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House Republicans Plan Onslaught Of Investigations Into Biden’s China Ties, Virus Origins
Authored by Mark Tapscott via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
If there is a House Republican majority when the 118th Congress convenes on Jan. 3, 2023, it will launch an onslaught of congressional investigations to expose, among much else, what they view as the Biden family’s abuse of public office to enrich themselves.
The U.S. Capitol in Washington on Aug. 6, 2022. (Anna Rose Layden/Getty Images)
Three House Republican veterans—Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, plus an unknown player to be named later—will be at the center of the tidal wave of document demands, televised corruption hearings, depositions, sworn testimonies, subpoenas, cross-examinations, and contempt citations that have been in the planning stages for months.
All three promise to go wherever the facts lead.
“Oversight Republicans are investigating the domestic and international business dealings of President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and other Biden associates and family members to determine whether these activities compromise U.S. national security and President Biden’s ability to lead with impartiality,” Comer told The Epoch Times.
Comer is expected to be chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform if voters, as widely expected, return Republicans to control of the lower chamber of Congress.
The Kentucky Republican, who was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2016, is presently the ranking GOP member of the oversight panel in the Democrat-controlled House. His ascension to chair one of the major House committees in only his fourth term would be among the fastest in recent memory.
“Hunter and other members of the Biden family have a pattern of peddling access to the highest levels of government to enrich themselves. The American people deserve to know whether the President’s connections to his family’s business deals occurred at the expense of American interests and whether they represent a national security threat,” Comer said.
Comer’s views were echoed by multiple GOP Members of the House of Representatives, and present and former congressional investigative staff veterans interviewed by The Epoch Times in recent days.
Congressional plans to dig into the Biden family’s alleged brew of government duties and business dealings have been solidified in recent months as a laptop owned by Hunter Biden has been found to contain thousands of incriminating emails, photographs and other documents.
The laptop materials describe multimillion-dollar deals between companies linked to Hunter Biden and James Biden, the President’s brother, and individuals and firms in Russia, China, Ukraine, and other foreign nations.
Those deals were made possible in part by access occasioned for Hunter and James Biden by Joe Biden’s duties as Vice President under President Barack Obama, and possibly since his elevation to the Oval Office in 2021, investigators believe.
Former Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski has insisted that references to “the Big Guy” in the emails and documents are to the senior Biden, who he said received 10 percent of the proceeds from a deal with the Chinese energy firm, CEFC. Bobulinski is all but certain to be called to testify during the committee’s hearings next year.
Jordan, the likely Judiciary Committee Chairman in a Republican-led House, told The Epoch Times he will be focused initially on two major areas, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas’ role in creating the worst immigration crisis in American history on the U.S. border with Mexico, and political abuses of the Department of Justice by Attorney General Merrick Garland and senior officials within the FBI.
“Everyone knows what the Biden administration has done on the border is intentional, so we are going to look at all of that. There is just a whole host of things that are a problem that I think warrant aggressive oversight. Mayorkas knew, for example, that these guys they accused of using their whips to hit migrants, he knew that was [expletive], like we all suspected it was,” Jordan told The Epoch Times.
Asked about the prospects of an impeachment effort against Mayorkas, Jordan said, “this guy certainly warrants it. He came in front of our committee and couldn’t remember when I asked him about the status of the individuals on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist arrested at the border and he sneeringly said ‘I don’t know.’ This guy is bad news.”
“The other big thing, of course, is the Justice Department and how political it has become, with the 14 whistleblowers, 14 FBI agents that have come to us as whistleblowers, so we’ll look at all of that,” Jordan said.
“We’ve had more whistleblowers come to us than I’ve ever seen while we’re in the minority, which means we can’t do the investigation in the proper way. But they’re willing to do it because it’s that bad over there,” Jordan continued. The Ohioan was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2006 and has been reelected seven times in the years since.
The Ohio Republican remarked that the first whistleblower who came to the Judiciary panel’s GOP members concerned DOJ’s creation of a “threat tag” to be applied to concerned parents protesting at school board meetings.
