A federal prosecutor may be nearing a decision on whether to charge Hunter Biden with tax offenses and a false statement related to a gun purchase, but House Republicans insist there is more.
They’ve been investigating the president’s son and his finances for a year now, with little to show for it. Not only are their allegations much broader than what the federal prosecutor is considering, they have yet to provide any concrete evidence of wrongdoing.
Federal prosecutors originally cast a broad net, too, before narrowing their work to focus on the taxes and gun.
Here’s a rundown of the GOP allegations into the Biden family.
Congressional Republicans say they know of a whistleblower within the Justice Department who alleges that President Biden received millions of dollars from a foreigner in exchange for a policy decision.
That’s all we know; Republicans are in an escalating battle with the FBI to get hold of the informant tip that they say will shed light.
The evidence: We should approach this claim with extreme skepticism. The document Republicans are requesting is a form the FBI uses to record unverified tips. The FBI stressed that in its response to Republicans: “The FBI regularly receives information from sources with significant potential biases, motivations, and knowledge, including drug traffickers, members of organized crime, or even terrorists. … Recording the information does not validate the information, establish its credibility, or weigh it against other information known or developed by the FBI.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) threatened the head of the FBI, Christopher A. Wray, with a contempt of Congress citation if he doesn’t cooperate in the investigation. That would be a partisan, though probably symbolic, slap on the wrist for Wray. A contempt charge can lead to prosecution, but it’s unlikely the Justice Department would pursue that against its own FBI director.
Republicans have spent a year investigating the Bidens and have come up with no evidence of a pay-to-play scheme involving the president. The White House points out that Biden released 25 years of tax returns when he was running for president.
“President Joe Biden has participated in his family’s global business ventures with America’s adversaries,” House Republicans wrote in a November report. “He has misused his public positions to further his family’s financial interests.”
The evidence: So far, House Republicans have provided no evidence to back that up. Despite reviewing thousands of bank records, they haven’t provided a link between President Biden and his family’s business deals. And there is no evidence he personally benefited financially.
Also, there is no evidence that Hunter Biden’s business deals with foreign companies were illegal — although what is publicly known about Hunter Biden suggests he was willingly using his famous name to earn money, raising the question of whether he was willingly being used by foreigners to try to curry favor with his father.
Hunter Biden has talked openly about his business deals abroad. In a 2019 New Yorker interview, he made clear his father was aware he had taken a job with a Ukrainian gas company. “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’” he recalled.
That brings us to the GOP’s third allegation.
When Joe Biden was vice president, he did a lot of overseas diplomacy — pushing anti-corruption messages in Romania and Ukraine, for example. Hunter Biden was also doing business in these countries, sometimes at the same time his father was working in them.
Republicans subpoenaed bank records from Biden associates to demonstrate that members of the Biden family — but not Joe Biden himself — received $10 million from foreign companies over a period of a few years starting in 2015.
They alleged this month that Hunter Biden was getting money from Romania, funneled to him by an associate. Republicans allege a similar situation in China, months after Joe Biden left the vice presidency. (They say they haven’t started investigating the existence of a money trail in Ukraine. Donald Trump, while president, was impeached by House Democrats in 2019 for pushing Ukrainian officials to dig up dirt on the Bidens.)
The evidence: So far, Republicans have failed to connect Hunter Biden’s business deals to his father’s work while vice president.
Hunter Biden seems to have shadowed his father by chasing business deals abroad. But if there were something nefarious going on, it wasn’t uncovered by the four-year criminal investigation led by a Trump-appointed prosecutor.
This GOP allegation of influence peddling also raises the question of why Republicans don’t investigate Trump’s family. Unlike Hunter Biden, Trump’s son-in-law and daughter held official positions in the White House. Jared Kushner oversaw U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East while running a company that received billions from Arab nations after he left office.
Hunter Biden apparently left a laptop in a Delaware shop before the 2020 election that made its way into Trump allies’ hands.
Biden’s critics have latched onto every ugly detail about the president’s son’s life — he has struggled with addiction and debt — and combined that with snippets of texts and emails and even nude photos from the laptop to suggest it may be hiding illegal activity.
The evidence: These allegations often lack context; for example, sometimes Republicans have made allegations based on just one email plucked from the laptop.
And it’s not clear that everything on the laptop is Hunter Biden’s. It’s been passed around in conservative circles for years now. The contents that The Washington Post could authenticate suggest that Hunter Biden profited from business deals in China and Ukraine because of his name and connections, but, again, that his father did not.
Democrats counter that this entire GOP investigation is a fishing expedition to help Donald Trump win back the White House.
The top House Republican investigating the Bidens did recently tie his work to Trump’s poll numbers: “You look at the polling, and right now Donald Trump is seven points ahead of Joe Biden and trending upward, Joe Biden’s trending downward,” said Comer. “And I believe that the media is looking around, scratching their head, and they’re realizing that the American people are keeping up with our investigation.”