House Oversight and Accountability Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said the newly released bank memo further proves committee Republicans have nothing on President Joe Biden and are using this investigation to distract from former President Donald Trump's legal troubles.
Raskin has been throwing cold water on Oversight Chairman James Comer's (R-KY) investigation into Joe Biden since its inception, claiming that all the money he has found had nothing to do with Biden when he was vice president or now that he’s president.
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The newly released bank memo from Comer does show that Hunter Biden and his business partner received millions from foreign oligarchs while Joe Biden was vice president, but there is no evidence that shows Joe Biden received any money from foreign entities.
“Committee Republicans have once again released information on financial transactions that do not involve the President,” Raskin said in a statement. “Instead, they rehash the same Hunter Biden business dealings that Congressional Republicans identified at least three years ago. The evidence released since then — including the testimony of witnesses called and interviewed by the Republicans and the records reviewed as part of Chairman Comer’s probe — have all clearly established that President Biden was not involved in his son’s business dealings.”
Raskin claims this is an “embarrassing attempt” by Republicans to validate their calls for impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden and to “distract from former President Trump’s dozens of outstanding felony criminal charges in three different cases.”
This message was also echoed by the Democrat-aligned Congressional Integrity Project, which was created in November 2022 as a rapid response war room to combat GOP investigations into Joe Biden.
“This stunt from Comer is just more of the same — no evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden, no new information to tie him to Hunter Biden’s business, and another desperate attempt to keep this bogus investigation alive,” Kyle Herrig, the groups executive director, said in a statement. “Comer’s fishing expedition continues to reel in nothing in a desperate attempt to distract from Trump.”
But, it does reveal that then Vice President Joe Biden met with foreign oligarchs in Washington D.C. on two separate occasions after they wired money to companies controlled by Hunter Biden and his business associate Devon Archer.
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One was in the spring of 2014 at Cafe Milano in Georgetown, when then Vice President Joe Biden had dinner with Hunter Biden, Archer, Yelena Baturina — a Russian billionaire and former first lady of Moscow — and Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakhstani oligarch. This meeting came after Baturina wired $3.5 million to a company controlled by Archer. $2.7 million of that wire was then sent to another bank account that was partly controlled by Hunter Biden, according to the new bank memo.
This meeting was also around the same time Rakishev wired a company controlled by Hunter Biden $142,300 in April of 2014. The day after this payment, the same amount was wired out of the bank account to a car dealership in New Jersey for Hunter Biden’s sports car.