House investigators are targeting the Hunter Biden associate behind a string of payouts to members of the Biden family after the associate received a $3 million wire transfer from a Chinese energy company.
House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer is demanding that Rob Walker appear before the panel for a transcribed interview after uncovering bank records revealing the suspicious payments months after President Biden ended his tenure as vice president.
“The committee has identified you as a critical witness to this matter and reviewed evidence showing you received millions of dollars from a Chinese energy company and elsewhere,” Mr Comer wrote in a letter to Mr Walker on Friday.
Bank records obtained by the committee show multiple payments to companies associated with President Biden’s brother James Biden, his son Hunter Biden and daughter-in-law Hallie Biden over a three-month period from Mr Walker’s company after he made the multimillion-dollar payment received from State Energy HK Ltd., a Chinese company, in March 2017.
The committee also uncovered multiple payments to an unknown account identified only as “Biden.”
Mr. Walker owns Robinson Walker LLC, which controls the account that received the transfer.
The details were released by the committee in a memo on Thursday.
“These records show that the three parties likely all received a third of the money from China, and it is unclear what services were provided in return,” said Mr. Comer, a Kentucky Republican. “The Oversight Committee has many questions for Rob Walker, and we look forward to getting answers for the American people.”
The committee memo also notes that a company affiliated with James Gilliar, another Biden family associate, received more than $1 million from Mr Walker’s business account received.
The memo said the committee’s investigators are particularly concerned “why Hallie Biden — who publicly works as a school counselor — received money from Mr. Walker’s business.”
Hallie Biden is the widow of Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015. After Beau’s death, she had a romantic relationship with her brother-in-law, Hunter Biden.
A spokesman for Hunter Biden’s legal team dismissed the memo as baseless.
“Hunter Biden, a private individual with every right to pursue his own business endeavors, has joined several business partners to seek a joint venture with a legitimate, privately held energy company in China,” the spokesman said. “As part of this joint venture, Hunter received his share of bona fide entry fees, which he shared with his uncle James Biden and Hallie Biden, who he was dating at the time, and shared the costs.”
The White House also wiped off the memo.
“Rather than bizarrely attacking the president’s family, perhaps Republicans should focus on working with the president to get results for American families on important priorities like cutting costs and strengthening health care,” White House spokesman Ian said Sam’s
The payment details were disclosed in bank documents obtained by the committee in response to a recent subpoena issued to Bank of America. The committee subpoenaed records of Hunter Biden’s business dealings for more than a decade.
Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the committee, announced the Feb. 27 subpoena in a scathing letter in which he accused Republicans of conducting a one-sided investigation into the Biden family. He accused Republicans of overlooking alleged conflicts of interest and foreign influence under President Donald Trump.
Mr. Comer justified the subpoena by saying “up until 2017, Biden family members and their associates, including [Rob] Walker, formed a joint venture with executives from CEFC China.”
CEFC China is a defunct Chinese energy company with alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
“Democrats have described that our subpoena provides nothing more than paperwork for Papa John’s and Starbucks, but they have made no mention of the paperwork we received documenting the Biden family’s business plans,” Mr Comer said Thursday. “Over the course of several years, members of the Biden family and their companies received over $1.3 million in payments from accounts associated with their associate, Rob Walker.”
Mr. Comer has made the Biden family’s financial transactions the centerpiece of an investigation into the long line of business ventures involving the President and his son.
On Tuesday, Mr. Comer announced that the Treasury Department had begun handing over documents related to the probe following a standoff with the committee’s Republicans.
Committee Republicans say the Treasury Department holds nearly 150 reports of suspicious activity related to Hunter Biden. Reports of suspicious activity give banks a mechanism to flag transactions for the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
Republicans have been in a fruitless back-and-forth with the Treasury Department for months for additional information on alleged Hunter Biden-related financial transactions that US banks have flagged as suspicious.
Mr Comer has accused the agency of obstructing the committee’s investigation into the Biden family by refusing to release the reports of suspicious activity. He said such reports had been made available to members of Congress for decades.
In a November report detailing Hunter Biden’s wide-ranging dealings, which for years have garnered attention over potential interference, the committee’s Republicans cited a publicly available suspicious activity report that found “a total of 93 wires between 02/03/2014 and 8/2/2019 listed $2,461,962.60” between Biden employees and “a Shanghai-based mutual fund controlled by the Bank of China.”
Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company, also pursued deals with Chinese Communist Party-affiliated energy magnates and allegedly pocketed more than $3 million from a Russian businesswoman who is the widow of a former Moscow mayor.
Citing evidence obtained from Hunter Biden’s laptop and through whistleblowers, Mr Comer said his committee uncovered a “decades-old pattern of influence influence, national security risks and political cover-ups” run by the Biden family with the knowledge and involvement of was committed President.
Source : www.washingtontimes.com