If there’s a House Republican majority when the 118th Congress convenes on Jan. 3, 2023, it will launch an onslaught of congressional investigations to expose, among much else, what members view as the Biden family’s abuse of public office to enrich themselves.
Three veteran House Republicans—Reps. James Comer of Kentucky, Jim Jordan of Ohio, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, plus an unknown player to be named later—will be at the center of a tidal wave of document demands, televised corruption hearings, depositions, sworn testimonies, subpoenas, cross-examinations, and contempt citations that have been in the planning stages for months.
All three promise to go wherever the facts lead.
The Kentucky Republican, who was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2016, is presently the ranking GOP member of the oversight panel in the Democrat-controlled House. His ascension to chair one of the major House committees in only his fourth term would be among the fastest in recent memory.
“Hunter and other members of the Biden family have a pattern of peddling access to the highest levels of government to enrich themselves,“ Comer said. ”The American people deserve to know whether the president’s connections to his family’s business deals occurred at the expense of American interests and whether they represent a national security threat.”
His views were echoed by multiple GOP members of the House, as well as present and former congressional investigative staff veterans interviewed by The Epoch Times in recent days.
Congressional plans to dig into the Biden family’s alleged brew of government duties and business dealings have been solidified in recent months, after a laptop owned by Hunter Biden was found to contain thousands of incriminating emails, photographs, and other documents.
Those deals were made possible in part by access occasioned for Hunter and James Biden by Joe Biden’s duties as vice president under President Barack Obama, and possibly since his elevation to the Oval Office in 2021, investigators believe.
“Everyone knows what the Biden administration has done on the border is intentional, so we are going to look at all of that,” Jordan told The Epoch Times.
“There is just a whole host of things that are a problem that I think warrant aggressive oversight. Mayorkas knew, for example, that these guys they accused of using their whips to hit migrants, he knew that was [expletive], like we all suspected it was.”
Asked about the prospects of an impeachment effort against Mayorkas, Jordan said: “This guy certainly warrants it. He came in front of our committee and couldn’t remember when I asked him about the status of the individuals on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist arrested at the border, and he sneeringly said, ‘I don’t know.’ This guy is bad news.
“The other big thing, of course, is the Justice Department and how political it has become, with the 14 whistleblowers, 14 FBI agents that have come to us as whistleblowers, so we’ll look at all of that.
“We’ve had more whistleblowers come to us than I’ve ever seen while we’re in the minority, which means we can’t do the investigation in the proper way. But they’re willing to do it because it’s that bad over there.”
Jordan was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2006 and has been reelected seven times in the years since.
Sanborn was assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division and executive assistant director of the bureau’s National Security Branch. She is expected to provide significant information regarding DOJ and FBI actions on a host of crucial issues of interest to Judiciary Republicans.
Another individual who’ll be summoned to testify is Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Comer said that U.S. taxpayer dollars were “being funneled to the Wuhan lab to conduct risky experimental research on bat coronaviruses” and that the evidence shows that Fauci “was aware of this information at the start of the pandemic and may have acted to conceal the information and intentionally downplay the lab leak theory.”
“It looks like they were working with the FBI to put together that letter. Where did that letter originate? Who started it? We need to get to the bottom of all that and how the FBI was a part of that, or not a part of that. It sure looks like they were because they went to Facebook and told them to be looking for Russian disinformation,” Jordan said.
McMorris Rodgers, whose congressional career began in 2005, is in line to take over the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has oversight responsibility for a host of issues in the energy, environmental, and economic spaces.
“We have a full agenda to hold President Biden and his administration officials accountable on behalf of the American people for how they’ve shut down American energy, broken trust at America’s public health agencies, made the fentanyl crisis worse, and increased our dependence on supply chains controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, among many issues,” McMorris Rogers told The Epoch Times.
“Nothing is off the table.”
Both Comer’s oversight and McMorris Rodgers’s energy and commerce panels are leading extensive investigations into the origins of COVID-19, with the latter particularly focused on how U.S. taxpayer dollars may have helped fund potential gain-of-function research that might have led to the pandemic.
McMorris Rodgers is also looking at how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) mismanaged the federal response to the virus, which to date has killed more than 1 million Americans since January 2020.
“Trust in public health has been broken by the Biden administration’s authoritarian actions to mandate vaccines, force masks on children, collude with teachers’ unions to keep schools closed, and urge Big Tech to shut down free speech,” the Washington Republican said.
She also said her panel will look into “the flawed studies and mischaracterization of data the CDC repeatedly used to justify school closures and mask mandates on children.”
The committee under McMorris Rodgers’s leadership is also planning an inquiry into social media giant TikTok’s relationship to the CCP.
“We have been doing some investigations as to how the Chinese Communist Party is stealing our data and collecting a ton of data on Americans. TikTok is going to be at the top of the [investigations] list,” she told The Epoch Times.
China’s influence on U.S. supply chains and the relationship of some environmental advocacy groups in the United States to Beijing are also on the energy and commerce agenda for 2023.
An energy and commerce Republican aide said McMorris Rodgers plans to expand the oversight subcommittee staff, who are already planning their moves for next year.
“Every member of our staff across all our subcommittees is working together on a robust oversight strategy of the Biden administration, which will inform how we take action on policies to reverse the damage they’ve caused to our economy, our global competitive edge against China, and our American way of life,” the aide said.
The “player to be named later” is whoever House GOP leaders designate to succeed Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) on the House Administration Committee, which has oversight responsibility for the day-to-day operations of the Capitol Complex, including how officials prepared for and responded to the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Davis, the ranking GOP member of the committee in the 117th Congress, was in line to become chairman under a Republican majority, but he lost a June primary that pitted him against Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.), after the two were redistricted into the contest by the state’s Democrat-dominated state legislature.
Whoever becomes the chairman can be expected to push forward using groundwork laid by Davis on a host of Jan. 6 issues that have been studiously ignored by the special committee appointed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
Those issues include why Pelosi and District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser didn’t accept then-President Donald Trump’s offer of thousands of National Guard troops to help protect the U.S. Capitol building and grounds. It is quite possible that Pelosi and Bowser will be summoned before the panel to testify under oath, according to officials.
