Democrats’ evolving defense of President Joe Biden and his family’s business activities speaks volumes about where the congressional investigation that is now an impeachment inquiry is going, says Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga.
“If the evidence wasn’t legitimate evidence, they would still be at their very first position,” Clyde, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Wednesday. “But they are not because the evidence has refuted their position. It’s going to refute their position all the way to the point of legitimate articles of impeachment.”
Though not a member of the committees involved in the Biden impeachment inquiry, Clyde has closely followed the Biden probe, and his website includes a page on the “Biden Crime Family Investigation.”
When the probe began, the president asserted that he never spoke with his son Hunter or other family members about business deals. However, new evidence emerged that several times in 2014 and 2015, then-Vice President Biden dined or held conference calls more than a dozen times with Hunter Biden’s business partners. In July, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “The president was never in business with his son.”
Later, the Democrats’ defense shifted to claiming that the president never benefited directly from his son’s business deals. The House Oversight and Accountability Committee produced two checks–one for $200,000 another for $40,000–labeled “loan repayment” from presidential brother James Biden–traced to business ventures. After this, Democrats pivoted to stress that the payments came in 2018 when Biden did not hold public office.
Even left-leaning mainstream media outlets noted that President Biden’s denials don’t match reality.
“It tells you everything you need to know right there. They are seeing that the evidence is concrete, it is hard evidence, it is legitimate evidence,” Clyde said. “It is irrefutable evidence. They are doing everything they can to try to minimize this.”
The House Oversight and Accountability Committee issued subpoenas on Wednesday to compel the testimony of Hunter Biden and James Biden. This comes after numerous interviews and depositions taken on the record but not in public hearings, with Biden associates such as Devon Archer.
Clyde, a 28-year Navy veteran with three combat deployments in Kuwait and Iraq, earned a master’s in corporate finance and entrepreneurship from the University of Georgia and established the company Clyde Armory in 1991, which grew into a nationwide firearms business.
“In the Navy we say ‘stand by for heavy rolls when the ship is in the storm,’” Clyde said, a reference meaning the boat is about to take on heavy seas.
He didn’t give a timeline, but said the House Oversight and Accountability Committee subpoena of Hunter Biden and James Biden suggests the evidence is “close to a pinnacle point.”
“I think what you are seeing is we are getting close to a wrap-up here,” Clyde said. “They wouldn’t be sending subpoenas to the Biden family until they have done all the other folks. That’s the way investigations work. You get the folks at the bottom of the totem pole first and then you move on up the totem pole. Sending subpoenas to the Biden family, that’s getting to the top of the totem pole.”
In a statement Wednesday, House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said the committee has followed the money to see what the president knew.
“Now, the House Oversight Committee is going to bring in members of the Biden family and their associates to question them on this record of evidence,” Comer said. “Unlike the many lies President Biden told the American people about his family’s business schemes, bank records don’t lie. These records reveal how the Bidens sold Joe Biden around the world to benefit the Biden family, including Joe Biden himself, to the detriment of U.S. interests.”
The White House dismissed the subpoena of Biden family members on Wednesday.
“This is an investigation that has been going on for a year now and has turned up zero evidence of wrongdoing by the president because there is none,” Jean-Pierre told reporters Wednesday. “But Republicans continue to double down on a baseless—a baseless smear campaign against the president and his family.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.,the ranking member of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, blamed former President Donald Trump for the impeachment and also tied a Democrat victory in Comer’s home state of Kentucky with what he called a failed impeachment effort.
“Even after yesterday’s electoral pasting, even after their buffoonish impeachment hearing in which their own witnesses testified that they saw no crime at all, much less evidence of an impeachable offense, in nine months of the majority’s investigation of President Biden, and even after an interview in which Special Counsel David Weiss thoroughly debunked Republicans’ empty claims of political interference in the Hunter Biden investigation, Chairman Comer has decided what he needs to jump-start this epic flop of an investigation is a big pile of subpoenas and interview requests, all to private citizens,” Raskin said in a statement.
Clyde pointing to Biden family shell companies that have taken in millions from countries such as China, Russia, Ukraine, Romania and Kazakhstan.
“Unfortunately, we have to do this,” Clyde said of the inquiry. “From the evidence that has come from the Oversight Committee and the Ways and Means Committee and the Judiciary Committee, he [Biden] is leveraging United States tax dollars to enrich him and his family. That is bribery, that is extortion, and we cannot allow that in the executive branch. So, I am looking forward to the end of the impeachment inquiry. I believe it will result in articles of impeachment.”
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