Less than twenty-fours hours after a damning report revealed House Oversight Committee Chairman Jim Comer used his office as then-Kentucky Secretary of Agriculture to import for a campaign donor hemp seed from China that ultimately tested as marijuana, the Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committee chairmen referred Hunter Biden and President Joe Biden’s brother, James Biden, to the U.S. Dept. of Justice for criminal prosecution, for allegedly lying.
House Committees typically take votes on criminal referrals, but Chairman Comer, along with Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, and Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith skipped any hearings or votes on the referral and shot off a joint letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Special Counsel prosecuting Hunter Biden on gun-related charges, David Weiss.
“No vote, just the direct referral,” reported HuffPost’s Arthur Delaney.
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The move to refer the Bidens to DOJ also comes just one day after Attorney General Garland sat for nearly five hours before Chairman Jordan’s Judiciary Committee, where he was attacked for the State of New York’s criminal prosecution of Donald Trump. State and federal prosecutions are entirely separate and Garland had no oversight of that investigation and subsequent prosecution, trial, or conviction by jury.
It also comes just days after a New York jury convicted Donald Trump on 34 criminal felony counts of falsifying business records in an effort to cover up a conspiracy to protect and promote his presidential campaign by “unlawful means.”
The Daily Beast‘s Roger Sollenberger on Tuesday reported Chairman Comer “has hounded the Bidens over China and business ventures” while “state records reveal his own involvement in a hemp import plan gone spectacularly wrong.”
Sollenberger reported, “The Daily Beast obtained [documents] after the Kentucky government released them to a third party in response to open records requests.” Those documents “contain a stunning revelation: While the emails show the involved parties clearly intended to import only legal hemp, two rounds of tests revealed the plants were essentially Chinese pot, containing illegally high levels of THC, the psychoactive compound that gives marijuana users a high.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Chairmen Comer, Jordan, and Smith published their letter, which accuses both Hunter Biden and James Biden of “lies.”
Despite being unable to provide any evidence that could lead to a successful impeachment of President Joe Biden, an effort House Republicans began one day after he was inaugurated, Comer on social media claimed the committees “today sent criminal referrals to the DOJ recommending Hunter and James Biden be charged with making false statements to Congress about key aspects of the impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden.”
“These false statements implicate Joe Biden’s knowledge of and role in his family’s influence peddling schemes and appear to be a calculated effort to shield Joe Biden from the impeachment inquiry.”
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Back in March, Chairman Comer’s impeachment efforts in tatters, ABC News reported criminal referrals might be his “exit strategy.”
“At the end of the day, what does accountability look like? It looks like criminal referrals. It looks like referring people to the Department of Justice,” Comer said.
“The notion of issuing criminal referrals,” ABC added, “as part of the probe has gained traction among senior Republicans on Capitol Hill as the prospects of impeaching President Biden have dulled, multiple sources told ABC News, with one congressional Republican bluntly describing the move as an “exit strategy.”
See the letter below or at this link.
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