As the House Oversight Committee prepares to question Hunter and Frank Biden about their roles in the Biden family corruption inquiry, Peter Schweizer is worried they will be drawn into “small ball” facts and miss the bigger picture of how Chinese and Ukrainian foreign nationals corrupted then Vice President Joe Biden by enriching his family members.
In this week’s episode of The Drill Down podcast, Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers discuss the upcoming hearings and where Schweizer hopes committee chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY) will keep the focus.
There are some bad early signs. Comer announced with great fanfare this week that Joe Biden received recurring payments of $1,380 from his son Hunter’s law firm beginning in late 2018, shortly after a bank money laundering officer warned that the same account was receiving millions of dollars in Chinese government-linked funds without “any services rendered.” While that is certainly suggestive, Schweizer said, he worries it obscures the real story behind fixation on small checks to Joe Biden directly.
“The real question is,” Schweizer says on the podcast, “are we prepared to accept as a standard that if money goes from foreign actors to the president’s family, but not to him directly, it’s okay? No. It’s bribery, according to the statute.”
The Biden camp’s tactic is to minimize the amount of money that has been shown to have gone directly to Joe (“It’s repayment of a car loan!”), as a way of distracting from the larger question of foreign businesses paying enormous amounts – more than $20 million – to members of Biden’s family. If Comer lets them do that, Schweizer said, “We might as well just pack everything up – that’s the end of the country.”
He noted that in the bribery case against Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), the other bribery case that is rocking Washington, it is charged that his wife was the one receiving the payments (in gold bars, no less) from the Egyptian government in exchange for Sen. Menendez’s actions to help Egypt through his position on the Senate foreign affairs committee, not the senator himself.
Instead, Schweizer stressed, Comer’s committee should stay focused on the massive amounts of money funneled to the Biden family – to Hunter, Frank, and James Biden in particular – and ask them to show any services they provided in return. “What’s the business? There’s nothing to show for the money they received,” Schweizer added.
Recent reports have corroborated the sequence of events that Schweizer’s 2018 book, Secret Empires, first laid out and his subsequent reporting has corroborated. Right after, then-Vice President Joe Biden was made point-man for US-China relations, his son Hunter entered into business relationships with regime-connected businesses in China.
A second bit of good news is that IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler will testify before the House Ways & Means Committee’s separate probe, after committee had issued a report documenting attempts within the Justice Department to prevent them from coming forward. According to a Fox News report, they will discuss information “protected under Internal Revenue Code Section 6103,” meaning the information is related to the confidentiality of tax returns.
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