President Biden’s daughter-in-law, Hallie Biden, was among several family members pocketing payouts after a Hunter Biden employee received a $3 million wire transfer from a Chinese energy company, a House committee announced Thursday.
Biden’s family members received about $1.065 million in payments over a three-month period after the Chinese transfer was released, according to a memo detailing the payments from the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.
In addition to Hallie Biden, several payments were also sent to companies linked to Mr Biden’s brother James Biden and his son Hunter Biden. An unidentified account, identified only as “Biden,” also received transfers from the company owned by Robert Walker, a Hunter Biden associate, in the months after the $3 million transfer was released in 2017.
“Bank records show that the Biden family received approximately one-third of the money that came from the China wire,” read the memo from committee investigators who study business deals by the Biden families around the world .
Bank records obtained by the Committee show that Hallie Biden received two payments totaling $35,000 from Mr. Walker’s company in 2017 after receiving the multimillion-dollar payment from State Energy HK Limited, a Chinese company, on January 1, 2017 Biden ends his term as Vice President.
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.
It was unclear what services Biden staffers provided to Mr. Walker “to obtain this exorbitant amount of money,” said Rep. James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the committee.
“The Oversight Committee is concerned about the national security implications of President Biden’s family receiving millions of dollars from foreigners,” Comer said Thursday. “We will continue to follow the money trail and the facts to determine if President Biden is compromised by his family’s business plans and if there is a national security threat.”
The memo said the committee’s investigators were particularly concerned about “why Hallie Biden — who publicly works as a school counselor — received money from Mr. Walker’s business.”
The memo also notes that a company affiliated with James Gilliar, another Biden family associate, stole more than $1 million from Mr. Walker’s business account on March 2, 2017, the day after the Chinese wire transfer had received.
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 interference under President Trump.
Mr. Comer justified the subpoena by saying that “Biden family members and their associates, including John R. Walker, formed a joint venture with CEFC China executives as of 2017.”
CEFC China is a defunct Chinese energy company with alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
“Democrats described our subpoena as nothing more than filings for Papa John’s and Starbucks, but they made no mention of the filings 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 after a months-long standoff with committee 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 deal deals that have garnered attention for years for potential interference, the committee’s Republicans cited a publicly available suspicious activity report that found “a total of 93 cables between 02/03/2014 and as of 8/2/2019 lists $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 activities, national security risks and political cover-ups” run by the Biden family with the knowledge and involvement of the Family was committed President.
Source : www.washingtontimes.com