The United States House Oversight Committee investigation into the Biden family is an ongoing investigation since January 2023 by the United States House of Representatives into U.S. President Joe Biden and his family. The investigation was initiated on January 11, and includes examination of the foreign business activities of Biden's son, Hunter, and brother, James, as well as Twitter's involvement in the Hunter Biden laptop controversy.
By November 2023, the investigation had not found any evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden. Nevertheless, in September 2023, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy directed committee chairman James Comer to lead a formal three-committee impeachment inquiry.
The three investigating committees released a nearly 300-page report on August 19, 2024, alleging "impeachable conduct" but did not recommend specific articles of impeachment, focusing primarily on the activities of Hunter Biden and his associates, and the president's brother, James Biden.
Background In 2006, Joe Biden's brother James joined his son Hunter in purchasing a New York City-based hedge fund, Paradigm. In 2014, Hunter accepted a business consulting engagement with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and was appointed to the company's board of directors. The U.S. State Department expressed concerns about Hunter's involvement with Burisma due to its history of corruption, and potential conflicts with Obama administration policy. In 2017, Hunter also co-founded international investment fund BHR Partners, based in China.
When Joe Biden announced his candidacy for president in 2019, the Trump presidential re-election campaign sought evidence of possible financial impropriety and influence peddling. Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and a team of associates traveled to Ukraine during 2019. In 2020, the FBI and Scott Brady, a US attorney appointed by Trump and assigned by attorney general Bill Barr, had examined these allegations but could not substantiate them.
Joe Biden claimed that he had no knowledge of, or investments in, his son's foreign business ventures. A 2020 investigation led by Republican senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley found no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden, noting only that Hunter Biden had used his family name to develop business relationships.
In October 2020, the New York Post reported about a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. The laptop had emails to Hunter Biden that mentioned Joe Biden. While neither email indicated that Joe Biden was involved in any of the business matters, the laptop garnered significant attention from Republicans and conservative media as the Hunter Biden laptop controversy. Despite extensive scrutiny of Hunter Biden's laptop contents by multiple parties, no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden was found.
In 2019, in what became known as the Trump–Ukraine scandal, Trump unsuccessfully attempted to pressure Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy into falsely announcing his government was investigating the Bidens; the pressure campaign resulted in Trump's first impeachment.
During the 2022 midterm elections campaign, Republicans promised to investigate the laptop and related matters, leading to the Oversight Committee investigation in January 2023 once they gained control of the House of Representatives.
Proceedings Committee chairman Comer launched the investigation on January 11, 2023, with a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen regarding alleged Biden family "foreign business practices and international influence peddling schemes". Comer also wrote several former Twitter executives to request their testimony before the committee in February.
First hearing
As Vice President during the Obama administration, Joe Biden had spearheaded the effort to encourage adopting economic and democratic reforms for the government of Ukraine. In 2016, Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, due to concerns of ineffectiveness and corruption. Despite Biden acting in accordance with American, EU, and IMF policy, Trump allies had alleged Shokin was fired to protect Burisma and Hunter Biden from corruption investigations.
During the committee's first public hearing on February 8, Comer falsely asserted in an opening statement that Biden did so to end an investigation of Burisma. This allegation was first published in an October 2020 New York Post story but had been repeatedly debunked. Prior to the hearing, many Republicans had alleged Twitter and the FBI had colluded to suppress the October 2020 New York Post story on Hunter Biden's laptop. Four former Twitter employees testified at the first committee hearing, contradicting the claims.
In September 2019, Trump had tweeted that Chrissy Teigen was "filthy mouthed"; and Teigen tweeted vulgarities in response. During the hearing, it was disclosed that the Trump White House later asked Twitter to remove the tweet, but got declined. Committee Democrats suggested hypocrisy among Republicans for complaining of government influence on Twitter and suppression of free speech.
Fox News served as an important platform for Comer and his allies to broadcast unfounded allegations against the Bidens. In August 2023, host Brian Kilmeade interviewed Viktor Shokin on One Nation with Brian Kilmeade where the latter repeated these allegations. A month later, former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko appeared on the show stating Shokin was fired by the Ukrainian parliament "for his own statement" and "he played a very dirty game unfortunately."
Later developments In March 2023, Jamie Raskin, Democratic ranking member of the Oversight Committee, disclosed that the chairman had quietly issued sweeping subpoenas of fourteen years of banking records of Hunter Biden associates involved with CEFC China Energy. Raskin also alleged cooperation between committee Republicans and a Trump attorney to quietly drop an Oversight Committee investigation into whether Trump improperly profited from his presidency.
