Republicans Issue Subpoenas For Joe Biden's Son And Brother

WASHINGTON ― Republicans want to talk to members of President Joe Biden’s family as part of their inquiry into whether to impeach the president.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) on Wednesday announced subpoenas for the president’s son Hunter Biden and brother James Biden, along with a family associate named Rob Walker.

The subpoenas are an escalation of the impeachment inquiry that so far has examined thousands of pages of Biden family bank records but failed to implicate the president in any wrongdoing.

A congressional subpoena is a legally enforceable request for information that lawmakers can ask a court to enforce ― but Comer said that shouldn’t be necessary in Hunter Biden’s case.

“I would want to show up, wouldn’t you? To defend yourself?” Comer told reporters.

“I’ve accused him of having shell companies and laundering money and evading taxes,” Comer continued. “That’s like at least 10 years worth of prison time. I would want to show up and defend himself if I were innocent.”

The White House didn’t say whether any of the subpoena targets would comply, but instead claimed Republicans have made investigating Biden’s family a higher priority than virtually all issues Americans care about.

“Despite spending millions of taxpayer dollars to conduct this probe, they have turned up no evidence to support their outlandish allegations of bribery and ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ which they claim are motivating their open-ended ‘impeachment inquiry,’” White House spokesman Ian Sams said in an email.

One of the main allegations Republicans have pursued is that as vice president, Biden rigged foreign policy to benefit his son, ousting a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect a Ukrainian company that paid Hunter Biden millions to serve on its board. State Department officials debunked the allegation in 2019 in sworn testimony that Republicans have never accepted.

Republicans are also looking at business deals Hunter Biden conducted with foreign nationals from China and Romania.

In addition to the subpoenas, Comer is asking for transcribed interviews with Sara Biden, the president’s sister-in-law; Hallie Biden, widow of the president’s late son Beau Biden; Elizabeth Secundy, Hallie Biden’s sister; Melissa Cohen Biden, Hunter Biden’s wife; and Anthony Bobulinski, a former business associate of Hunter Biden’s.

Comer told HuffPost he would ask Hunter Biden, “What exactly did you do to receive millions and millions of dollars from these foreign nationals?”

Biden wrote in his 2021 memoir that his law degree and work in elite law firms more than qualified him for his work with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, but he also said the job freed him from having to earn money elsewhere and that his monthly fee fed a crack cocaine addiction that nearly killed him.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the Oversight Committee’s top Democrat, said Republican lawmakers had set a bad example by blowing off subpoenas from the House Jan. 6 committee last year — but that didn’t mean the Bidens should.

“Everybody’s general obligation is to comply with lawful congressional subpoenas,” Raskin told HuffPost.