(LifeSiteNews) – U.S. Rep. James Comer (R-KY), chairman of the House Oversight & Accountability Committee, released on Wednesday a new banking records memo outlining details of the Biden family’s business dealings that Comer says details how the former vice president and current President of the United States enriched himself through the promise of access to one of the world’s most powerful men to business interests in foreign, and sometimes authoritarian, nations.
The memorandum details more than $20 million in payments from individuals in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine that Joe Biden, members of his family, and business associates received while Biden was vice president under Barack Obama; millions of dollars that troubled presidential son Hunter Biden and his business partner Devon Archer received from foreign sources while attempting to conceal their origin and size; millions that Hunter received from Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings (on whose board Hunter served despite lacking experience in the energy industry), Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina, and Kenes Rakishev (associate of Kazakhstan Prime Minister Karim Massimov), with whom then-Vice President Biden himself had dinner in 2014 and 2015.
The memo also details multiple transactions between the Bidens and foreign interests, including a $3.5 million payment from Baturina to Rosemont Seneca Thornton, a shell company linked to Hunter and Archer; and Rakishev wiring $142,300 to Rosemont Seneca Bohai, an account established with the previous payment from Baturina, which in turn paid that exact sum for a sports car for Hunter.
“During Joe Biden’s vice presidency, Hunter Biden sold him as ‘the brand’ to reap millions from oligarchs in Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine,” said Comer. “It appears no real services were provided other than access to the Biden network, including Joe Biden himself. And Hunter Biden seems to have delivered. This is made clear by meals at Café Milano where then-Vice President Joe Biden dined with oligarchs from around the world who had sent money to his son. It’s clear Joe Biden knew about his son’s business dealings and allowed himself to be ‘the brand’ sold to enrich the Biden family while he was Vice President of the United States.”
“The House Oversight Committee will continue to follow the money trail and obtain witness testimony to determine whether foreign actors targeted the Bidens, President Biden is compromised or corrupt, and our national security is threatened,” he declared.
For years, Biden has been dogged by allegations of personal corruption and influence peddling. During the Obama years, he infamously boasted that he facilitated the firing of Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who had been investigating Burisma, by threatening to withhold a billion-dollar loan from the U.S. to Ukraine. Defenders claim that the move was about Shokin not prosecuting corruption aggressively enough, but critics suggest it was about Shokin potentially getting too close to Burisma and, by extension, Hunter. “Shokin was considered a threat to the business,” Archer recently attested in an interview with commentator Tucker Carlson.
In the months before the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post released a series of bombshell reports about a laptop belonging to Hunter that was delivered to and abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop. The laptop contained scores of emails and texts detailing the Biden family’s international business activities.
The Biden camp did not specifically deny the authenticity of the material, but its allies in traditional and social media worked tirelessly to ignore, suppress, or discredit the story, in large part by promoting unsupported claims that the laptop was part of a “disinformation” operation by a foreign power, fueled by a statement to that effect signed by 51 “individuals who devoted significant portions of [their] lives to national security” and intelligence, at least one of whom admitted this year to having always believed the contents were real.
In June, members of Congress reviewed an FBI informant file alleging that in June 2020 the future president accepted a $5 million bribe from a Burisma executive, and reportedly corroborating that the elder Biden was indeed the “big guy” repeatedly referred to in business correspondents found on Hunter’s laptop.
Upon narrowly retaking the House in last year’s midterm elections, Republicans named investigating the Biden family as one of their priorities. Critics accuse the U.S. Justice Department of a politically motivated double standard for not pursuing alleged Biden family crimes while indicting former President Donald Trump, who is currently seeking the Republican nomination to challenge Biden for president, on charges of stonewalling investigators over his post-presidency retention of classified documents.