Republican members of a House panel sent letters on Thursday to the White House and the National Archives demanding records of any communication between Hunter Biden and the White House during the two terms of the Obama administration, when his father was vice president.
“Hunter Biden’s connections throughout the Russian sphere of influence have now become especially relevant in the fast-moving and developing Russian war in Ukraine,” the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee write in the letters, which were obtained by The Post.
“If the Russian government is attempting to influence American policy in Ukraine by exploiting Hunter Biden’s connection with his father — the President of the United States — the American people deserve to know it,” the letters said.
The Republicans expressed concern over whether Hunter Biden continues to profit now off being the president’s son and whether enemies of the US may be attempting to exploit him because of his foreign business relationships in Ukraine and Russia.
The letters are addressed to Dana Remus, the counsel to President Biden, and David Ferriero, the head archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration.
“The days of Hunter Biden using his father to line his own pockets are numbered. For years, concerns over Hunter’s shady foreign business dealings and the possibility he’s selling access to the President of the United States have been inexcusably ignored by Congressional Democrats,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the ranking Republican on the committee, said in a statement to The Post.
“His unethical behavior and sketchy business relationships in Russia and Ukraine should concern every American and demands the attention of the Oversight Committee. Given the history of the Biden family using public office for self-gain, Oversight Republicans will continue to seek answers for the American people and use all available resources to hold Hunter Biden accountable,” Comer said in the statement.
He and the other 13 Republicans who signed the letters — including Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona and Pete Sessions of Texas — point out that when the Russian government on March 15 slapped a series of sanctions on the president, Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, they also included Hunter Biden in the penalties.
“It is the inclusion of Hunter Biden — decidedly not a ‘Democratic official’ — that raises serious questions. The nation’s adversaries apparently see the president’s son as a pressure point to exploit,” they say in the letter.
The House Republicans claim that the inclusion of Hunter Biden on the list raises questions about whether he “has indeed engaged in business schemes with our adversaries.”
If the White House and the National Archives don’t deliver the documents, there’s little recourse for Republicans since they are a minority on the House Oversight Panel and in Congress.
But the GOP has repeatedly said if, as widely conjectured, they regain control of the House and Senate in the 2022 midterms, they intend to haul Hunter Biden before a hearing to answer questions about the laptop and business dealings.
“We will subpoena Hunter Biden,” Rep. Elise Stefanik, the No. 3 Republican in the House, told The Post over the weekend. “It should concern every American that they did this for the Biden family’s financial gain, which came at the cost of our national security,” Stefanik said of the evidence on the laptop.
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. NARA confirmed it had received the letter but did not comment.
Reps for Hunter Biden did not immediately return a request for comment.
Among the allegations swirling around the first son is that he received $3.5 million from Yelena Baturina, one of the richest women in Russia and the wife of the former mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov.
Beyond the gift from Baturina, the Republicans claim Hunter Biden and the rest of the family have made a financial killing off his father’s political influence as a longtime senator from Delaware and as vice president for eight years in the Obama administration.
“Hunter Biden has particularly benefitted from his father’s success in politics, from managing a Ukrainian energy conglomerate, to selling cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to connecting his father to Kazakhstani oil oligarchs, and preventing a Romanian real estate tycoon’s conviction for bribery charges,” the Republicans allege in their letters.
The Post in a series of exposes in October 2020 blew the lid off Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings in Ukraine and China in a series of reports that revealed he was paid up to $50,000 a month to sit on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, and introduced his father, the then-vice president, to a top executive at the firm.
The revelations were contained in a trove of emails found on the hard drive of a laptop Hunter Biden left behind at a computer repair shop in Delaware in April 2019.
Five days after The Post’s bombshell reporting, 51 former intelligence officials, including former National Intelligence Director James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan, released a letter saying that the information on the laptop had the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.
But Republicans ratcheted up their calls for new investigations into Hunter Biden after the New York Times said it had confirmed the laptop’s authenticity and the existence of the emails in a report on March 16, nearly a year and a half after The Post first reported on them.
The Times report also revealed that Hunter Biden paid off a tax liability of over $1 million — a year after he announced he was under investigation for defrauding the IRS.
An investigation into his failure to pay taxes expanded in 2018 into an inquiry into how his business dealings may have intersected with his father’s political career.
The Republicans raised that possible connection in their letters, noting that the younger Biden lacks the qualifications and the background that would provide him the expertise for the wide swath of businesses he was involved in.
“If not for the career of Hunter Biden’s father, the president of the United States, it is unlikely that he would have had the opportunity to engage in any of these highly compensated activities,” they said.
Comer and his Republican colleagues also are skeptical of the president’s assurances that he has never spoken “to my son about his overseas business dealings.”
“This appears not to be true. The evidence is now clear that not only did Joe Biden talk to his son about his overseas business dealings, but he also met with his son’s associates,” they write.
“The misleading statements by President Biden are even more troubling now that Russia has singled out Hunter Biden on its sanctions list instead of any of the other Biden children,” the letters state.
The Republicans are seeking documents and communications between the son and the White House or associates of the Biden family relating to Russia or Ukraine between Jan. 20, 2009, and Jan. 20, 2017.
They also want the same information from the White House from Jan. 20, 2021, to the present — Biden’s first 14 months in office.
From the White House counsel’s office, they particularly want a list of past and current foreign business interests and foreign relations for Biden family members, as well as policies in place to ensure the Biden family doesn’t profit from Biden’s presidency.
Specifically from NARA, the Republicans want information from the White House relating to Baturina and Luzhkov, and documents between then-Vice President Biden’s office and State Department officials that refer to Hunter Biden and his dealings in Ukraine and Russia.
The Republicans placed an April 14 deadline on receiving the documents.
