By Josh Christenson and Steven Nelson | New York Post
CHICAGO — House Republicans issued a blistering report Monday accusing President Biden of committing at least two offenses that would justify his impeachment — delivering a political black eye to Biden just hours before he speaks on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention.
Republicans launched the investigation last September after evidence surfaced that Biden, 81, repeatedly interacted with his relatives’ foreign business partners during his vice presidency — and following allegations from two IRS investigators of a far-reaching Justice Department cover-up.
Biden engaged in “abuse of power” and “obstruction of justice or obstruction of Congress” by corruptly abetting and concealing a $27 million “influence-peddling racket” — which warrant proceedings that could result in his removal from office, the 291-page report by three House committees says.
“Joe Biden has exhibited conduct and taken actions that the Founders sought to guard against in drafting the impeachment provisions in the Constitution: abuse of power, foreign entanglements, corruption, and obstruction of investigations into these matters,” the report says.
“The Committees’ investigative work has revealed that the Biden family — with the full knowledge and cooperation of President Biden — has engaged in a global influence peddling racket from which they made millions of dollars.”
The rare congressional impeachment inquiry kicked off in September 2023, and the House of Representatives ratified it by a party-line vote in December 2023, with all Republican lawmakers voting it through.
It compiled interview transcripts from 30 witnesses, involved the issuing of another 30 subpoenas to compel testimony and resulted in millions of pages of business contracts, bank records and other documents.
‘One of the most egregious abuses of power uncovered in the history of the United States’
The report accuses Biden of aiding the shady business ventures of first son Hunter, 54, and first brother James Biden, 75, and then attempting to cover the family’s tracks by resisting oversight from Congress.
Biden, who announced his looming retirement July 21 after a Democratic mutiny over his mental acuity, “knowingly participated” in a conspiracy “to monetize his office of public trust to enrich his family” during and after his time as vice president in the Obama administration, the report says.
“Joe Biden’s participation in his family’s influence peddling represents — as quantified by sheer dollar amounts flowing to a public official’s personal interests — one of the most egregious abuses of power uncovered in the history of the United States,” it alleges.
As much as $18 million allegedly flowed from foreign entities to “shell companies” and other accounts linked to first family members from “corrupt dealings” that sold the “Biden brand” to associates in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia and China.
Biden family associates — including former Hunter Biden business partners who testified to the panels — nabbed another $9 million in profits.
The president met, spoke on the phone with and at times dined with the foreign patrons, implying to them that in exchange for the payments, “they had access to Joe Biden” that could project their business interests, the report by the House Oversight, Judiciary and tax-focused Ways & Means committees says.
Biden is not expected to be impeached by the House — where Republicans hold a narrow 220-212 majority — in part because of reluctance from a handful of Republicans, but also because of the diminished political salience now that Biden has dropped his bid for a second term.
Some of the foreign dealings are likely to be probed in detail next month at Hunter’s federal tax trial in Los Angeles for allegedly evading $1.4 million in taxes between 2016 and 2019.
Those charges and a gun felony case in Delaware, which resulted in Hunter’s conviction June 11, were brought after IRS agents Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler alleged preferential treatment of the first family and false testimony to Congress by Attorney General Merrick Garland about the independence of a years-old probe. Hunter initially agreed to a probation-only plea deal, but walked away from it last July over demands for broader immunity, including for alleged foreign-agent counts that could implicate his dad.
The Republican report serves as a blemish to the legacy of the chief executive — who has repeatedly claimed in public that he “never” spoke about business with his son or brother and that he “did not” interact with their business partners — despite a trove of evidence to the contrary.
The report says that “[t]he Biden family’s influence peddling was vast and involved entities and individuals from some of America’s greatest adversaries, such as China and Russia.
“Clearly aware of the political risks associated with Joe Biden’s participation in this scheme, the Biden family and their business associates sought to conceal his involvement by funneling money through an extensive network of shell or third parties’ companies, using code names, and engaging in other obfuscatory tactics designed to maintain, as James Biden described, ‘plausible deniability,’” it says.
