House Republicans on Wednesday sent criminal referrals to the Justice Department to recommend the president Joe BidenHunter Biden’s son and brother James Biden are accused of making false statements to Congress.
The letter from the three Republican committee chairmen to Attorney General Merrick Garland and special counsel David Weiss comes as Hunter Biden is on trial on unrelated gun charges filed by Weiss in federal court in Delaware. The trial started on Monday.
The references also come less than a week after former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was convicted by a New York jury on charges of falsifying business records.
Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, labeled the move as “nothing more than a desperate attempt by Republicans to distort Hunter’s testimony so they can distract from their failed impeachment inquiry and interfere with his trial.”
James Biden’s attorney, Paul Fishman, said: “This baseless partisan action is a transparent and cynical attempt to distract from and retaliate against Donald Trump’s recent criminal conviction.”
The letter from House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky.; Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio; and Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., accused Hunter and James Biden of “making demonstrably false statements to the Oversight Committee and the Judiciary Committee on key aspects of the impeachment inquiry, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to obstruct the focus of the investigation on President Joe Biden.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., also supported the move. “If the Attorney General wants to demonstrate that he does not employ a bipartisan justice system and does not target the President’s political opponents, he will open a criminal investigation into James and Hunter Biden,” he said in a statement.
The ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, mocked the move, which he said only illustrates how Republicans have failed to prove their allegations of misconduct against the president.
“This painfully lengthy and utterly fruitless investigation has only proven that President Biden was not part of, did not benefit from, and took no official actions to benefit the business ventures of his family members,” Raskin said, calling the references “a last-ditch attempt”. attempt to divert attention from President Biden’s acquittal by leveling ‘gotcha’ accusations against the president’s son and brother.”
Hunter Biden and James Biden both sat for separate, hours-long depositions before the Oversight and Judiciary committees in February as part of their impeachment inquiry into the president.
In his prepared opening statement to accompany the deposition, Hunter Biden revisited the basics of the committee’s impeachment inquiry. “I am here today to provide the committees with the one indisputable fact that will put an end to the false premise of this investigation: I did not involve my father in my affairs,” Biden said in his prepared opening statement.
“Not when I was a lawyer, not in my investments or transactions at home or abroad, not as a board member and not as an artist. Never,” the statement said.
The chairman’s letter accuses Hunter Biden of “falsely distancing himself from a corporate entity” that received money from foreign individuals and entities, while previously claiming he was the company’s “corporate secretary.”
It also accused him of fabricating a claim by saying he had sent threatening text messages intended for a Chinese business associate to the wrong person. The chairmen indicate that the text messages went to the intended recipient.
They also accuse James Biden of being misleading by saying that Joe Biden had not met a business associate of his and Hunter Biden named Tony Bobulinski in 2017, when Biden was not in office.
NBC News has contacted the Justice Department for comment. The White House declined comment.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
