House GOP plans to turn tables from Trump tax return fight, track Hunter Biden's money to father

Still smarting from Democrats' protracted fight to get Donald Trump's private tax records, House Republicans are planning to turn the tables and fight for secret bank records showing the timing of suspicious foreign payments to Hunter Biden in hopes of determining if any such proceeds made their way to President Joe Biden.

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told Just the News that fighting the Biden administration for access to some 150 Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR) filed by banks concerning Hunter Biden's financial transactions would allow investigators to determine to what extent, if any, Joe Biden benefited from his son's foreign influence peddling.

"This isn't a fishing expedition," Comer told the John Solomon Reports podcast this week. "We have every reason to believe that Hunter Biden was paying for living expenses for Joe Biden, a significant amount of living expenses. And we want to verify that."

Comer said the pursuit is ripped from the Democrats' playbook.

"The Democrats have set a precedent on this," he explained. "They filed suit forcing former President Trump to have to turn over his tax records. So the Democrats have already set a precedent for bank records and tax records."

Comer said he expects a fight from the Biden administration, which he said is now claiming SARs are exempt from congressional oversight. He is ready to use subpoenas to force the issue.

"When the White House will inevitably say, 'Well, Joe Biden wasn't benefiting from Hunter's shady business dealings,' there's gonna be a little 'Wait a minute now, who was paying for this, and who was paying for that? How did the President afford this? Who paid for that?'" he explained. "And that's why we need the bank records."

Just the News reported in April that emails on a Hunter Biden laptop seized by the FBI show Joe Biden was more involved in Hunter Biden's financial and business dealings than previously acknowledged and that the two commingled their finances at times.

For instance, the president allowed his son to pay some of his bills, diverted one of his tax refunds to Hunter, rubbed elbows with the first son's foreign clients and even directly referred a friend who wanted to "do some work" with his son.

A string of spring and summer 2010 emails, for example, show Hunter Biden and a partner at his Rosemont Seneca firm assisted the White House with documents for then-Vice President Joe Biden's tax returns after his first year in office. Afterwards, they chose to divert Joe Biden's Delaware state tax refund to Hunter Biden to pay off money the father owed his son, the emails state.

"I am depositing it in his account and writing a check in that amount back to you since he owes it to you," Rosemont Seneca official Eric Schwerin wrote in June 2010 about Joe Biden's tax refund. "Don't think I need to run it by him, but if you want to go ahead."

Another Schwerin email a month later entitled "JRB bills" — using the future president's initials — listed a series of expenses from Joe Biden's lakefront home in Wilmington, Del., that Hunter Biden had paid.

They included $1,239 of air conditioner repairs at "mom-mom's cottage" and another $1,475 to paint the "back wall and columns at the lake house." There was $475 "for shutters" and $2,600 for building or repairing a "stone retaining wall at the lake."

Comer said he and House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) are collaborating on the Biden family corruption probe, with Jordan taking lead on why it has taken the FBI four years to investigate the serious allegations. Some FBI whistleblowers have alleged politics played a role in sidelining some aspects of the Hunter Biden probe that has been underway since 2018.

Hunter Biden has acknowledged he is under investigation, but he has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

Comer said House GOP investigators believe the FBI may have tried to keep the laptop contents secret, unaware there were multiple copies floating around beyond the one they seized from a Delaware computer repairman back in December 2019.

"When the laptop guy gave the computer to the FBI, they were under the assumption that there were no copies," he said. "That was it. And so they basically just sat on it. They, you know, locked it up somewhere, and thought, well, this story went away. And they didn't realize that there were three other copies."