After asking ‘Where’s Hunter?’ For years, Republicans will question Biden’s son
Hunter Biden, the president’s son, will appear on Capitol Hill on Wednesday for testimony from House Republicans seeking evidence in an effort to oust his father.
The interview with 54-year-old Hunter Biden, which is expected to be lengthy, comes at a decisive time for the investigation. Republicans have tried for months to link President Biden to his second son’s alleged misdeeds, but they have struggled with a series of setbacks, including the indictment of an FBI informant accused of fabricating a story that the elder Mr. Biden had taken over. a $5 million bribe.
The statement is the culmination of a multi-year Republican pursuit of Hunter Biden, whose business dealings and descent into debauchery have long made him a punching bag for the Republican Party. After years of asking “Where is Hunter?” and by spreading the lurid contents of a laptop that contained graphic material of his exploits while struggling with drug addiction, Republicans will finally have a chance to question him.
The impeachment will begin at 10 a.m. in a House office building near the Capitol.
It will be a key moment in the long-running feud between Republicans and Mr. Biden over whether he would cooperate with the impeachment inquiry. He had repeatedly refused to sit for a personal deposition, and Republicans threatened to hold him in contempt of Congress for defying an earlier subpoena.
Mr. Biden had insisted that he feared Republicans in the House of Representatives would selectively leak parts of his testimony to misrepresent his story and try to harm his father. He made two surprise appearances on Capitol Hill, where he challenged Republicans to question him at a public hearing. But after the dismissive threat, Mr. Biden relented.
Hunter Biden is already under federal indictment on charges of tax crimes related to his foreign business interests, including with companies and partners in Ukraine and China. Testifying is a risk for him, because everything he says can be used against him in the criminal case.
Republicans are trying to uncover evidence that President Biden was improperly involved in his son’s foreign business dealings, but so far their impeachment inquiry has turned up no evidence.
They used bank records to determine what Biden family members received from 2014 to 2019 approximately $15 million through business deals from foreign entities. But they have yet to prove that any of the deals were illegal or that the elder Mr. Biden benefited from them.
House Republicans have found evidence that the elder Biden knew about and met some of his son’s business associates. This raises questions about whether some of the president’s public statements about the deals were deliberately misleading. But a key witness also testified that such conversations were superficial in nature and only extended to nice things like the weather or fishing.