South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
House GOP signals investigations
But Biden team has long prepped to face onslaught of probes
WASHINGTON — Even with their threadbare House majority, Republicans have doubled down on using their new power next year to investigate the Biden administration and, in particular, the president’s son.
But the midterm results have emboldened a White House that has long prepared for this moment. Republicans secured much smaller margins than anticipated, and aides to President Joe Biden and other Democrats believe voters punished the GOP for its reliance on conspiracy theories and Donald Trump-fueled lies over the 2020 election.
They see it as validation of the administration’s playbook for the midterms and going forward to focus on legislative achievements and continue them, in contrast to Trump-aligned candidates whose complaints about the president’s son played to their most loyal supporters and were too far into the weeds for the average American. The Democrats retained control of the Senate, and the GOP’s margin in the House is expected to be the slimmest majority in two decades.
“If you look back, we picked up seats in New York, New Jersey, California,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist and public affairs executive. “These were not voters coming to the polls because they wanted Hunter Biden investigated — far from it. They were coming to the polls because they were
upset about inflation. They’re upset about gas prices. They’re upset about what’s going on with the war in Ukraine.”
But House Republicans used their first news conference after clinching the majority to discuss presidential son Hunter Biden and the Justice Department, renewing long-held grievances about what they claim is a politicized law enforcement agency and a bombshell corruption case overlooked by Democrats and the media.
“From their first press conference, these congressional
Republicans made clear that they’re going to do one thing in this new Congress, which is investigations, and they’re doing this for political payback for Biden’s efforts on an agenda that helps working people,” said Kyle Herrig, the founder of the Congressional Integrity Project, a newly relaunched, multimillion-dollar effort by Democratic strategists to counter the onslaught of House GOP probes.
Inside the White House, the counsel’s office added staff months ago and beefed up its communication efforts,
and staff members have been deep into researching and preparing for the onslaught. They’ve worked to try to identify their own vulnerabilities and plan effective responses. But anything the House seeks related to Hunter Biden, who is not a White House staffer, will come from his attorneys, who have declined to respond to the allegations.
Rep. James Comer, incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said there are “troubling questions” of the utmost importance about Hunter Biden’s
business dealings and one of the president’s brothers, James Biden, that require deeper investigation. He said they were examining the president, too.
“Rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government is the primary mission of the Oversight Committee,” said Comer, R-Ky. “As such, this investigation is a top priority.”
Republican legislators promised a trove of new information this past week, but what they have presented so far has been a condensed review of a few years’ worth of complaints about Hunter Biden’s business dealings, going back to conspiracy theories raised by Trump.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed the GOP focus on investigations as “on-brand” thinking.
“They said they were going to fight inflation, they said they were going to make that a priority, then they get the majority and their top priority is actually not focusing on the American family, but focusing on the president’s family,” she said.
Even some newly elected Republicans are pushing back against the idea.
“The top priority is to deal with inflation and the cost of living . ... What I don’t want to see is what we saw in the Trump administration, where Democrats went after the president and the administration incessantly,” Rep.-elect Mike Lawler of New York said on CNN.
Hunter Biden’s taxes and foreign business work are already under federal investigation, with a grand jury in Delaware hearing testimony in recent months.
While he never held a position in the presidential campaign or in the White House, his membership on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma while his father was vice president and his efforts to strike deals in China have long raised questions about whether he traded on his father’s public service, including reported references in his emails to the “big guy.”
Joe Biden has said he’s never spoken to his son about his foreign business, and nothing the Republicans have put forth suggests otherwise. And there are no indications that the federal investigation involves the president.