Joe Biden bribery allegation On May 3, 2023, Comer and Republican senator Chuck Grassley wrote to attorney general Merrick Garland and FBI director Christopher Wray a whistleblower allegedly revealed policy decisions being made in exchange for money from a foreign national. This whistleblower was a former FBI informant, Alexander Smirnov, who claimed the FBI had buried the tip.
A year later, in February 2024, Smirnov was indicted by the US Justice Department on allegations he had fabricated his account based on Russian intelligence officials' instructions. Prosecutors said Smirnov had been "actively peddling new lies that could impact US elections" since meeting with Russian agents in late 2023. On December 12, 2024, it was reported that Smirnov agreed to plead guilty to lying to the FBI and to admit that he fabricated the Burisma bribery story about Joe and Hunter Biden.
Comer subpoenaed the FBI for a document from June 2020, despite the form being used by FBI officials to note tips from informants, regardless of them being verified. Committee ranking member Raskin characterized the subpoena as a "baseless partisan stunt". On May 10, the FBI declined to provide the form, citing confidentiality and the lack of credibility it would provide.
One purported informant the committee sought to interview was Gal Luft, who claimed to inform FBI and Justice Department agents in March 2019 of alleged Biden corruption. A dual US-Israeli citizen, Luft was arrested in Cyprus in February 2023 at the request of American authorities seeking extradition; he was released on bail and became a fugitive. In July, the US Justice Department unsealed an indictment of Luft on eight counts related to arms trafficking, and in 2016, paying a high-ranking government official and advisor to Donald Trump, as an unregistered agent for Chinese interests. Comer had characterized Luft as a "very credible witness" three days before the indictment.
The New York Times reported that some of the materials Brady reviewed were "junk and plainly not credible", but that Brady forwarded some materials to other prosecutors. Raskin also said that the tip from the highly credible informant was a recounting of conversations with a Ukrainian energy magnate, but the informant could not vouch for the veracity of what that person had said, and that after an initial assessment the Brady investigators closed the matter in August 2020. By June 2023, multiple Republican lawmakers acknowledged that the existence of the recordings have yet to be verified.
Analysis by The Washington Post in late May noted that the letter and documents Comer and Grassley had publicly released made "an allegation of an allegation of bribery". Mediaite and Media Matters reported that after committee Republicans had viewed the form on June 8, some Fox News hosts started claiming it showed Joe Biden had received payments, despite earlier reporting that the document did not say that.
Senator Ron Johnson later said the source was believed to be Mykola Zlochevsky, a co-founder of Burisma Holdings. Giuliani sought Zlochevsky's assistance in 2019 to seek dirt on the Bidens, though Zlochevsky told a journalist at the time that he had never spoken with Joe Biden. Zlochevsky was implicated in paying $5 million in bribes to Ukrainian officials in June 2020. Asked about Zlochevsky on June 15, Comer replied, "Unfortunately, nobody's had any contact with him for the last three years".
Grassley publicly released the form on July 20, 2023. According to the document, Zlochevsky told the FBI informant in 2016 that he had paid the Bidens $5 million each, which the informant could not confirm. The account was contradicted by an earlier conversation with Zlochevsky, provided to Congress in January 2020. The FBI criticized the release of the document, asserting it "unnecessarily risks the safety of a confidential source".
May 2023 report On May 10, 2023, Comer released a 36-page report of interim findings and held a press conference with other Republican members of the committee. The report did not find any evidence of wrongdoing or money directed to Biden. Asked by reporters if he could name a specific official policy decision Joe Biden had made that may have been directly influenced by foreign payments, Comer said he could not.
Allegation of Justice Department cover-up On June 20, 2023, Hunter Biden agreed to plead guilty to federal tax offenses. The terms of the plea were described as a "sweetheart deal" and many alleged that it was part of a "two-tiered justice system".
Two days later, the House Ways and Means Committee released depositions from two IRS investigators who worked on the Biden case and who alleged Justice Department interference in the investigation, as well as being denied special counsel status. This was refuted by the U.S. Attorney leading the investigation, David Weiss, in a letter to Senator Lindsey Graham on July 10. On the day the depositions were released, Comer released a statement asserting "Now we know that Biden's Justice Department has been actively engaged in a cover-up to protect the Bidens from facing justice".
The Weiss letter to Graham supported Garland's earlier congressional testimony that the prosecutor had been given full authority over his investigation. As House Republicans sought closed-door interviews with Weiss and others, on July 24, the Justice Department proposed Weiss provide public testimony to dispute what it saw as misrepresentations about his investigation. Weiss told a closed-door session of the House Judiciary Committee on November 7 that he was the decision-maker in the investigation, he was not hindered in any way and there were no political considerations involved.