A top Republican senator said he will soon release an interim report on the investigation he is spearheading into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
“Stay tuned. In about a week, we’re going to learn a whole lot more of Vice President Biden’s unfitness for office,” Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Senate Republicans have been long seeking information regarding Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy company that employed Hunter Biden on its board at the same time his father was serving as vice president with a key role in shaping Ukrainian policy. After the panel voted to authorize a subpoena against Blue Star Strategies, a Burisma Holdings-linked public relations firm, Johnson said in the middle of June that it turned over 2,600 pages of information to the committee.
The interim report is set to release less than two months before Election Day, with Biden, the Democratic nominee, consistently ahead of President Trump in national polls.
Democrats have complained that Johnson is running a partisan investigation to damage Biden’s election prospects. “It’s going to be hard to work to recover from the wholesale integration of the Senate and White House into the President’s political operation. A long hard slog to rebuild the legitimacy of government,” tweeted Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, on Monday.
The Trump campaign has used Hunter Biden in a number of electioneering efforts, including in a high-cost ad targeting the younger Biden over his business ties to Ukraine and China.
The ad focuses on a 2013 trip the Bidens took to Beijing and uses footage of Hunter Biden’s interview with ABC News regarding the controversy as well as photos of the family in China. In the interview, Biden denied anything improper took place on the trip.
Trump has also repeated a debunked claim that Biden had made millions of dollars from Ukraine and received $1.5 billion dollars from China despite having limited experience.
Fact-checkers say Biden had an investment deal involving the Bank of China, but Trump’s repeated figure of $1.5 billion could be exaggerated, although it is unclear by how much due to a lack of disclosures on the deal.
There’s also been no evidence of the Bidens breaking any laws, though some experts have raised concerns over ethics regarding the entire situation.
In a recent campaign stop to Warren, Michigan, Trump attacked Hunter Biden’s ties to foreign countries again as he pushed his “Made in America” initiative.
Bridge, a nonprofit news source serving Michigan, reported that Trump made a new accusation regarding Biden, telling potential voters he had played a role in selling a local auto supplier to China to help create jobs overseas. The outlet reported that the company, Henniges Automotive, did play a role in shipping jobs overseas, but it was prior to Hunter Biden’s involvement with them.
Still, the accusation was quickly picked up by right-wing news site Breitbart and Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who tweeted “like father, like son,” referring to shipping manufacturing jobs overseas.
The GOP-led investigation into the Bidens began around the time Democrats pursued an impeachment investigation into Trump, who was accused of pressuring Kyiv to look into the Bidens’ activities in the country while leveraging nearly $400 in military aid and a White House meeting.
A whistleblower complaint, which raised concerns about Trump pressing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into whether Joe Biden improperly used his position as vice president to pressure Ukraine to fire a top prosecutor to protect his son from an investigation into Burisma, was the focus of the proceedings by the Democrat-controlled House.
Trump was impeached by the House on two Ukraine-related charges in December but was acquitted in February by the GOP-led Senate.
The Biden campaign has dismissed the investigation as an attempt to “smear” the Democratic nominee.
