House Democrats voted Tuesday to protect Hunter Biden from a probe of the alleged influence-peddling schemes revealed by his abandoned laptop.
The House Oversight Committee voted along straight party lines to kill a “resolution of inquiry” proposal by Rep. James Comer (R-KY). The proposal followed a steady drip of text messages and emails from the laptop that appear to implicate President Joe Biden’s son as well as one of his brothers, and even raise questions about what Biden himself knew about potential corruption.
“[Democrats] are continuing in their coordinated effort to shield a potentially compromised President,” Comer said after the vote.
The Democrats blocked any inquiry into the influence peddling scheme of Hunter Biden. If Republicans take the House as expected in the midterms, the Democrats now effectively took ownership of Hunter — a political proprietary claim that few would relish. https://t.co/GyhncHndlD
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) September 21, 2022
The Kentucky lawmaker has warned that revelations from the laptop paint the entire Biden family as a national security threat. The computer, which was abandoned at a Wilmington, Delaware, computer repair shop, contain photos, videos, emails, and text messages which paint the president’s son as a drug-addled, venal degenerate but also raise troubling questions about President Joe Biden’s own role in his son’s corrupt dealings.
“President Biden’s family peddles access to the highest levels of government to enrich themselves, often at the expense of U.S. interests,” Comer said before the vote. “We need to know if President Biden has received a cut from these shady foreign business deals. If President Biden or his immediate family has, that is a national security threat, and he may be compromised.”
The House vote came after 33 Republican senators asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel in the matter. While Democrats have managed to shield the Bidens for now, Republicans could be poised to capture the House, and possibly the Senate, in November, in which case some kind of Congressional investigation seems all but certain.
“Even if no criminal acts are charged, the foreign dealings of the Hunter and his uncle were clearly corrupt and leveraged access to Joe Biden to acquire windfall payments from governments and their surrogates,” George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley wrote on his blog. “There is no good faith basis to refuse to investigate such a scheme designed to influence U.S. policy and policymakers.”
Hunter Biden accompanied his father on overseas trips when the elder Biden was vice president from 2008-2016, and struck lucrative deals with energy companies and investors in China and Ukraine. President Biden, in an interview that aired on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” Sunday, said his son’s dealings had no effect on national security.
“There’s not a single thing that I’ve observed at all from — that would affect me or the United States relative to my son Hunter,” Biden said.
President Biden has previously insisted that he and his son never discussed any of Hunter Biden’s business dealings, a claim refuted by photos and messages on the laptop, White House visitor logs, and the claims of Tony Bobulinski, a former Hunter Biden associate who identified the president as “the Big Guy” who Hunter Biden’s emails referred to as getting a cut from his foreign business deals.
FBI whistleblowers have come forward to tell GOP lawmakers that the bureau’s top brass shut down any investigations into the laptop, which it obtained in late 2019, so as not to affect the 2020 election. A recent poll by Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics suggested that 79% of Americans believe President Trump likely would have won re-election if voters had known about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and that it was authentic.
The legacy media parroted Democrat claims the laptop, first revealed by the New York Post, was part of a Russian disinformation plot. But in recent months, outlets such as The New York Times and Washington Post have grudgingly admitted the laptop is authentic although they have not conducted meaningful reporting on its contents.