“The Committees present this information to the House of Representatives for its evaluation and consideration of appropriate next steps.”
It’s unlikely that Republicans would be able to muster the votes to actually impeach the lame-duck commander-in-chief, but it’s possible that some lesser reprimand such as a censure could pass the GOP-held House.
Democrats have argued that Biden did nothing wrong and that he’s guilty of being no more than a supportive father to his son Hunter, who has struggled with addiction to alcohol and drugs, while pointing out that members of other first families have had dealings with state-linked foreign firms while or shortly after their powerful relative held office.
‘Abuse of power’
President Biden interacted with his family’s foreign patrons from an array of foreign countries — including China, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine — according to the report, despite Biden’s vehement denials during the 2020 campaign and after he assumed the presidency, the report finds.
In Ukraine, Hunter Biden earned a salary for up to $1 million per year to serve on the board of natural gas company Burisma Holdings — despite no relevant industry experience — beginning mere weeks after his father, the sitting vice president, became the Obama administration’s point person on policy toward Kyiv.
“Throughout Vice President Biden’s tenure in the Obama-Biden Administration, Hunter Biden’s business encounters with Burisma involved his father,” the report says.
“For example, on April 16, 2015, Vice President Joe Biden attended a dinner with his son and Burisma officials, including Devon Archer and Burisma’s corporate secretary, Vadym Pozharsky, at Café Milano in Washington, D.C.,” the report says — referring to an encounter first reported by The Post in October 2020, which Biden’s campaign vaguely denied at the time.
“The following day, Mr. Pozharsky thanked Hunter Biden for giving him ‘an opportunity to meet your father and spen[d] some time together.’ Throughout his tenure on the Burisma board, Hunter Biden also met with several Obama-Biden Administration State Department officials, including then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken … on July 22, 2015, to get his ‘advice on a couple of things.”
The report says that “evidence demonstrates that Hunter Biden called his father, then-Vice President Biden, to help alleviate the pressure that Burisma and its owner Mykola Zlochevsky faced from Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin’s investigation into the company. This phone call appears to have sparked Vice President Biden to condition a third $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee on Prosecutor General Shokin’s firing.”
Hunter’s business partner Devon Archer testified that the then-second son “called DC,” which Archer said meant Joe Biden, during a December 2015 meeting in Dubai with Burisma’s corporate leaders.
“Three days after this December phone call from Dubai, on December 7, 2015, Vice President Biden ‘called an audible’ on the plane to Kyiv. Rather than concurrently signing a loan guarantee as planned by the State Department, Vice President Biden unilaterally decided to condition the release of a third $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee on the firing of Mr. Shokin,” the report says.
Joe Biden also dined at Cafe Milano in DC in 2014 and 2015 with Hunter’s Kazakhstani associates, including Kenes Rakishev, who purchased Hunter a $142,000 sports car, according to the first son’s own testimony to the inquiry this year.
Two lucrative Chinese government-linked business relationships also involved Joe Biden, the report recounts — including a December 2013 trip to Beijing where Hunter introduced his father to the incoming chief of state-backed investment fund BHR Partners, Jonathan Li.
Joe Biden later wrote college recommendation letters for Li’s children and greeted him on speakerphone during a business meeting, Archer told investigators.
Hunter Biden held a 10% stake in BHR Partners at least through part of his father’s first year as president and the terms of his divestment remain murky.
In the second Chinese government-linked venture, the report notes, the elder Biden met with his son and CEFC China Energy chairman Ye Jianming at the Four Seasons hotel in Georgetown shortly before $3 million flowed to a consortium of Biden family associates in March 2017, according to testimony from former Biden family business associate Rob Walker.
Walker said the payday was for services rendered during the Obama-Biden administration.
Another $5.1 million flowed from CEFC to entities linked to Hunter and James Biden within 10 days of a threatening text message to a China-based associate, in which Hunter wrote he was “sitting here with my father” and threatened retribution.
Photos from Hunter’s abandoned laptop indicate he was at his father’s Wilmington, Del., home that day.
