Hunter Biden will stand trial next week on gun-related charges just as the GOP’s effort to untangle his web of foreign moneymaking fizzles out. While the political will to impeach President Joe Biden over any involvement in his family’s influence-peddling has all but disappeared, the belief that the Justice Department gave Hunter Biden favorable treatment has not. In this series, the Washington Examiner will look at where the saga stands on the eve of his first trial. Part 1 looked at the cases against him that never materialized. Part 2 will look at how the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden is drawing to a close.
House Republicans have dedicated enormous resources to investigating Joe Biden for impeachable offenses, but as his son Hunter prepares to defend himself in a criminal gun trial in less than one week, the president appears poised to avert his own trial before Congress.
Since Republicans took the majority, a trio of House committees have conducted numerous interviews and gathered thousands of documents showing Hunter Biden for years wielded Joe Biden’s political influence for profit.
However, implicating Joe Biden in his son’s business schemes has been a less cut-and-dry process for GOP lawmakers. It has consisted of sometimes hostile witnesses and competing testimonies, and it has been bogged down by an elaborate web of foreign entities and financial records that even politically savvy legal observers find tedious.
Republicans leading the impeachment inquiry say their work is not over and that a final report containing criminal referrals and other recommendations is forthcoming. While there are unknowns about what is to come, there are also no signs that an impeachment vote, never mind a successful vote that results in a Senate trial, will come to fruition.
Bad findings for the Bidens
House Republicans were met time and again over the course of the past year with Biden-friendly witnesses who asserted at the start of their interviews that the president had no involvement in Hunter Biden’s or his brother James Biden’s business endeavors.
However, bits of evidence have cropped up amid those denials that uncovered that Joe Biden had at least awareness of the fact that his family members were peddling the president’s political influence to secure investment deals in China, Ukraine, and elsewhere abroad.
Joe Biden, for instance, met with a Chinese executive with whom Hunter Biden was entering into a multimillion-dollar investment project. One of the first son’s former associates, Devon Archer, testified that Joe Biden routinely hopped on the phone to greet his son’s business partners. These mere winks and nods from Joe Biden granted him, as another former Biden business partner named Tony Bobulinski described it, “plausible deniability.”
The impeachment inquiry has forced Joe Biden to change his story from unequivocal claims that he “never discussed” business with his son to saying he was never “in business” with his son.
Republicans have also zeroed in on one specific incident: Joe Biden using political pressure in 2015 to force the firing of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who could have uncovered corruption within the energy company Burisma, where Hunter Biden held a lucrative board position.
One of the Republicans leading the impeachment inquiry, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), has hammered Joe Biden for this move countless times and told the Washington Examiner he wished more people grasped what transpired. He said one telltale sign of nefariousness on Joe Biden’s part is that Shokin’s predecessor and successor were both lenient on Burisma, while Shokin was not.
“The one guy who’s actually investigating Burisma is the one person Joe Biden says has to be fired, or you’re not getting the loan guarantee money, even though our State Department, just a few months before, complimented that very prosecutor,” Jordan said. “So that fact I don’t think has sunk in with the country. … I don’t know that it’s sunk in with people who are looking at all this.”
Joe Biden’s speech as vice president in which he called for Shokin’s firing came days after Hunter Biden and Burisma executives called “D.C.” together to speak about the matter, according to Archer’s testimony. It is unclear if “D.C.” was a reference to Joe Biden, another Obama administration official, or someone else.
Archer also testified that the executives constantly pressured Hunter Biden to get help from “D.C.”
Joe Biden using political influence to help his son profit in a country in which his father was spearheading anti-corruption efforts would be a damning revelation.
However, some evidence has also worked in Joe Biden’s favor.
For example, a State Department official who largely led the anti-corruption work in Ukraine told Congress there was no feasible way in which Joe Biden could have acted in response to his son. Moreover, he claimed Russians were attempting to “sow disinformation among Ukrainians” by using Hunter Biden’s name.
The official, Amos Hochstein, said that Joe Biden pressuring Ukraine to fire Shokin was a “coordinated, multi-stakeholder effort” that Hochstein was part of that had nothing to do with Hunter Biden.
Comer comes up short
From the outset of the inquiry, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), who has been at the helm of the investigation, has faced the challenge of presenting complex flow charts to the public to illustrate how millions of dollars flowed from foreign entities to the Biden family.
While he has thoroughly conveyed that Hunter and James Biden received money, including through shady exchanges and empty promises, pinpointing where Joe Biden may have personally received money through these deals has been a dead end. The disappointment for Republicans was compounded earlier this year when a claim found on an FBI form that Joe Biden accepted a massive bribe turned out to have originated from an informant who allegedly lied to the bureau to hurt the president’s 2020 campaign.
Further bruising Comer’s image is the highly partisan nature of the inquiry. No Democrat has shown support for it, and Democrats on his committee have routinely blasted him during public hearings for what they see as wasting time.
At a recent hearing in April, ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), perhaps Democrats’ most skilled lawyer in Congress, attacked Comer for dragging out the inquiry.
“You have not identified a single crime. What is the crime that you want to impeach Joe Biden for and keep this nonsense going?” Raskin asked.
Republican sources familiar with the impeachment inquiry described Comer as “checked out” of it. That notion is bolstered by his committee spiraling out of control at a recent impeachment-related hearing. The event, which Raskin later described as a “radical breach of decorum,” devolved into a chaotic display of lawmakers exchanging insults about perceived “butch” bodies and false eyelashes.
Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, does not blame Comer for the lackluster optics surrounding the inquiry. Von Spakovsky told the Washington Examiner that Comer’s burden to prove impeachable offenses was always heavy and that confusion about the financial aspect was by design.
“How many shell companies did they put up? Twenty different shell companies to hide the income they were getting abroad, to launder it between all these different companies?” von Spakovsky said. “[The Bidens] engaged in an intentional effort to obscure what they were doing. The money they were receiving, how much, who they were getting from, and to try to present that in simple terms that everyone can understand is difficult.”
Von Spakovsky added that he would like to wait for the final impeachment report to come out before he makes a judgment call on whether the president committed an impeachable offense, such as abuse of power.
Inquiry nears its end
Comer is not planning any future impeachment hearings, and despite Hunter Biden rejecting an invitation to appear at a public oversight hearing, the chairman does not plan to compel his appearance, according to one Republican source familiar with the inquiry.
While Comer has drawn a fair amount of criticism, including from his own party members, for coming up short, the chairman’s committee projected a sense of accomplishment in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
An Oversight Committee official said Republicans had “unearthed an overwhelming record of evidence revealing Joe Biden knew of, participated in, and benefited from his family’s influence-peddling schemes.”
The spokesman said the committee also just obtained a wealth of new documents from the former Biden business partner Archer and that more bank records were on the horizon.
The spokesman also asserted that the committee would outline its findings in its forthcoming final report “with recommendations and criminal referrals soon,” but he did not specify a time frame beyond that.
Jordan, whose committee is engaged in writing the report, said the committee trio plans to give the report to leadership and the Republican conference once it is ready.
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“And we’ll see what the conference wants to do,” Jordan said, adding that “everything’s on the table.”
“We’ll just continue to do our work, and then we’ll let the conference make a decision,” he said.
