House Republicans may soon release more evidence of alleged influence peddling involving the Biden family and their business associates, adding to the findings they’ve uncovered over the past several months.
House Oversight Committee members are sifting through new bank records related to the complicated web of accounts, companies, and business partners that Hunter Biden, the president’s brother James Biden, and other members of the Biden family used to collect millions of dollars from foreign entities starting when Joe Biden was vice president.
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And while congressional investigators have not yet compiled all of their latest findings, the bank records could shed more light on the payments from Chinese, Ukrainian, Romanian, and other foreign companies that close Biden associates collected and then doled out to the Biden family in smaller increments. Those arrangements often shielded Hunter Biden and other family members from taking money directly from the foreign actors.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) last week teased “disturbing findings” in the Biden case that his committee would release as soon as this week, although that timeline is likely to be pushed back.
John Robinson “Rob” Walker, James Gilliar, and Devon Archer are three of the Biden associates likely to face even more scrutiny from congressional investigators focused on bank records.
Among the bank records that Comer requested directly from Bank of America were those involving Walker, a close business associate of the president’s son. Comer’s committee also sent subpoenas for records to JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, and Cathay Bank, likely seeking transactions involving the more than a dozen shell companies used by the Biden family and their associates to filter foreign money.
Lawmakers already have evidence that Walker’s company paid more than $2 million to Biden family members from 2015 to 2017, after receiving millions from a Chinese energy company to which Hunter Biden has multiple ties, as well as from a Romanian company.
State Energy HK Limited, a Chinese company, paid Walker $3 million in March 2017, bank records show. Walker later disseminated a third of that money to Biden family members, including Hallie Biden, the widow of President Joe Biden’s late son Beau, James Biden, and Hunter Biden. Gilliar, a frequent business partner of Hunter Biden’s from that time, also got a third of the money.
Hunter Biden’s spokesperson later defended the payments as “seed funds” from the work with Walker, although that does not explain why Gilliar received his cut all in one chunk and the Biden family took theirs over two months through smaller transactions with multiple shell companies and accounts.
Oversight Committee investigators have focused on another set of payments from Walker to Biden family members that occurred while Joe Biden was vice president. In 2015, a Romanian company believed to belong to Gabriel Popoviciu, a wealthy businessman under investigation for corruption, paid Walker’s company $3 million.
Hunter Biden, according to a review of emails found on his abandoned laptop, actively worked to help Popoviciu avoid prosecution.
According to one email chain from May 2016, for example, Hunter Biden discussed with Walker and Gilliar which powerful friends they should call to help argue that Popoviciu was facing “injustice” at the hands of Romanian investigators.
On emails involving Walker, Gilliar, Hunter Biden, and another lawyer working with them, the lawyer boasted that U.S. Embassy officials had “primed this for us” as they sought to set up a meeting with Romania’s anti-corruption unit on behalf of Popoviciu.
After deliberating about whether to proceed with the delicate meeting with anti-corruption officials, the lawyer later emailed Walker, Gilliar, and Hunter Biden to note that the U.S. ambassador to Romania had “called me to discuss a development that is best relayed over phone. Can we connect either tonight or first thing tomorrow? Bottom line is that we should proceed with requesting the meeting.”
While the meeting did not appear to have taken place, the exchanges show how Hunter Biden’s business associates worked their connections to Obama administration officials to help Popoviciu as he faced an indictment. Then-Vice President Joe Biden had traveled to Romania and spoken out forcefully against corruption in Romania while his son performed the work, for which he did not register as a foreign agent.
Walker ultimately paid Hunter Biden, James Biden, and Gilliar cuts of the money Popoviciu’s company had given directly to him, again wiring the Biden family’s share through a maze of accounts.
Oversight Committee Republicans wrote in a May memo that the Romanian episode was one of several examples that have made them “concerned about the Biden family’s pattern of courting business in regions of the world in which the then Vice President had an outsize role and influenced U.S. policy.”
Another, and perhaps the highest profile, has involved Hunter Biden’s work for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
Like in other foreign consulting deals, Hunter Biden did not register as a foreign agent, and instead of taking his money from Burisma directly, he took it in the form of a loan from a company owned by Archer, another close business partner.
That arrangement came to light through testimony provided by an IRS whistleblower to the House Ways and Means Committee.
Republicans have grown increasingly frustrated that the Justice Department has done so little to investigate the type of activity that has landed other people behind bars.
The House GOP has publicized these findings after having subpoena power for just over six months; the FBI and IRS have had five years to investigate Hunter Biden and have thus far produced only a lenient plea deal for misdemeanor tax charges that have little to do with the most substantive allegations against the president’s son.
This week, the Justice Department indicted a witness who said he had intimate knowledge of illegal conduct involving the Hunter Biden business web, in part for doing something identical to what Hunter Biden is accused of doing.
Gal Luft, a think tank owner, faced charges for failing to register as a foreign lobbyist for work he did on behalf of a Chinese energy company, CEFC, to which Hunter Biden also has significant business ties.
In addition to bank records, Comer has also pressed the Treasury Department for suspicious activity reports related to payments sent to Biden family members and their associates.
Federal law requires banks to flag transactions over $5,000 that raise red flags, such as transfers that involve complex networks of accounts or payments involving unusually large sums of money.
Members of the House Oversight Committee reviewed some suspicious activity reports in March, and in May, Republicans on the committee released a memo outlining their finding that $10 million from foreign sources had flowed to Biden family members and their associates through a tangled network of companies and accounts.
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“After foreign companies sent money to business associates’ companies, the Biden family received incremental payments over time to different bank accounts,” Oversight Republicans wrote in their memo. “These complicated financial transactions appear to conceal the source of the funds and reduce the conspicuousness of the total amounts made into the Biden bank accounts.”
The new findings coming from the Oversight Committee could also involve information taken from suspicious activity reports, which the Treasury Department had at first resisted providing to GOP lawmakers.