The next impeachment witness on the list of House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) is the biggest yet: President Joe Biden.
Closing out a fiery March 20 hearing with two ex-associates of Hunter Biden, Mr. Comer noted that the probe into President Biden’s involvement in his family’s business schemes had produced conflicting testimony.
“Hunter Biden denies his father’s role in the Biden family business. This is a material discrepancy among witnesses of the highest order. … At this point, the only person who can resolve this discrepancy about Joe Biden’s participation in his family’s influence-peddling schemes is Joe Biden himself,” the congressman said.
“In the coming days, I will invite President Biden to the Oversight Committee to provide his testimony and explain why his family received tens of millions of dollars from foreign companies with his assistance,” he continued. “We need to hear from the president himself.”
Ian Sams, White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations, responded to the news on X, formerly Twitter.
‘Joe Biden Was the Brand’
The president maintains that he had no knowledge of or involvement in his family members’ businesses. However, businessmen Tony Bobulinski and Jason Galanis—both former partners of Mr. Hunter Biden—refuted that claim at the latest impeachment hearing.
“From my direct personal experience and what I’ve subsequently come to learn, it is clear to me that Joe Biden was the brand being sold by the Biden family,” Mr. Bobulinski testified.
Mr. Bobulinski added that the president was an “active, aware enabler” of his family members’ business endeavors, meeting with associates like him to further the business “despite being buffered by a complex scheme to maintain plausible deniability.”
Mr. Galanis, testifying remotely due to his current incarceration, shared corroborating testimony. Describing Mr. Hunter Biden’s only value to their business as “the Biden lift,” he said his former partner’s claims that he never involved his father in his business dealings were “patently false.”
“And I think that there’s documentation that says that’s just an untruthful statement,” he added.
One point Republicans have made is that no witness they have spoken to has named a legitimate service that the Biden family provided in exchange for the millions of dollars they received from foreign partners in countries like China, Romania, and Russia.
Reiterating that argument at the hearing, Mr. Comer asserted that the only logical conclusion to be drawn was that President Biden’s influence was the product and that he was either “complicit” in his family’s schemes “or incompetent.”
‘RICO Is Not a Crime’
Throughout the hearing, Democrats attacked the credibility of the Republicans’ witnesses.Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, derided Mr. Bobulinski as a “bitterly disappointed, wannabe Hunter business partner.”
Mr. Raskin also dismissed Mr. Galanis as a “serial fraudster and convicted conman” who was found guilty of “defrauding union pension funds, a Native American tribe, and scores of innocent investors.”
Mr. Bobulinski sparred with his detractors. In one particularly heated exchange, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) asked him to identify what crime he claimed to have witnessed President Biden commit.
The businessman suggested that the president had violated anti-corruption and conspiracy laws, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), and the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
“Excuse me, sir. RICO is not a crime. It is a category,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez interjected, prompting a back-and-forth argument.
The RICO statute covers a long list of crimes in relation to racketeering and organized crime, including murder, bribery, wire fraud, obstruction, and more.
The congresswoman went on to denounce the impeachment probe as a “Republican majority lost in the desert,” maintaining that Republicans had failed to identify an impeachable offense.