Of the $5.1 million, $40,000 was transferred from James Biden to Joe Biden in an alleged loan repayment, the first brother admitted to investigators — with the president’s younger brother insisting it was a short-term loan for personal reasons.
“While Jim Biden claimed he gave this money to Joe Biden to repay personal loans, Jim Biden did not provide any evidence to support this claim,” the report says.
In addition to foreign revenue sources, “The Biden family leveraged Joe Biden’s positions of public trust to obtain over $8 million in loans from Democratic benefactors,” the report says.
Among those was Joey Langston, a former Mississippi lawyer convicted of bribery, who told investigators he loaned James Biden $800,000, with most of the installments coming toward the end of the Obama-Biden administration in 2016, and ended up only being repaid $400,000 of the amount.
Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris allegedly loaned Hunter Biden $6.5 million “in order to protect Joe Biden’s presidential campaign,” the report says — after the men met for the first time in late 2015 at a political fundraiser for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, an arrangement Republicans say may constitute an impermissible in-kind political contribution.
Morris and other Democratic donors pitched in more to purchase Hunter’s novice artworks following the dissolution of his business enterprise, with at least one scoring an appointment to one of Biden’s presidential commissions.
Joe Biden received $200,000 in a second alleged loan repayment from James Biden that investigators linked to deals involving a now-bankrupt hospital chain in the US after pledging to use his political connections to secure a foreign investor, according to court filings from the firm’s bankruptcy trustee.
“No one has been able to assert any plausible reason for the Bidens receiving this much money from foreign sources and Democratic benefactors,” the report alleges.
“And to the extent that reasons were provided, the witnesses’ descriptions of the purported services provided do not justify the amount of money paid to them.”
‘Obstruction of Congress’
The White House repeatedly obstructed the probe by denying access to important witnesses and records — including a massive trove of emails in which the former vice president used a pseudonym to at times communicate with his son’s business associates, drafts of his late 2015 speech to Ukraine’s parliament and recordings of his interview with special counsel Robert Hur regarding his retention of classified documents, the report says.
“President Biden’s failure to produce relevant documents and his obstruction of Congress ‘gives rise to the inference that the evidence is unfavorable to him,’” the document says.
Those inferences include “that earlier drafts of his speech to the Ukrainian Rada, before his call to his son and before he called an audible, do not include claims that the Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needed reform; that the White House knew President Biden had willfully retained and had still possessed classified documents as early as May of 2021 and covered it up until after the 2022 midterm elections; that he used pseudonym emails to interact with and coordinate the activities of Biden family business associates; that he is unfit to serve as President of the United States.”
The Republicans say, “Such obstruction alone is a high crime and misdemeanor under the Constitution.”
Biden’s Justice Department also interfered in a five-year criminal probe of Hunter’s taxes from the vast business enterprise, the report says, citing the IRS whistleblowers who made protected disclosures to congressional investigators.
“The delays and obstruction by Biden-appointed U.S. Attorneys and Justice Department officials helped run down the clock on potential criminal charges regarding Hunter Biden’s under-reported income and tax avoidance that occurred while his father was Vice President,” the impeachment inquiry report says.
The report further cites special counsel Hur’s investigatory findings that Biden “willfully retained classified material” from the Obama White House and disclosed it to his ghostwriter for a memoir that ultimately netted an $8 million advance.
Hur opted not to bring charges against the oldest-ever president due in part to the belief that a jury would view him as a “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Biden asserted executive privilege to prevent Congress from getting tapes of his discussions with Hur.
“Although the President is now 81 years old and appears to suffer from diminished mental capacity,” the report adds, “it is important to note that much of the President’s wrongful conduct occurred while he was lucid and during the peak of his political career.”
The “schemes would not have generated millions of dollars if President Biden did not do exactly what his family members needed him to do: show up,” it concludes.
“He did so intentionally, repeatedly, and with the knowledge that his actions sent the message his family members intended: that they had access to Joe Biden and, in exchange for payment, anyone—even a foreign adversary—could obtain access.”
In the case of the influence-peddling schemes, the committees also wrote that Biden’s actions “exceed” the threshold for impeachable conduct.
