The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee is dismissing Chairman James Comer’s probe into the Biden family as “a complete and total bust.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., released a 14-page memo on Monday morning attacking House Republicans’ bid to investigate President Biden and his son Hunter. It comes just a day before representatives return to Capitol Hill after the August recess, and GOP leaders are expected to weigh whether to open a formal impeachment inquiry over allegations of impropriety stemming from Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
“Instead of working on legislation to promote the common good or even just keep the government running, House Republicans are weaponizing their offices and exploiting congressional power and resources to promote debunked and outlandish conspiracy theories about President Biden,” Raskin’s memo, sent on the 22nd anniversary of September 11, said.
In a possible preview of Democrats’ rebuttal strategy, the Democrat accused Comer of trying to stage a “false moral equivalency” between Biden and former President Donald Trump. Raskin played a top role in Trump’s second impeachment, over the Capitol riot, as House Democrats’ Lead House Impeachment Manager at the time.
“This is a transparent effort to boost Donald Trump’s campaign by establishing a false moral equivalency between Trump—the four-time-indicted former president now facing 91 federal and state criminal charges, based on a mountain of damning evidence for a shocking range of felonies, including lying to the FBI, endangering national security by illegally keeping classified documents, and conspiring to subvert the U.S. Constitution—and President Biden, against whom there is precisely zero evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever,” Raskin wrote.
“House Republicans constantly insist that they are investigating President Biden, and not his adult son. In that case, we can form an obvious judgment on their investigation: it has been a complete and total bust—an epic flop in the history of congressional investigations.”
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A spokesperson for the House Oversight majority told Fox News Digital that the committee would continue its investigative efforts and argued that evidence was “mounting” against the president.
“Mounting evidence reveals that then-Vice President Joe Biden was ‘the brand’ that his family sold around the world to enrich the Bidens,” the spokesperson said Monday.
“The Oversight Committee has a duty to continue to follow this pattern of corruption and hold President Biden accountable for abusing public office for the financial benefit of his family. Unfortunately, Democrats would rather play Biden family defense lawyer instead of working for the American people.”
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Investigating whether Biden profited off of his son’s business deals while he was vice president in the Obama administration has been a marquee item for Congress’ House GOP majority this year.
Revelations made by former Hunter Biden associate Devon Archer and elsewhere have heaped scrutiny on how much Biden knew about his son’s business, and to what extent Hunter Biden used his powerful father as leverage.
Archer said to Oversight Committee staff and several lawmakers last month that the president was on the phone with Hunter Biden at least 20 times while the latter was with business associates, across a ten-year span. Archer did not say he heard the president discuss business matters at those times.
But Biden’s allies have insisted that the hours of testimony and pages of bank records seized upon by House Republicans fail to show any proof that the president did anything improper.