Sen. Johnson proposes committee to probe federal law enforcement corruption allegations

GOP Sen. Ron Johnson is proposing a congressional commission to investigate allegations of corruption in federal law enforcement agencies, similar to the 1975 Church Committee.

The Wisconsin lawmaker said Sunday on the Fox News Channel that President Biden's son Hunter Biden has been involved in questionable business dealings for "quite some time" and that the FBI is "sitting on a mountain of evidence" related to the matter. 

Johnson, who's in a tight reelection bid, also said a whistleblower said the FBI had the president's son's infamous laptop, which allegedly includes information about the business dealings, in December 2019, but agents decided to not act on it before the 2020 election, in which then-Democrat presidential nominee defeated incumbent GOP President Donald Trump.

"I think we're going to have to have something like a Church Commission. It may be a bicameral select committee," Johnson said. 

The bipartisan Senate Church Committee was created in 1975 after the Senate Watergate Committee found the executive branch had ordered national intelligence agencies to execute questionable domestic security operations.

The committee made nearly 100 recommendations and wrote in its final report that "intelligence agencies have undermined the constitutional rights of citizens" since the Roosevelt administration through the early 1970s. As a result, Congress approved the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the executive branch to request wiretapping and surveillance warrants from the secretive FISA court.

"I'd love to help head something like that, but we need to expose the corruption in federal law enforcement," Johnson said. "But then we also need to expose the complicity and corruption of the media as well, and that's very difficult to do."

Republicans even before news broke late in the 2020 presidential campaign that Hunter Biden's laptop had been found in a repair shop have raised concerns that his overseas business dealing were directly connected to his father, who prior to becoming president was vice president for eight years.

Johnson joins other GOP lawmakers who have called for the creation of a new Church Committee, including Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).