James Comer is demanding answers from the Biden family associate behind the Chinese payments

Investigators are looking into an associate of Hunter Biden behind a series of payments to members of the Biden family after the associate received $3 million from a Chinese energy company.

House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer is requesting that Rob Walker appear before the panel for a classified interview following the release of bank records that revealed suspicious payments months after President Biden ended his term as vice president.

“The committee has identified you as a key witness in this case and has reviewed evidence that you received millions of dollars from a Chinese energy company and elsewhere,” Mr. Comer wrote in a letter to Mr. Walker on Friday.

Bank records obtained by the committee show several payments to companies linked to President Biden’s brother James Biden, son Hunter Biden and daughter-in-law Halley Biden within three months from Mr. Walker’s campaign after he received a multimillion-dollar payment from China’s State Energy HK Ltd. in March 2017

The committee also found several payments to an unknown account identified only as “Biden.”

Mr. Walker owns Robinson Walker LLC, which controlled the account to which he received the wire transfer.

The details were released by the committee in a memo on Thursday.

“These records show that all three parties likely received a third of the money from China, and it’s unclear what services were provided in return,” said Mr. Comer, Republican of Kentucky. “The Oversight Committee has many questions for Rob Walker, and we look forward to hearing from the American people.”

The committee memo also noted that a company associated with James Gilliar, another Biden family partner, received more than $1 million from Mr. Walker’s business account on March 2, 2017, the day after the Chinese wire transfer.

The memo said the committee’s investigators were particularly concerned about “why Hallie Biden, who has been publicly reported to have worked as a school counselor, was receiving money” from Mr. Walker’s business.

Hallie Biden is the widow of Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015. After Beau’s death, she became romantically involved with her brother-in-law, Hunter Biden.

A spokesman for Hunter Biden’s legal team dismissed the memo as baseless.

“Hunter Biden, a private citizen with full rights to run his own business, joined several business associates in seeking a joint venture with a private, legitimate energy company in China,” the spokesman said. “As part of this joint venture, Hunter received his portion of the bona fide start-up funds, which he shared with his uncle James Biden and Haley Biden, with whom he was involved at the time, and split the costs.”

The White House also rejected the memo.

“Instead of making outrageous attacks on the president’s family, perhaps House Republicans should focus on working with the president to get results for American families on important priorities like lowering costs and strengthening health care,” White’s spokesman said. at home Jan Sams.

Details of the payment were revealed in bank statements obtained by the committee in response to a recent subpoena issued to Bank of America. The committee subpoenaed more than a decade of Hunter Biden business records.

Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, one of the top Democrats on the committee, disclosed the subpoena on Feb. 27 in a scathing letter accusing Republicans of conducting a one-sided investigation into the Biden family. He accused Republicans of overlooking alleged conflicts of interest and foreign influence under President Donald Trump.

Mr. Comer justified the subpoena by saying that “until 2017, members of the Biden family and their associates, including [Rob] Walker, have formed a joint venture with the management of CEFC China.

CEFC China is a defunct Chinese energy conglomerate believed to be affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party.

“Democrats characterized our subpoena as seeking information about Papa John’s and Starbucks, but they failed to mention the records we obtained documenting the business schemes of the Biden family,” Mr Comer said on Thursday. “Over several years, members of the Biden family and their companies received more than $1.3 million in payments from accounts linked to their associate Rob Walker.”

Mr. Comer has made the Biden family’s financial dealings the centerpiece of an investigation into a long trail of business ventures involving the president and his son.

Mr. Comer said Tuesday that the Treasury Department had begun turning over documents related to the investigation after a standoff with committee Republicans.

Committee Republicans say the Treasury Department maintains nearly 150 suspicious activity reports related to Hunter Biden. Suspicious activity reports give banks a mechanism to flag transactions for the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Republicans have been negotiating with the Treasury Department for months without success to get more information about suspicious financial transactions linked to Hunter Biden, which US banks have flagged as suspicious.

Mr. Comer accused the agency of obstructing the investigation into the Biden family by refusing to turn over suspicious activity reports. He said such reports have been available to members of Congress for decades.

In a November report detailing Hunter Biden’s massive business dealings that have raised concerns for years about potential influence peddling, the Republican committee cited a publicly available suspicious activity report detailing “93 wiretapping between 02/03/2014 and 08/02 /2019 for a total of $2,461,962.60” between Biden staff and “a Shanghai investment fund controlled by the Bank of China.”

Hunter Biden, who served on the board of directors of a Ukrainian gas company, also made deals with energy tycoons linked to the Chinese Communist Party and is alleged to have taken more than $3 million from a Russian businesswoman who is the widow of a former Moscow mayor .