We honestly thought it would take more prodding than it appears to have required to get the new House Republican majority to launch investigations of the multiple previously known
Biden family scandals, so let us first thank House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (KY-1), House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (OH-4) and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Mike Turner (OH-10) for announcing investigations of Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents and the Biden family’s “foreign business practices and international influence peddling schemes.”
But this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Biden family scandals.
Chairman Comer has now announced a much broader investigation than he first envisioned. Based on evidence obtained by Committee Republicans, Joe Biden clearly lied to the American people about his involvement in his family’s business schemes, said Comer.
The Biden family business model is built on Joe Biden’s political career and connections with Joe Biden as the ‘chairman of the board.’ Biden family members sold access for profit around the world to the detriment of American interests, Comer charged. If President Biden is compromised by deals with foreign adversaries and they are impacting his decision making, this is a threat to national security. The American people deserve transparency and accountability about the Biden family’s influence peddling, concluded Rep. Comer.
And the influence peddling has its own national security implications.
As Prof. Jonathan Turley explained in an article for FOX News, it remains to be seen whether some of the classified material found at the Penn-Biden Center was relevant to Biden's book and his lectures on diplomacy, raising the possibility that he worked with the classified documents on unsecure computers or discussed them with third parties who were not cleared for access to the classified information in them. In the meantime, they apparently sat in a closet, easy pickings for any intelligence service.
While the media continues to dismiss the influence peddling investigation as, in the words this weekend of NBC's Chuck Todd, a "personal" attack, it is far more serious as a form of corruption due to an array of dangers from such access. The millions given to Hunter Biden came from a variety of foreign sources, including some coming from figures tied to foreign intelligence. This money not only gained influence but access to the Bidens, observed Prof. Turley.
Hunter himself stated that foreign intelligence used hotel rooms to steal his files. A videotape purportedly shows Biden claiming that one of his laptops was stolen by Russians for blackmail purposes.
The danger of influence peddling is that it is not only the preferred avenue for corruption in Washington, but it often allows dangerous levels of access to targeted leaders, concluded Turley.
So, one scandal is the mishandling of the documents, the other is the money trail and whether the payments to Hunter and Jim Biden, and indirectly or directly to Joe Biden, also involved access to the classified documents Joe Biden squirreled away in his homes and an office largely funded by the Red Chinese.
And here’s a “tell” there’s something for Congress to investigate.
Despite the “appearance of impropriety,” which is a very low bar to the FBI or other agencies to look into the Biden family businesses, Attorney General Merrick Garland has maintained, what Prof. Turley views as “an incomprehensible position” in refusing to appoint a special counsel to investigate the Biden influence peddling controversy and other issues. He has done so despite clear evidence that the president had lied in denying any knowledge of his son's foreign dealings and repeated references to the president getting a possible cut or benefits (including the Chinese-funded office) from the deals.
The Capitol Switchboard is (202) 224-3121 we urge CHQ readers and friends to call Chairman Comer, Chairman Jordan and Chairman Turner, tell them you appreciate their commitment to investigating Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, but you want them to follow the money and investigate who had access to the documents and whether the classified information in them was used in any of the Biden family influence peddling schemes.
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