CLAIM: “A Republican investigation … uncovered no wrongdoing by then-Vice President Biden” regarding Hunter Biden.
VERDICT: MOSTLY FALSE. That investigation found Joe Biden had conflicts of interest and likely misled the public.
President Joe Biden sat down Sunday with CBS News’ Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes for his first media interview since the Super Bowl in February. He again denied any wrongdoing by his son, saying nothing Hunter Biden had done affected him or the country. That claim is very much in doubt, but Pelley appeared to lend weight to it by claiming, erroneously: “Congress investigated Hunter Biden’s job with a Ukrainian company at the time that his father ran Ukrainian policy in the Obama administration. A Republican investigation, however, uncovered no wrongdoing by then-Vice President Biden.”
That is not what the investigation by the Republican-led committees on homeland security and finance found in their report.
The report detailed many conflicts of interest involving then-Vice President Biden and members of his family, including Hunter Biden. Concerns about those conflicts of interest were raised within the Obama administration but went nowhere once those questions reached the vice president’s office. Conflicts involving Hunter Biden went far beyond Ukraine and included Russia and China, among other countries implicated in Hunter Biden’s business dealings while his father was in office.
It was true that the committee could not find that Joe Biden broke the law — because the law exempted the president and vice president. It found, however, that Biden had violated the basic understanding that politicians would not abuse their positions:
Although [Office of Government Ethics] authority to investigate and recommend solutions to most employees for conflicts of interest issues is well-established, Congress did not extend this authority to the president and vice president in OGE’s establishment statute. This does not mean there is an absence of any authority to hold the President and Vice President accountable for conflict of interest issues; rather, it demonstrates that the responsibility for holding the President and Vice President responsible for conduct that implicates conflicts of interest lies elsewhere, namely, with Congress and the American people.
…
Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board hindered the efforts of dedicated career-service individuals who were fighting for anticorruption measures in Ukraine. Because the vice president’s son had a direct link to a corrupt company and its owner, State Department officials were required to maintain situational awareness of Hunter Biden’s association with Burisma. Unfortunately, U.S. officials had no other choice but to endure the “awkward[ness]” of continuing to push an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine while the vice president’s son sat on the board of a Ukrainian company with a corrupt owner, earning tens of thousands of dollars a month.
The report also noted that Democrats on the two committees falsely accused Republicans of pursuing a “Russian disinformation” campaign by investigating Hunter Biden and the conflicts of interest he created for his father.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who led the investigation, suggested that it provided strong evidence that Joe Biden had lied to the public when he said, repeatedly, that he had not discussed any of his family’s overseas business dealings with them.
Demcorats, of course, dismissed the findings of the report, and the media largely followed their narrative, as they usually do. But the investigation did not find “no wrongdoing” by then-Vice President Biden; it found plenty of unethical behavior.
Moreover, the investigation was concluded just weeks before Hunter Biden’s laptop was revealed to the public by the New York Post. The laptop contained evidence that Hunter Biden had arranged meetings between his Ukrainian colleagues and his father, contradicting Joe Biden’s denials that he had ever discussed his son’s business dealings. It also included evidence that Biden was personally involved in one of Hunter Biden’s Chinese ventures in the years after Joe Biden left public office.
The FBI had possession of the laptop since December 2019, but it was not made available to congressional investigators.
So while it is true that the investigation did not find that Joe Biden had broken the law, it found ample evidence that he had conflicts of interest relating to Hunter Biden; that these conflicts were ignored; and that Biden had likely lied to the public.
Hunter Biden is the subject of a brand new narrative film, My Son Hunter, marking Breitbart’s expansion into film distribution. The film was directed by Robert Davi (Goonies, License to Kill, Die Hard) and stars Laurence Fox (Victoria, Inspector Lewis, The Professor and The Madman) as Hunter Biden; Gina Carano (The Mandalorian, Deadpool, Heist) as a Secret Service agent; and John James (Dynasty) as Joe Biden. It was produced by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney (Gosnell movie, FBI Lovebirds: Undercovers) from the Unreported Story Society. The film is available RIGHT NOW for Streaming and Downloading at MySonHunter.com. The trailer below has been viewed almost 5 million times across social media.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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