Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, suggested that the allegations against Hunter Biden are likely why former President Barack Obama didn’t encourage Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to run for president.
In an interview with Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Johnson described the controversy surrounding Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings as “a huge mess” that is “not going away, particularly if [former] Vice President Biden becomes the president.”
“It’s one of the reasons I’ve been saying for quite some time that I never felt that Vice President Biden should ever run for president,” Johnson said. “I think this is probably one of the reasons [why] President Obama did not encourage the vice president to run, so this is a huge mess.”
It comes days after Johnson said a special counsel might have to investigate Joe Biden if he wins on Nov. 3.
“You know, I am not a big fan of special counsels, but if Joe Biden wins the presidency, I don’t see how you avoid one,” Johnson told Fox Business. “Otherwise, this is going to be, you know, tucked away, and we will never know what happened. All this evidence is going to be buried.”
Congressional Republicans had urged Attorney General William Barr to create a special counsel to investigate Biden before the election. Johnson, meanwhile, was one of two Republican chairmen who investigated Hunter Biden’s emails and overseas business dealings, which are at the center of a growing scandal after The New York Post last month first reported about the alleged emails, asserting that he and his business partners may have benefited from deals in Ukraine and China due to his father’s position at the White House.
Biden’s campaign has denied that a meeting in Washington with an adviser from Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings ever took place, an event referred to in the Post’s initial report. Biden himself has said he had no knowledge of his son’s business dealings and asserts that federal government officials have said on the record that they’re not aware of anything he did that was corrupt.
In text messages sent to Bobulinski on Oct. 14, 2017, Hunter Biden wrote that he and Ye Jianming, the founder of multibillion-dollar Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC China Energy, had a “solid” relationship. Hunter Biden said he was the first guest at Ye’s new apartment and that the billionaire cooked lunch for him.
Biden added that Ye “has me helping him on a number of his personal issues,” including for “staff visas and some more sensitive things.”
Johnson said on Oct. 29 that Bobulinski’s claims appear to be authentic, and that no discrepancies have turned up in his claims.
“All I can say is that all the verification, all the validation we’re doing, we haven’t turned up any discrepancies. Everything appears to be authentic that we’ve looked at so far,” Johnson said.
The emails first reported on by the Post were allegedly sourced from a laptop hard drive belonging to the younger Biden that was purportedly left at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019.
