House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) released bank records showing that Hunter Biden’s company, Owasco PC, transferred money to President Joe Biden in 2018.
Owasco PC was an entity Hunter Biden used to handle income he received from his foreign business deals. For example, some of the money he earned from working with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma would flow to his Owasco account, as would payments from Hunter Biden’s work with a Romanian oligarch.
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According to a bank statement released Monday by Comer and the committee, the Owasco entity transferred $1,380 to Joe Biden on Sept. 17, 2018. According to the ACH Authorization Agreement, a form used for setting up direct deposits, the payments would be made “monthly” starting Sept. 15, 2018, though the committee only released a document showing the singular payment that went through on Sept. 17.
An Oversight Committee aide said the committee is aware of at least three monthly payments made to Joe Biden: this one on Sept. 17, another on Oct. 15, 2018, and another on Nov. 15, 2018.
“Today, the House Oversight Committee is releasing subpoenaed bank records that show Hunter Biden’s business entity, Owasco PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden,” Comer said. “This wasn’t a payment from Hunter Biden’s personal account but an account for his corporation that received payments from China and other shady corners of the world.”
The Oversight Committee Republicans said the bank records were significant because they featured transactions involving Owasco, Hunter Biden’s primary business entity at the time, and did not appear to involve Hunter Biden’s personal bank account.
Hunter Biden used Owasco as something of a clearinghouse for the various foreign business deals he had pursued during his father’s vice presidency and shortly after it. He created the company, one of several affiliated with him during his years of foreign work, to help manage the large tax bills he was incurring by earning much of his money through consulting fees and other arrangements that did not involve his employers withholding taxes for him.
In addition to payments from businesses in Ukraine and Romania, Hunter Biden used Owasco to collect income from a lucrative partnership with Chinese government-linked CEFC, an energy conglomerate in China.
A CEFC affiliate placed millions of dollars into a joint venture owned partly by Hunter Biden and partly by a Chinese CEFC executive in August 2017, bank records previously released by the committee showed.
Hunter Biden withdrew hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Chinese joint venture and deposited them into his Owasco account in the weeks that followed. He paid his uncle, James Biden, a cut of the Chinese income using the Owasco entity.
“At this moment, Hunter Biden is under an investigation by the Department of Justice for using Owasco PC for tax evasion and other serious crimes,” Comer said. “And based on whistleblower testimony, we know the Justice Department made a concerted effort to prevent investigators from asking questions about Joe Biden. I wonder why?”
Investigators from the IRS and Justice Department took an interest in Owasco’s finances as they spent years looking into whether Hunter Biden committed tax crimes.
In late 2020, IRS agents and prosecutors learned that Hunter Biden had cleared out the Owasco offices in Washington, D.C., and placed all of the company’s documents into a storage unit in northern Virginia, according to congressional testimony from IRS whistleblowers.
Investigators prepared an affidavit to request a search warrant for the storage unit, but Lesley Wolf, a prosecutor in the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office, called Hunter Biden’s lawyers and warned them that investigators were eyeing the Owasco records in the storage unit.
The IRS whistleblowers testified that Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Eric Schwerin, prodded Hunter Biden to set up Owasco PC to help Hunter Biden with his tax compliance troubles.
“And the crux of this, as I understand it, is that Hunter Biden had a history of noncompliance with his taxes, and he would often get large sums of money and wouldn't withhold,” IRS agent Gary Shapley, who spent years on the Hunter Biden investigation, testified in the spring. “So Owasco PC — was initially for the — the whole purpose was, Eric Schwerin came in to help him with his tax situation so it didn't continue to be a problem in the future.”
“So all of his consulting fees and all that type of stuff would go into Owasco. There would be withholdings from it. So then he didn't get — when he filed his tax returns, they had withholdings to offset the taxes that he owed for that year,” Shapley added.
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Investigators later questioned some of the purchases Hunter Biden claimed on his tax returns as business expenses, including payments to alleged prostitutes that he attempted to write off as business-related.
White House spokesman Ian Sams has slammed the House Republican investigation of the Biden family finances as a "stunt" and denied that Joe Biden profited off the foreign business deals of his son and brother.