WASHINGTON — The Republican-led House Oversight Committee said Wednesday Hunter Biden He has been invited to testify publicly at hearings this month on the GOP’s impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden.
It has not been announced whether the president’s son has agreed to participate in the court session on March 20. Sources said NBC News As of Monday this week, the two sides had not discussed a possible date for public testimony.
A representative of Hunter Biden’s legal team said Wednesday that they would respond in writing to the committee’s invitation.
Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer said in a statement Wednesday that, given the president’s son’s “repeated calls for a public hearing, I fully expect Hunter Biden to attend the March 20th scheduled Oversight Committee hearing along with Biden family business associates.”
Comer, R-Ky., said the hearing will “examine inconsistencies between witness statements to get the truth for the American people.”
The committee also invited Devon Archer, Jason Galanis and Tony Bobulinski — former business partners of Hunter Biden — to testify on March 20.
Hunter Biden, 54, ensureed testimony During a closed-door deposition last week on Capitol Hill, she repeatedly denied that her father had anything to do with her business dealings.
“My father was never involved in my business. I never asked my father to take care of my business. “My father has never benefited from my business and I have never asked anyone – or my father – to do anything for the benefit of anyone I do business with,” he said. transcript from sediment.
Biden also testified that his relationship with Bobulinski ended badly when he turned down a business deal. He called Bobulinsky “incompetent and stupid” and a “bitter, bitter man.”
Bobulinski told the committee in testimony last month that the only reason Hunter Biden was able to make millions from various outside sources was because his father was vice president at the time.
Republicans also pointed to the testimony of Archer, another former co-worker of Biden, who testified that he and his co-workers put his father on speaker phone about 20 times.
“He can’t remember the times I put my dad on speaker phone while he was at dinner or a social event, so that means for 10 years, twice a year, my dad would call me and I’d be in the middle of dinner and I’d always answer his call. I always respond to his call based on my life experience,” Biden told committees last month, citing his father’s loss of his first wife and two children.
One of the invited witnesses, Galanis, is unlikely to appear in person — he is serving 14 years in prison for two multimillion-dollar fraud schemes. The House committees leading the impeachment inquiry interviewed him on February 23 from the federal prison camp in Montgomery, Alabama.
Archer was convicted of one of Galani’s plots and sentenced to a little over a year in prison. He lost his appeal sent the sentence to the Supreme Court in January, but has not yet started serving his sentence, the judge in the case is evaluating his request for a review of the sentence.
The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, cracked the GOP’s witness lineup for the upcoming hearings.
“It appears that Chairman Comer’s best witnesses include a in federal custody ‘serial cheater‘ and will be a bitterly disappointed business partner Cooperating with the Trump campaignRaskin said in the statement, which included links to news articles about Galanis and Bobulinski. “Unfortunately for Chairman Comer, even these dubious witnesses have already testified that they have no evidence that Joe Biden took any official steps to benefit Hunter Biden’s business ventures.”
“At their last audition, I challenged them to fold the circus tent, but they just came back with a three-ring circus,” he said.
A source familiar with Hunter Biden’s legal strategy said the move comes because “Comer is desperate to keep alive an impeachment inquiry that died last week while Hunter Biden was testifying for nearly 7 hours.”
The impeachment inquiry took a major hit last month when an FBI informant, who has repeatedly raised allegations of Biden family corruption by Comer and other top Republicans, was accused of lying about the allegations. Alexander SmirnovProsecutors with the office of special counsel David Weiss said the Bidens “provided false and derogatory information to the FBI,” including a false claim that officials from Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that employed Hunter Biden, paid the father and son $5. million.
Biden’s closed-door testimony on Feb. 28 came after months of heated discussions with the committee. He initially said he would be willing to testify only in open hearings, citing concerns that Republicans might take some of his testimony out of context.
GOP lawmakers were rebuffed suggests that he should testify openlyand Biden objected to a subpoena to testify behind closed doors, instead a Press Conference outside the Capitol in December.
House Republicans then called for a resolution to keep him in office Contempt of Congress. Biden surrendered After GOP lawmakers formally announced the impeachment inquiry, they issued new subpoenas.
Asked in a Feb. 28 statement whether Archer, Bobulinski and Galani had any expectation that their father might be involved in their business dealings, Hunter Biden said, “I have no expectation. When I was dealing with them, there was never a time that I remember saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to get my dad on the job,’ ‘Hey, let’s get my dad on the phone,’ ‘Hey, you know, come — you know, what can we get out of my dad?’
Rebecca Kaplan and Sarah Fitzpatrick reported from Washington, D.C., and Dareh Gregorian reported from New York.