1. What are Republicans investigating?
The chairman of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer of Kentucky, says the Biden family “sold access for profit around the world to the detriment of American interests.” He also says the Justice Department gave Hunter Biden preferential treatment while investigating his past. And Comer has raised questions about Hunter Biden’s latest career turn, as a painter. Biden has offered prints and paintings for sale, some listed for hundreds of thousands of dollars, raising questions about whether buying his art could be seen as a way to curry favor with his father.
2. Why so much attention to a president’s son?
Hunter Biden, 53, has led a troubled life. “I’ve bought crack cocaine on the streets of Washington, DC, and cooked up my own inside a hotel bungalow in Los Angeles,” he wrote in his 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things. “In the last five years alone, my two-decades-long marriage has dissolved, guns have been put in my face, and at one point I dropped clean off the grid, living in $59-a-night Super 8 motels off I-95 while scaring my family even more than myself,” he wrote. A lawyer by training, Biden pursued business opportunities with foreign parties after his father became vice president in 2009, often in ways that intersected with his father’s work.
3. What proof have Republicans turned up?
It’s clear that Hunter Biden made money from foreign companies and individuals while Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president. But there’s no proof that Joe Biden influenced or was aware of those dealings. The Federal Bureau of Investigation received an unsubstantiated allegation that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden each received a $5 million bribe; Joe Biden called that “a bunch of malarkey.” A onetime Hunter Biden business partner, Devon Archer, told Comer’s committee that over the course of many years, Hunter Biden put his father on the phone around 20 times while in the company of associates but “never once spoke about any business dealings.” Citing testimony from two employees of the Internal Revenue Service, Republican lawmakers allege the Department of Justice interfered with the criminal investigation of Hunter Biden’s unpaid taxes. Attorney General Merrick Garland has denied interfering in the probe, which was conducted by a Trump appointee, David Weiss, the US attorney in Delaware.
4. What was the result of the criminal probe?
Hunter Biden was accused of failing to pay more than $200,000 in income taxes in 2017 and 2018 and of lying when filling out a federal form before purchasing a handgun in 2018. (To a question about whether he was “an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance,” he answered “no.”) Under a deal disclosed on June 20, he was to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges, avoid prison and avert prosecution on the felony gun charge. (He’s already paid his back taxes.) Republicans complained that the proposed punishment was too light, evidence of a two-tiered justice system when contrasted with the criminal charges Trump is facing. At a July 26 hearing, a federal judge took issue with the plea deal and directed prosecutors and defense lawyers to clarify the scope of immunity it would grant to Hunter Biden. On Aug. 11, prosecutors revealed that plea talks had reached an impasse, and Garland named Weiss as a special counsel, freeing him from day-to-day oversight of Biden administration officials.
5. What sort of work did Hunter Biden do?
Much of it involved corporate deal-making and consulting. In 2013, for instance, after flying to China with his father aboard Air Force Two, Biden joined the board of an investment fund co-founded by a Chinese private equity investor trying to raise $1.5 billion. Entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle, James Biden, who ran a consultancy called the Lion Hall Group, were paid $4.8 million in 2017 and 2018 by Chinese conglomerate CEFC China Energy in relation to energy projects that never came to fruition, the Washington Post reported. A September 2020 report released by Republican members of the Senate Homeland…
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