The White House formally declined an invitation by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., for President Biden to testify in connection to his son Hunter\u2019s business dealings.<\/p>\n
\u2018As our Office has demonstrated, and you acknowledged in a recent fundraising email, your impeachment investigation is over,\u2019 Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president, wrote in a letter to Comer on Monday. \u2018It is past time for the House to focus on the issues that matter to the American people rather than continuing to waste time and taxpayer resources on this partisan charade.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sauber said the House Oversight Committee\u2019s impeachment inquiry \u2018has succeeded only in turning up abundant evidence that, in fact, the President has done nothing wrong.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018Yet rather than acknowledge this reality, your March 28, 2024, letter contains the same litany of false allegations that have been repeatedly debunked and refuted by the very witnesses you have called before your Committee and the many documents you have obtained,\u2019 the special counsel told Comer. \u2018Your insistence on peddling these false and unsupported allegations despite ample evidence to the contrary makes one thing about your investigation abundantly clear:\u00a0 The facts do not matter to you.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
The National Review published a full copy of the letter also obtained by The Associated Press and other outlets.<\/p>\n
Reacting to President Biden\u2019s refusal to testify, Comer issued a blistering statement on his X account, declaring, \u2018The apple doesn\u2019t fall far from the tree in the Biden family.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018Like his son, Hunter Biden, President Biden is refusing to testify in public about the Bidens\u2019 corrupt influence peddling,\u2019 Comer wrote. \u2018This comes as no surprise since President Biden continues to lie about his relationships with his son\u2019s business partners, even denying they exists when his son said under oath during a deposition that they did. It is unfortunate President Biden is unwilling to answer questions before the American people and refuses to answer the very simple, straightforward questions we included in the invitation. Why is it so difficult for the White House to answer those questions? The American people deserve transparency from President Biden, not more lies.\u2019<\/p>\n
Despite providing testimony behind closed doors, Hunter Biden declined to testify in a public committee alongside former business associates, Tony Bobulinski and Jason Galanis, regarding alleged \u2018pay-for- influence\u2019 schemes to provide access to certain offices in exchange for payments to the Biden family. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Notably, Bobulinski at the committee hearing accused Hunter Biden and his uncle, James Biden, of lying under oath regarding the nature of their dealings with the Chinese conglomerate CEFC.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a March 28 letter, Comer invited President Biden to \u2018explain, under oath,\u2019 what involvement he had in the Biden family businesses, claiming the committee \u2018has accounted for over $24 million that has flowed from foreign sources to you, your family and their business associates.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
The letter included questions about Biden\u2019s interactions with specific foreign business officials.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Comer told President Biden that \u2018you have asserted your pressuring Ukraine in 2015 to fire a government official investigating a company in which your son has a financial interest was wholly in line with U.S. policy.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
The committee received bank records showing Hunter Biden was paid $1 million per year for his position on the board of the Ukrainian company Burisma until Joe Biden left office, when Hunter\u2019s salary \u2018was inexplicably cut in half,\u2019 Comer wrote. The letter specifically asks if President Biden has interacted with executives at Burisma Holdings, which was at the center of the indictment of a former FBI informant in February who the Justice Department accused of providing false information to the FBI. \u00a0<\/p>\n
The indictment says the former informant, Alexander Smirnov, claimed that during meetings with Burisma executives, they admitted to hiring Hunter to \u2018protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,\u2019 and later that they had specifically paid $5 million for such protection. But the DOJ goes on the claim that those events that Smirnov first reported to the FBI Agent in June 2020 were \u2018fabrications.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sauber, who was brought on in 2022 to oversee the president\u2019s response to congressional investigations into the Biden family, is leaving the White House early next month to return to the private sector.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To replace him, the White House is elevating his deputy, Rachel Cotton.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Associated Press contributed to this report.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n
The White House formally declined an invitation by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., for President Biden to testify in connection to his son Hunter\u2019s business dealings. \u2018As our Office has demonstrated, and you acknowledged in a recent fundraising email, your impeachment investigation is over,\u2019 Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president, wrote in <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":18058,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-18057","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}