GOP claims smoking gun in docs on Biden finances

WASHINGTON — Facing growing pressure to show progress in their investigations, House Republicans on Wednesday detailed what they say are concerning new findings about President Joe Biden’s family and their finances.

The smoking gun, according to the GOP, is recently obtained financial records connected to the president’s son Hunter Biden, brother James Biden and a growing number of associates who received millions of dollars in payments from foreign entities in China and Romania. They suggest, without evidence, that the payments were part of a wide-ranging scheme to enrich themselves off the family name.

To help them get here, Congressional Republicans relied on more than 150 suspicious activity reports as a roadmap to follow what they call the Bidens’ complicated financial money trail.

The confidential reports, called SARs for short, are often routine, with larger financial transactions automatically flagged to the government. The filing of a SARs report is not evidence on its own of misconduct.

But Rep. James Comer, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee leading the probe, said Wednesday that other types of financial records obtained through congressional subpoenas and lawsuits have now become the focus of their investigation.

The White House dismissed the whole investigation as “yet another political stunt.”

“Congressman Comer has a history of playing fast and loose with the facts and spreading baseless innuendo while refusing to conduct his so-called ‘investigations’ with legitimacy,” White House spokesperson Ian Sams said in a statement.

“This is not just about the president’s son. This is about the entire Biden family, including the president of the United States,” Comer said during an appearance Sunday on Fox News. “So we believe there are a whole lot of accounts that the IRS and the DOJ don’t know about because we don’t believe they have done a whole lot of digging in this. And we have.”

This all comes as Hunter Biden’s taxes and foreign business work are already under federal investigation, with a grand jury in Delaware reportedly making a charging decision in the next few months.

An attorney for Hunter Biden on Wednesday slammed years of Republicans’ investigations as “chasing conspiracies.”

“Today’s so-called ‘revelations’ are retread, repackaged misstatements of perfectly proper meetings and business by private citizens,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for the president’s son, said.