House GOP ready to subpoena Hunter and James Biden, force FBI to address integrity issues

Two senior Republicans likely to chair House investigative committees next year if the GOP wins control of Congress say they are prepared to compel testimony from Hunter and James Biden about their overseas business deals and to use the power of the purse to force the FBI to address long-simmering questions about its integrity.

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told the "Just the News, Not Noise" television show on Thursday night that if he wins the chairmanship of the powerful House Oversight and Government Reform Committee next January, he will methodically look to compel testimony from President Joe Biden's son and brother.

"We're gonna ask them to testify, and when they say no, then we'll subpoena them," Comer said in a wide-ranging interview. "So that'll be probably the first subpoena issued by a Republican majority."

Comer stressed that the subpoena wasn't an effort at further political embarrassment of an already-unpopular president, but rather an attempt to address the legitimate national security and ethics questions surrounding the Biden family's dealings with companies in countries like Russia, China and Ukraine.

"It's not that we're picking on Hunter Biden for political reasons," he said. "We believe that Hunter Biden and his shady business dealings have compromised Joe Biden in some of the decisions that he's making, especially when you look at decisions he's made with respect to China, and with respect to Russia. So we consider this a priority for the American people."

He added: "We should consider this a national security risk, and we're not going to let up on it."

You can watch the full Comer interview in the player above.

Another key Republican, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, told "Just the News, Not Noise" he has specific information from FBI whistleblowers that agents and prosecutors have been engaged in political tampering with sensitive cases and that they have also been inflating statistics to make the domestic terrorism problem in the United States look worse than it is.

"They're juicing the numbers, plain and simple," Jordan said, describing the whistleblowers' allegations. "They set up this this office on domestic terrorism just a few months ago. This has been a big focus of the Democrats because they can't talk about everything else that they've done wrong, every policy decision they made that's been a disaster. So they've got this focus. And we've had whistleblowers now, multiple whistleblowers, come to us and tell us they're being pressured to catalog cases as domestic terrorism cases to, I think, fit this whole crazy political narrative that the Biden administration has."

Jordan, the likely chairman of the House Judiciary Committee next year should Republicans win in November, has repeatedly been rebuffed by FBI Director Chris Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland when seeking answers and evidence about alleged wrongdoing inside their agencies. But he said Republicans have a strategy to change that dynamic next year, using Congress' power of the purse through budget appropriations.

"We can continue to do the investigations, get the facts and the truth to the American people," he said. "We can look at the appropriations process, which is the legislature's job to get the executive branch of governments funded.

"And then hopefully, in two years, we can elect a Republican president. I think and hope it's going to be President Trump. I think he's going to run. I hope he does, and I want him to win. And then you put in place the right kind of leadership at the Justice Department, who will actually rein that institution in, get rid of the politics and focus on equal treatment under the law, the rule of law, the Constitution, and not all the political things that we see now."

On the Hunter Biden probe, Comer questioned why the FBI has taken four years to decide whether to charge Hunter Biden with crimes, promising Republicans will disclose the approximately 150 transactions that Hunter Biden and other family members made over the last decade that were flagged by U.S. banks.

Those alerts — known as Suspicious Activity Reports or SARS — will also be subpoenaed and made public so Americans can see what concerned the financial institutions while Joe Biden was still sitting as vice president.

"There's not as much digging required with this investigation, which makes it all the more peculiar that the FBI hasn't already done something with Hunter Biden," Comer said. "I mean, he had 150 suspicious activity reports filed from various banks. That means the bank was pretty confident that Hunter Biden was committing some type of criminal activity, but yet they did nothing. They knew Hunter Biden was influence-peddling in Ukraine, in Russia in the Middle East and China, but yet they did nothing."

Comer said his investigators have already gathered evidence that Joe Biden knew what his son and business associates were doing even as he professed on the campaign trail that he wasn't involved or aware.

"I believe Joe Biden knew about all of it," he said. "And what we're seeing now — we've got the phone message where Joe Biden calls Hunter after this Chinese fiasco was starting to break, and he said, 'Look, you know, I think you're free and clear now. Everything's good.' So obviously Joe Biden was keeping up with that.

"Now we have text messages and phone messages that show that Joe Biden was communicating with many of Hunter's business associates. We're seeing call logs now, White House visitor logs that show that there were many, many communications between Joe Biden and Hunter's business associates."

Some Republicans are pressing for a special counsel to taker over the probe of the Biden family that has been led since 2018 by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Delaware. But Comer said he's not ready to support that move.

"I want to see the House Republicans have a bite at the apple first," he said. "I've not been impressed with special counsels in the past. I'm not impressed with [Russia collusion special counsel John] Durham. I wasn't impressed with [Whitewater Independent Counsel] Ken Starr. I would like to see what we can do."