Senate Republicans, whose committees launched investigations into President-elect Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, say their investigations will continue regardless of who is in the White House or whether they keep the majority after two Georgia runoffs are decided.
The Senate Homeland Security Committee, led by Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson, previously launched an investigation of Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and opened a separate investigation into the e-mail and text exchanges found on his laptop.
Johnson told the Washington Examiner that regardless of how President Trump’s legal disputes against states that called the presidential election for Joe Biden shake out, he will continue forward with his investigation into Hunter Biden.
“Both Sen. Grassley and I are not going to turn a blind eye to this. I can’t speak for him, but certainly our staffs are continuing to work on this,” Johnson said. “We’ll continue to gather more information as it becomes available. But let’s face it, as much as I was criticized by some, at a minimum, what our investigation has done by exposing this, it’s diffused, to a certain extent, some of the counterintelligence and extortion threats.”
He continued, “But that’s just what we know. What other things don’t we know? I think when you’ve seen all the activity by Hunter, and you know now it’s been revealed about the fact that vice president Biden knew about some of this, you’ve got to think there’s probably additional things to be revealed. And that, that, again, continues to be a counterintelligence, extortion threat … [which] could affect our policy towards some of these nations and, in particular, the most concerning one is China.”
Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul argued Hunter Biden should be treated similarly to Paul Manafort, Trump’s former 2016 campaign manager, who was indicted and convicted last year on tax fraud charges and the conspiracy charges that stemmed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign. Manafort was sentenced to 47 months in prison.
“I think that the law should be consistent and applied to everyone equally. And I think that the same standard that was applied to Manafort on foreign dealing should be applied to Hunter Biden. And it would be, I think, a miscarriage of justice not to apply the law equally,” Paul told the Washington Examiner.
“Was he registered as a foreign agent? That was one of the things that I think they went after Manafort on. Did he pay taxes on the money he was kind of getting from what seems like everywhere? Those are, I think, honest questions to ask and should be answered,” Paul said. “I don’t know that I have control over those we can investigate in our committee. It’s trying to find out the truth.”
Republican Sen. John Cornyn, a member of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s team, says there are enough Republican committee chairmen who would support moving forward with the investigation regardless of the occupant in the White House.
“I think there are enough people, the committee chairmen, who would be committed to getting to the bottom of that. We could do that through the committees, either the judiciary or government affairs,” Cornyn said. “If there’s potential corruption in the government, this is one of the things that the American people hate the most about their government. They figure some people are in this to feather their own nest or their family’s nest. And if there is, corruption is to be exposed, and people need to be held accountable. And hopefully that will have some deterrent effect.”
“It sure didn’t stop the Democrats from investigating Trump during his time in office,” The Texas Republican said.
In late October, days before the presidential election, Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of the younger Biden, alleged on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News that Hunter Biden may have engaged in a pay-for-play scheme, by using his father’s position in the White House as leverage, with foreign oligarchs in in Ukraine, China, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere.
The former vice president’s son purportedly left a laptop at a computer repair shop in Delaware last year. The hardware was never reclaimed, the shop owner said, and it was turned over to the FBI. A copy of the hard drive was also given to Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who shared the drive’s contents with the media prior the election.
