Wednesday about particular policy decisions made by Biden as president or vice president that may have been directly impacted by these foreign donations. Comer did not name any, instead pointing to then-Vice President Biden travelling around the world and debating foreign aid in the final year of the Obama administration, and adding that they believe Biden made decisions as president that “put China first and America last.” According to Comer, the committee “will get into more of those later.”
“Congressman Comer has a history of playing fast and loose with the facts and spreading baseless innuendo while refusing to conduct his so-called ‘investigations’ with legitimacy,” White House spokeswoman Ian Sams said in a statement to AWN ahead of the memo’s release. He withheld facts from the public in order to selectively leak and promote his own hand-picked narratives as part of his wider effort to launch personal assaults on the President and his family.”
In a statement, Hunter Biden’s counsel, Abbe Lowell, stated, “Today’s so-called “revelations” are retread, repackaged misstatements of perfectly proper meetings and business by private citizens.” Rep. Comer should conduct the same investigation into the various entities of former President Trump and his family members instead of rehashing earlier investigations that found no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, told AWN, “Chairman Comer has failed to provide factual evidence to support his wild accusations about the President.” He keeps bombarding the public with insinuation, misrepresentation, and downright lies, rehashing unsubstantiated assertions from refuted stories from years past.”
Payments from a Romanian business partner
According to bank records cited in the committee’s memo, within five weeks of then-Vice President Biden’s meeting with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in 2015, Gabriel Popoviciu, a Romanian for whom Hunter Biden was doing legal consulting, began sending money to Rob Walker, a business associate of Hunter’s.
From November 2015 to May 2017, Walker received more than $3 million and wired nearly $1 million in various installments to Hunter Biden, his business associate James Gillian, and Hallie Biden, the widow of the president’s oldest son, Beau Biden, who died in May 2015. For a while after Beau’s death, Hallie Biden and Hunter Biden were romantically linked.
Hunter Biden has long been known to have done legal work for Popoviciu, a wealthy Romanian business leader convicted of corruption in 2016.
Comer’s memo begs the question of why Popoviciu was paying a Biden family business associate directly rather than the law company where Hunter Biden was working at the time or the other firm Hunter allegedly referred Popoviciu to.
Comer’s report makes no mention of former President Donald Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s involvement with Popoviciu.
Republicans on the committee received the financial records through subpoenas issued to four different institutions.
