House Oversight chair admits GOP can’t back up Biden bribery accusations

Republicans still haven’t produced evidence of any illegal behaviour by President Joe Biden

The chairman of the House Oversight Committee on Monday said he and his colleagues still lack evidence proving that President Joe Biden took bribes while he was vice president during the Obama administration, despite months of investigation into his son, Hunter Biden.

Representative James Comer made the embarrassing admission during an appearance on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s eponymous nightly programme alongside Representative Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

Comer was asked about the evidence presented to the committee by Devon Archer, a convicted fraudster who had a three-year business relationship with the president’s son, during closed-door testimony on Monday.

Republicans had hoped that Archer, who is due to start a year-and-a-day prison sentence after being convicted of conspiring to defraud a Native American tribe in 2019, would confirm an as-yet uncorroborated allegation made by an alleged FBI informant who claimed that the president and his son each pocketed a $5m bribe from a Ukrainian energy executive who’d also hired Hunter Biden to serve on the board of the company he’d founded, Burisma.

Asked whether he would be able to prove the outrageous claim about the president, Mr Comer hesitated.

Pressed further by Hannity, he finally replied: “I sure hope so. And I do believe that there’s a lot of smoke and when there’s smoke, there’s fire”.

No evidence has emerged to support the allegations, which first gained traction in Republican circles when former president Donald Trump attempted to use US military aid to blackmail Ukraine’s president into announcing sham investigations into the Bidens on the eve of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.

According to New York Representative Daniel Goldman, Archer, the former business associate of the president’s son, said Hunter Biden had a habit of putting his father on speakerphone during meetings with potential business partners, but he stressed that the then-vice president never discussed any business matters and only answered the phone to say hello to his son and engage in general pleasantries.