WASHINGTON — Republicans have repeatedly claimed that the Biden administration has wielded the Justice Department to distract from their investigation into the Biden family.
On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), released a report arguing that actually, it’s Republicans who are using their investigation of Hunter Biden to distract from news about former President Donald Trump’s crimes.
The Democratic staff memo suggests Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) released the transcript of an interview with a former FBI agent on Monday because a district attorney in Georgia was preparing to announce an indictment against Trump.
Earlier this month, the memo notes, Comer released a transcript of the committee’s interview with a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s “on the very same day that Donald Trump was arraigned on federal charges of conspiring to defraud the United States” and obstructing congressional proceedings to certify the 2020 election.
It’s all an effort to distract from Trump’s various indictments, according to Democrats.
“They’ve not laid a glove on Joe Biden as president. They haven’t been able to show any criminal corruption on his part,” Raskin said Sunday on ABC News “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” “What they’ve got is Hunter Biden. And we’ve all seen clear that this guy was addicted to drugs and did a lot of really unlawful and wrong things. And we have said, let the justice system run its course.”
Hunter Biden has been under investigation by the Justice Department for years, with prosecutors accusing him of failing to pay taxes in 2017 and 2018 and of illegally owning a firearm while he was using drugs. Biden had been set to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax charges last month, but the deal collapsed amid questions from a federal judge about the structure of the deal. Last week Attorney General Merrick Garland elevated the prosecutor to special counsel status, and the prosecutor said the case will go to trial.
Comer has been increasingly adamant that the Oversight Committee’s Hunter Biden material incriminates the president, since Hunter Biden’s business partner testified that the father and son frequently talked on the phone and that Hunter Biden would occasionally put his dad on speaker in the presence of business associates. Hunter earned millions from foreign nationals, including in the years when his father was vice president and involved in foreign policy.
“What I think the evidence shows is Joe Biden was front and center in this from day one,” Comer said on Fox News last week.
In a staff report, Comer’s committee suggested last week it didn’t matter if they couldn’t prove that the elder Biden had received a bribe or taken an official action on his family’s behalf, calling it a “weak defense” to insist that Republicans “must show payments directly to the President to show corruption.”
Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) elaborated on that argument on Tuesday during a conversation with reporters at the Capitol.
“You don’t have to do anything directly to be indicted for conspiracy,” Griffith said. “if you’re in the room, and discussions are happening, which are leading to criminal conduct, and you have any awareness or should have any awareness of criminal conduct may be being discussed…You can have a conspiracy indictment based on that.”
Griffith is not a member of the Oversight Committee, but their investigation into the Biden family has taken center stage in the House as Republicans consider whether to open an impeachment inquiry into the president over his alleged involvement in his son’s business when he was vice president.
The main allegation of corruption, so far, is the same one that Donald Trump lodged in 2019 ― that as vice president, Biden pushed for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor because his son sat on the board of a sketchy Ukrainian company. During Trump’s first impeachment, State Department officials said Biden was just doing his job as vice president.
In their Wednesday memo, the committee’s Democratic staff said the witness testimony received so far actually undercut accusations of corruption by Biden, even if the material was supposed to distract from Trump. The report calls the investigation a “complete and utter failure” and a “lost-in-the-wilderness fishing expedition yielding no evidence of wrongdoing of any kind by the President.”
The unnamed FBI agent whose interview transcript was released this week, for instance, confirmed that the FBI “tipped off” the Secret Service about plans to approach Hunter Biden in December 2020, preventing an interview, but the agent suggested that the tipoff was within normal protocol.
“I personally was not going to go to armed Secret Service agents and demand that I interview their protectee for two reasons,” the former agent said. “Number one, I did not believe they would let me in, which would frustrate us. And number two, they would cause us to wait and seek the permission of, most likely, their headquarters, because those agents in the field are doing their job, which is to protect their assigned protectee.”
(It’s possible that Hunter Biden, himself an attorney who by then had a legal defense team on his case, would have declined to be interviewed even if the FBI did knock on his door.)
Democrats concede in their memo that Hunter Biden “appears to have engaged in conduct that is common in lobbying and government relations in Washington,” such as trading on his family name. But their report notes that while Hunter Biden’s past business partner, Devon Archer, testified to instances of the elder Biden talking to their work contacts, the conversations were never about business.
“They were calls to talk about the weather, and that was signal enough to be powerful,” Archer said.