OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Democrats won’t have much time to celebrate following President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address next week, according to a report on Friday.
Republicans are planning to announce a series of investigations in the immediate aftermath of a speech that many believe will be focused primarily on Biden’s perceived accomplishments thus far in his term, according to Bloomberg News.
“Republicans will launch a promised investigation and hold hearings into alleged ‘influence peddling’ by Hunter Biden and members of the Biden family,” the Western Journal noted, citing Bloomberg’s reporting. “The hearings will come at the same time news outlets traditionally focus on the president’s speech from the night before.”
“The investigation also includes alleged social media collusion regarding the suppression of information and news of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop, which contained a trove of alleged evidence of influence peddling, illicit activities, and illegal drug use, among other possible crimes,” the Western Journal report continued.
Hours after Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union Address to Congress, House Republicans will launch their promised investigation into alleged Biden family “influence peddling” https://t.co/FZ5qAomuwU
— Bloomberg (@business) February 1, 2023
President Biden is also being dogged by a classified documents scandal.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said on Tuesday that it is likely first son Hunter Biden was “in proximity” of classified documents discovered in the garage of his father’s Wilmington, Del., home recently, and that’s a potential national security issue.
Fox News reported that the Kentucky Republican is one of several House GOP members who are expressing concerns that Joe Biden’s potentially problematic possession of the documents may also have been compromised in other ways.
“We have reason to believe that Hunter Biden has had some contacts that would be of concern to our national security,” Comer told reporters in reference to documents found stored haphazardly in a garage where the president keeps his classic Corvette.
He added that, in “the beginning, the story was that the National Archive triggered the raid on Mar-a-Lago and that the administration has come back and implied that it wasn’t the National Archives that it was actually the Department of Justice.”
Continuing, Comer said Republicans in the House “want to know who triggered the raid on Mar-a-Lago,” why there was “such a difference” in how former President Trump’s classified document situation was handled compared to Vice President Mike Pence’s documents, and that GOP lawmakers are “very concerned” about “who had access to Biden’s documents.”
“With respect to the investigation we’re conducting, we have reason to believe that Hunter Biden has had some contacts that would be of concern to our national security,” Comer told reporters.
Comer also said House Republicans “want to know who had access to the documents,” “who all was involved with the president’s personal attorneys,” and if they possessed the proper security clearances to obtain and handle said documents.
“We don’t know who his personal attorneys are; we don’t know who their clients are,” Comer said. “So we just have basic questions. We’re not accusing anyone of any wrongdoing. We just want to know the facts.”
“We’re pretty certain that Hunter Biden was in the proximity of the documents,” Comer added after being pressed by Fox News.
Comer noted that Republicans are fairly certain that Hunter Biden was around the documents because “they were in the house where Hunter Biden lived for two years.”
“I wouldn’t rule out searching anywhere where certain relatives of the Biden family, who we all know, have been involved in the influence-peddling schemes,” Comer previously said in an interview with Fox News. “I wouldn’t rule out looking at their locations because this is clearly a pattern. No one believes these documents were delivered to 5 or 6 different locations once they left the Vice President’s office. Something bad is going on here.”
The classified documents scandal has worsene for the president over the past few weeks.
On Tuesday, CNN reported, for instance, that the FBI searched Biden’s private office at the Washington, D.C.-based Penn Biden Center after the president’s team contacted the National Archives to tell them that they found classified documents there in November.
An anonymous official for the Department of Justice informed CNN that there was no search warrant and the November search was done with the cooperation of the president’s legal team.
