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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 President 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 continually gotten worse 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.
CNN reported: “The White House and Biden’s legal team did not previously disclose the FBI’s November search, in contrast to a search conducted by the bureau earlier this month at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware. This latest revelation raises additional questions about how transparent the White House and Biden’s legal team have been about the government’s investigation into the president’s handling of classified documents, which is now being overseen by special counsel Robert Hur.”
Earlier this month, Attorney General Merrick Garland noted, “On November 9, the FBI commenced an assessment, consistent with standard protocols, to understand whether classified information had been mishandled in violation of federal law.”
Hunter Biden, who is a recovering crack addict who has had several questionable business dealings with overseas contacts in Ukraine and China, noted in his 2021 memoir that often, Biden family members would “quarantine” in the Delaware home where the documents were located.
“The president’s classified documents scandal came after he used the FBI to raid his predecessor’s Mar-a-Lago estate to recover” similarly classified documents, Fox News added.
