WASHINGTON ― Hunter Biden won’t sit as a witness in a hearing related to the Republican-led impeachment inquiry into his father, his lawyer said Wednesday.
Republicans had asked President Joe Biden’s son to join a public hearing later this month alongside his former business associates, including one who claimed that the younger Biden ripped him off and another who is currently in federal prison.
Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said in a letter to Republicans that “even if that hearing was a legitimate exercise of congressional authority, neither Mr. Biden nor I can attend because of a court hearing the very next day in California.”
The president’s son faces federal charges of failing to pay his taxes on time in California, as well as charges in Delaware of illegally owning a firearm when he was addicted crack cocaine in 2018.
House oversight committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said that the hearing would still take place.
“Next week’s hearing with Hunter Biden and his associates is moving forward, and we fully expect Hunter Biden to participate,” Comer said. “The American people demand the truth and accountability for the Bidens’ corruption.”
Republicans have claimed that Biden essentially sold access to his father by participating in lucrative business deals with foreign nationals from Ukraine and China. They’ve also claimed that Joe Biden actively participated in his son’s business, though they’ve struggled to substantiate the accusation even after sifting through Hunter Biden’s bank records, looking through his laptop and interviewing him during a private deposition last month.
Hunter Biden had previously demanded a public hearing and refused to sit for a private deposition, but wound up changing his mind and talking to lawmakers for several hours.
Biden said during that interview that his father wasn’t involved in his work: “Not while I was a practicing lawyer, not in my investments or transactions domestic or international, not as a board member, and not as an artist. Never.”
The younger Biden did make a surprise appearance at a January hearing on holding him in contempt of Congress after he refused to testify in the impeachment inquiry. Lawmakers shouted at him and, after he left, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) displayed compromising photos of Biden that were taken from his laptop.
A key piece of evidence in the impeachment case ― an FBI informant’s claim that he’d been told of bribes paid to the Bidens by a Ukrainian oligarch ― went up in smoke last month after the informant was arrested and charged with making a false statement.
Several Republican lawmakers have said it’s unlikely that the House will vote to impeach Joe Biden based on the evidence gathered in their inquiry so far, but Comer scheduled a public hearing for March 20 and demanded that Hunter Biden attend.
Lowell’s letter on Wednesday, a thousand-word diatribe against Comer, makes it seem unlikely that Hunter Biden will return to Capitol Hill. “Your blatant planned-for-media event is not a proper proceeding but an obvious attempt to throw a Hail Mary pass after the game has ended,” the letter said.