Two other FBI whistleblowers who have come forward to Jordan and the panel’s GOP members—Special Agents Kyle Seraphin and Steve Friend—have since gone public with descriptions of how senior bureau officials pressure agents to exaggerate the extent of violent acts by “domestic terrorists.”
He also pointed to the fact former FBI senior official Jill Sanborn has agreed to sit down with Republican committee staff for a transcribed interview on Dec. 2 as evidence more whistleblowers will come forward in the coming months.
Sanborn was Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division and Executive Assistant Director of the bureau’s National Security Branch. She is expected to provide significant information regarding DOJ and FBI actions on a host of crucial issues of interest to Judiciary Republicans.
Another individual who will be summoned to testify is Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) within the National Institutes for Health (NIH).
Comer told The Epoch Times he plans to “continue our oversight of COVID origins. Our oversight has already uncovered “growing evidence” that the COVID-19 virus “likely originated from the Wuhan Institute for Virology (WIV) in China and the Communist Party of China covered it up.”
Comer warned that “U.S. taxpayer dollars were being funneled to the Wuhan lab to conduct risky experimental research on bat coronaviruses” and the evidence shows that Fauci “was aware of this information at the start of the pandemic and may have acted to conceal the information and intentionally downplay the lab leak theory.”
Jordan also wants to get the facts about the more than 50 former intelligence officials who signed an October 2020 letter claiming the emails on the Hunter Biden laptop were likely part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
“It looks like they were working with the FBI to put together that letter. Where did that letter originate, who started it. We need to get to the bottom of all that and how the FBI was a part of that, or not a part of that. It sure looks like they were because they went to Facebook and told them to be looking for Russian disinformation.” Jordan said.
McMorris Rodgers, whose congressional career began in 2005, is in line to take over the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has oversight responsibility for a host of issues in the energy, environmental, and economic spaces.
“We have a full agenda to hold President Biden and his administration officials accountable on behalf of the American people for how they’ve shut down American energy, broken trust at America’s public health agencies, made the fentanyl crisis worse, and increased our dependence on supply chains controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, among many issues,” McMorris Rogers told The Epoch Times.
“Nothing is off the table,” she warned.
Both Comer’s oversight and McMorris Rodgers’ energy and commerce panels are leading extensive investigations into the origins of COVID-19 with the latter taking a particular focus in how U.S. taxpayer dollars may have helped fund potential gain-of-function research that might have caused the pandemic. McMorris Rodgers is also looking at how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) mismanaged the federal response to the virus that to-date has killed more than one million Americans since January 2020.
“Trust in public health has been broken by the Biden administration’s authoritarian actions to mandate vaccines, force masks on children, collude with teachers unions to keep schools closed, and urge Big Tech to shut down free speech,” the Washington Republican said.
She also said her panel will look into “the flawed studies and mischaracterization of data the CDC repeatedly used to justify school closures and mask mandates on children.”
On the energy front, McMorris Rodgers earlier this year introduced a bill to prevent sales of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to any entity under the control of or influenced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). How the Biden administration has managed the SPR will get heavy attention from the energy and commerce panel.
The committee under McMorris Rodgers’ leadership is also planning an inquiry into social media giant TikTok’s relationship to the CCP.
“We have been doing some investigations as to how the Chinese Communist Party is stealing our data and collecting a ton of data on Americans. TikTok is going to be at the top of the [investigations] list,” she told The Epoch Times.
China’s influence on U.S. supply chains and the relationship of some environmental advocacy groups in the United States to Beijing are also on the energy and commerce agenda for 2023.
An energy and commerce Republican aide said McMorris Rodgers plans to expand the oversight subcommittee staff and noted that “every member of our staff across all our subcommittees is working together on a robust oversight strategy of the Biden administration, which will inform how we take action on policies to reverse the damage they’ve caused to our economy, our global competitive edge against China, and our American way of life.”
The “player to be named later” is whoever House GOP leaders designate to succeed Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) on the House Administration Committee that has oversight responsibility for the day-to-day operations of the Capitol Complex, including how officials prepared for and responded to the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Thu, 10/27/2022 – 17:20
