Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chairman of the Republican-led House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, has indicated his committee will scrutinize President Joe Biden’s family’s finances and will trace the flow of money into the Penn Biden Center, where documents with classified markings were recently discovered.
“We’re trying to trace the money,” Comer said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “We’ll be looking at bank statements. We’ll be looking at bank violations.”
Comer’s comments come after the Biden administration recently announced that potentially classified documents were found at the Penn Biden Center in November. Biden established the Penn Biden Center with the University of Pennsylvania after his time as vice president ended in 2017.
Potentially classified documents have also been found at Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home after three separate searches in December and January.
Comer indicated that he would link investigations into these recent document discoveries with other investigations into Biden and his family, including his son Hunter Biden.
Chinese Donations to UPenn
The University of Pennsylvania has received tens of millions of dollars in donations from Chinese sources in recent years, much of which has been donated to the university anonymously.
According to a 2020 complaint by the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), the university has received $70 million from China since 2017, of which the donors of $22 million were listed as “Anonymous.” Paul Kamenar, an attorney for the NLPC, recently said a single donation of $14.5 million was given to the university in 2018 when the Penn Biden center opened. Kamenar said money continued to flow into the university when Biden announced he was running for the presidency in 2019.
In a January 2021 letter (pdf) to the university, Comer noted that in the three years prior to announcing the formation of the Penn Biden Center in February of 2017, the University of Pennsylvania had received $21 million in donations from Chinese sources. In the three years following that announcement, Comer said the school had taken in $72 million in Chinese donations to the school, an increase of $51 million for a similar span of time.
In another letter last week, Comer called on the university to release all documents and communications related to donations originating from China to the university of the Penn Biden Center, all documents and communications related to soliciting donations for the Penn Biden Center, a list of who had access to the Penn Biden Center, and a visitor log of the center.
“That’s the next phase of our investigation because we’re trying to figure out who these anonymous sources are that are sending so much money to the Biden family schemes—the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Hunter Biden’s artwork,” Comer told the Examiner.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) has made calls to investigate Chinese donations to the University of Pennsylvania a bipartisan issue. In a Monday interview with Fox News, Khanna said Congress needs to know if the university and the Penn Biden Center are benefitting through payments from the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
“We need to know what the facts are, who was the money coming from, was it coming from private individuals, was it coming from people with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, what was the purpose of the funding, was it connected in any way to the Penn Center?” Khanna said.
Suspicious Activity Reports
In his comments to the Examiner, Comer said his committee is looking for bank statements and bank violations relating to the Biden family.
In November 2022, after Republicans won control of the House, Comer and other Republican lawmakers announced they would investigate the Biden family’s foreign business dealings. During a press conference, Comer said he had seen reports that banks had generated more than 150 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) related to transactions by members of the Biden family.
Hunter’s Access
Comer’s comments to the Examiner made clear that he will also investigate how Hunter Biden may be connected to the properties where classified documents have been found. Comer told the Examiner that there is a link between the investigations into the Biden family business and into the documents found at the Penn Biden center and at Biden’s home because Hunter Biden had “access” to those properties.
“That raises a red flag,” Comer said.
In a Jan. 13 letter to White House counsel Stuart Delery, Comer said Hunter Biden had listed the address of his father’s Wilmington, Delaware home on his driver’s license as recently as 2018.
“The Committee is concerned President Biden stored classified documents at the same location his son resided while engaging in international business deals with adversaries of the United States,” Comer wrote to Delery.
Investigation is ‘Political Stunt,’ Biden Team Says
The president’s representatives have defended his handling of classified documents, noting that the documents were in his possession by mistake and that his team had immediately notified and turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
After Attorney General Merrick Garland announced he had appointed former U.S. attorney Robert Hur as a special counsel to investigate the Biden documents, special counsel to the president Richard Sauber said “We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the President and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake.”
In a Jan. 17 call with reporters, White House spokesman Ian Sams described Republican investigative efforts as “political stunts” and criticized them for seeking investigations of Biden after having defended former President Donald Trump when FBI agents raided his home for classified documents in August.
“They’re faking outrage, even though they defended the former President’s actions,” Sams said.
