- Rep. James Comer demands documents from Hunter Biden travel, finances since 2009.
- Abbe Lowell, a Biden lawyer, calls inquiry illegitimate with no legislative purpose.
- House Republicans are mounting wide-ranging investigations of President Joe Biden and his family.
WASHINGTON – The House Oversight and Accountability Committee continues widening its investigation into Hunter Biden with new document requests Thursday, but a lawyer for the president’s son responded by calling the inquiry illegitimate and calling for a criminal investigation of his laptop.
- What records do the House GOP want?: The latest demand from the chairman, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., was for Hunter Biden documents since 2009 covering communications with intelligence agencies, travel and financial records since the time President Joe Biden served as vice president. He also requested similar documents from James Biden, the president’s brother, and their business associate Eric Schwerin.
- Wednesday hearing focused on the laptop: The requests followeda six-hour hearing Wednesday about Twitter stifling news coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which contained information about foreign business deals.
- What Comer is investigating: “You and your associates’ financial conduct raises significant ethics and national security concerns,” Comer wrote to Hunter Biden. “The Committee is investigating President Biden’s knowledge of and role in these foreign business deals to assess whether he has compromised our national security at the expense of the American people.”
Hunter Biden laptop story enflames House lawmakers:7 takeaways from Twitter hearing
Hunter Biden’s lawyer responds: ‘Inaccurate and baseless’
But Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, replied that the committee request was illegitimate for pursuing a private citizen and had no valid legislative function.
“Peddling your own inaccurate and baseless conclusions under the guise of a real investigation, turns the Committee into ‘Wonderland’ and you into the Queen of Hearts shouting, ‘sentence first, verdict afterwards,’” Lowell wrote in a four-page letter to Comer.
Joe Biden: Investigation ‘not going to go very far’
Joe Biden dismissed the inquiry.
“The public’s not going to pay attention to that,” Biden told the PBS NewsHour on Wednesday. “If the only thing they can do is make up things about my family, it’s not going to go very far.”
Comer’s latest document request followed a six-hour hearing Wednesday about Twitter stifling news coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which contained information about foreign business deals.
The hearing and document requests are part of wide-ranging House Republican investigations into the president and his son about potential corruption stemming from Hunter Biden’s business deals in Ukraine and China.
Hunter Biden’s lawyers want investigation into Trump allies over how laptop information spread
Lowell has challenged the use of information from the laptop as a potential criminal violation. Hunter Biden failed to retrieve the laptop left at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019.
The shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, gave the laptop to the FBI and later provided the contents to Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for former President Donald Trump, who has suggested the Bidens engaged in corruption in Ukraine. Giuliani distributed the contents to news organizations such as the New York Post and political advocates such as Steve Bannon.
Lowell urged the Justice Department and Delaware attorney general to open criminal investigations into access and dissemination of personal information from the laptop. Lowell argued there were potential violations of the National Stolen Property Act, the Stored Communications Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
