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House GOP advances Hunter Biden contempt resolution after fiery hearing

by Rebecca Beitsch, Emily Brooks, Mychael Schnell and Miranda Nazzaro - 01/10/24 5:41 PM ET

Two House panels separately voted to advance a contempt of Congress resolution against Hunter Biden on Wednesday, teeing up a full House vote and the potential for criminal charges for the president’s son.

The votes by the Oversight and Judiciary committees came hours after Biden made a surprise appearance in the Oversight markup, drawing a string of criticism from GOP lawmakers and sparking fiery exchanges between members.

“Hunter Biden’s willful refusal to comply with the Committees’ subpoenas is a criminal act. It constitutes contempt of Congress and warrants referral to the appropriate United States Attorney’s Office for prosecution as prescribed by law,” House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said at the start of the hearing.

“We will not provide Hunter Biden with special treatment because of his last name.”

Hunter Biden defied the subpoenas to appear for a closed-door deposition with the committees last month as part of the House GOP’s impeachment inquiry into his father, President Biden.

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He instead made an appearance on the Senate lawn on the morning of the deposition, noting an offer from Comer to “drop everything” if he wanted to appear before the committee, offering only to testify in a public setting and accusing the GOP of misrepresenting other witnesses’ closed-door testimony.

Hunter Biden on Wednesday again scuttled the committee’s plans, with his brief appearance in the Oversight hearing room causing Comer to interrupt ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) to chastise photographers snapping photos of the president’s son.

Comer said Republicans had “no idea” that Hunter Biden was going to show up during the markup, but “the Secret Service was sniffing around, so we assumed something was going to happen.”

“This was a P.R. stunt,” Comer said.

Hunter Biden was accompanied by his attorney Abbe Lowell and associate Kevin Morris, who himself is being sought as a Judiciary witness after paying Hunter Biden’s overdue taxes.

His presence, an apparent surprise to even Democrats on the panel, ignited fury from some GOP members.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) spoke to Biden directly: “You are the epitome of white privilege. Coming into the Oversight Committee, spitting in our face, ignoring a congressional subpoena to be deposed. What are you afraid of? You have no balls to come up here.”

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) would later attack Mace’s comments.

“I just can’t get over the gentlelady from South Carolina talking about white privilege. It was a spit in the face — at least of mine as a Black woman — for you to talk about what white privilege looks like, especially from that side of the aisle,” she said.

“Y’all don’t know what white privilege looks like.”

Hunter Biden exited the hearing room after about 20 minutes, just as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was speaking, with her calling him a “coward.”

Lowell, alongside a silent Biden, delivered a brief statement in a Capitol hallway, throwing Mace’s question back at Republicans.

“The Republican chairs today, then, are commandeering an unprecedented resolution to hold someone in contempt who has offered to publicly answer all their proper questions,” Lowell said. “The question there is, what are they afraid of?”

Lowell and Oversight Committee Democrats noted previous public statements from Comer indicating a willingness to talk to Hunter Biden in a public format, or any format he wanted.

But after issuing the subpoenas, Republicans said a public format, with rounds of questioning cycling between members on the panel, was insufficient for poring over reams of financial documents. They offered a public hearing at a later date, and to release the transcript of the deposition. The Republican leaders noted that initial closed-door testimony is standard for such inquiries.

“The Chairman refused to take yes for an answer from Hunter Biden,” said Raskin, the top Democrat on the Oversight panel.

“They pulled a bait-and-switch. They changed the terms of their request.”

As the hearing wound down, Comer again said Hunter Biden could testify publicly once he does a deposition.

“After the deposition, I guarantee it,” he said.

Down the hall in the Judiciary Committee hearing, Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) came under fire from several House Democrats who accused the Ohio Republican of hypocrisy after defying his own subpoena from the House Jan. 6 Select Committee in 2022.

“No seriously, is this hearing a joke? This is a committee that now cares about subpoena compliance, and we’re gonna hold somebody in contempt for subpoena compliance. That’s really interesting because, to me, it seems like you believe we all had our memories wiped 608 days ago, when you failed to honor your own subpoena,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) said, with a screen beside him showing a time tracker of “Jim Jordan’s subpoena evasion.”

Jordan shot back, arguing the “completely partisan” Jan. 6 committee “certainly could have” held him in contempt of Congress but did not because he believes they “knew it was bogus.”

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), another Judiciary member who flouted a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee, was chastised during a similar line of argument in the Oversight Committee hearing, where Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) suggested Perry and Jordan have their names added to the contempt resolution.

In a sign of the simmering tensions on the committee, Moskowitz wore a blue tie with a smurf on it during Wednesday’s markup, an apparent homage to when Comer said he looked like a smurf during a November hearing.

At another point during the Oversight hearing, Greene displayed lewd sexual images related to Hunter Biden, prompting Raskin to ask for a point of order on whether members could display “sensationalist, voyeuristic pornographic images.”

“This is not ‘The Jerry Springer Show,’” he said.

Comer said it was “appropriately censored.”

While a public rebuke of a sitting president’s son in itself would be extraordinary, a contempt of Congress resolution largely serves as a recommendation to the Justice Department, which can choose whether or not to bring charges.

The contempt legislation directs the Speaker to refer the contempt report “to an appropriate United States attorney” and calls on the Speaker to “otherwise take all appropriate action to enforce the subpoena.”

That’s a risky proposition for Biden, who is already facing felony tax charges in California, as well as charges in Delaware related to buying a weapon without disclosing drug use.

The Justice Department in the last Congress acted on just half of the contempt of Congress resolutions that were referred by the House, all by the Jan. 6 committee.

It pursued and scored convictions against both former White House strategist Steve Bannon and former White House adviser Peter Navarro, and declined to bring cases against Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows or communications guru Dan Scavino.

Still, Comer during a Tuesday appearance on Newsmax suggested any declination to prosecute Biden by the Justice Department could be part of a potential impeachment of Attorney General Merrick Garland.

House Republicans have long investigated alleged “influence peddling” by the president’s son while his father was vice president, going as far as to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Biden that has centered in large part on Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, as well as the Department of Justice’s handling of a tax crimes investigation into Hunter Biden.

Both Hunter Biden and the White House have repeatedly said that the president was not involved in his family’s foreign business activities.

In his press conference on the Senate lawn during the scheduled deposition time last month, Hunter Biden addressed the crux of the investigation into his father.

“Let me state as clearly as I can: My father was not financially involved in my business. Not as a practicing lawyer. Not as a board member of Burisma. Not in my partnership with a Chinese private businessman, not my investment at all nor abroad, and certainly not as an artist,” he said, running through a number of key aspects of the GOP probes.

Tags Abbe Lowell Hunter Biden Jamie Raskin Jasmine Crockett