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Today on the Ben Domenech podcast, Ben sits down with the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Republican Kentucky Congressman Jim Comer. Coming up right after this.
Reporting live from under my blanket, I'm Susan Curtis with Duncan at Home. Breaking news, pumpkin spice iced and hot coffees are back. I'll pass it to Mr. Curtis with his blanket for the full story. That is so right, Susan. You know, it's never too early to get in a spicy mood. I'm talking cinnamony goodness that's so tasty, people don't want to leave their blankets either. Back to you. No, back to you. All you.
The home with Dunkin' Pumpkin Spice is where you want to be. This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan.
a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu. Congressman, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. My pleasure.
Well, this is a particularly good time. I know we've been trying to talk for a while to have a conversation given the latest announcements regarding Hunter Biden. And I don't want to spend our whole time talking about that, but I'd like to get your reaction to it. And I'd like you to clarify one thing for me. The comments from Hunter Biden's camp that came out said, you know, we view this, we understand this matter to be resolved.
And yet then you had this comment that came out from the Weiss camp that said this is an ongoing investigation. So which is it from your perspective? Is it ongoing or have they resolved it so that they can't use the ongoing excuse anymore? Well, unfortunately, that's what we're trying to find out. I met with Jim Jordan last night. We're working on that.
a mechanism to where we can force the U.S. Attorney Weiss to tell us exactly whether or not his investigation is concluded or not. But, you know, you asked about my reaction. I'm not surprised. I've predicted this for a long time. It's been very clear to me that what the Department of Justice was trying to do was run out the statute of limitations. Many of the money laundering schemes that
Many of the shell corporations that were formed had five-year statutes of limitations. It shouldn't take over six years to convict someone of failing to pay over a million dollars in taxes for two years. That's obvious. There was a million dollars of taxable income where he had a W-2 or a 1099 or something that showed he owed the taxes and he didn't pay it. So, you know, a minimum wage employee in H&R Block
could have audited that. There wasn't any effort by the Department of Justice to investigate any of the wrongdoing. We've already brought out, as you know, on the House Oversight Committee, that the president's son, at the very least his son, has been involved in money laundering, racketeering, wire fraud, and potentially being an unregistered foreign agent. That years and years, decades of jail time with all of those felonies.
But then to see that they waited and tried to run the statute of limitations clock out to get him out.
Three little misdemeanors. It's a joke. It's an example of a two-tier system of justice. And the reason we're concerned about whether or not the investigation is ongoing isn't because I'm depending on the Department of Justice or the U.S. Attorney in Delaware to do anything productive or meaningful with respect to investigating the Bidens. It's because they're using that as an excuse why they can't turn over the form immediately.
1023s or the suspicious activity reports that shows the banks said that Bidens were money laundering. I would love to show that evidence to the American people, but they say, oh, you can't because there's an ongoing investigation. You know, that last thing that you mentioned there about failing to register as a foreign agent.
That's obviously something that is being enforced to a much higher degree than it used to be in Washington these days. A lot of folks are going to a lot of lawyers are making a lot of money advising a lot of people about that right now. It seems shocking to me that that's something that everyone's just breezing by.
in terms of the media coverage of this. I realize that they're all in the tank for the Bidens, that they're just getting their marching orders from the White House, whether officially or unofficially, in saying like, oh, this is all resolved, this is all over. Wait a minute. We know certain facts here in terms of the things that Hunter was being paid to do, whether he did them or not.
that would seem to necessitate a filing, a fair filing that, you know, simply as a matter of course, is that something that you're going to let be swept under the rug? How do we sort of enforce something on that grounds to get answers about why that was never part of this?
Absolutely. And I'm sure in the end, that'll be part of the criminal referrals that we issue, that hopefully when we have a fair and credible attorney general, something will be done. Look, it's important that we enforce the federal, the foreign agents laws, because if we don't, China is going to come in and start buying off family members of every politician, cabinet secretary and decision making bureaucrat in this town.
So it's imperative that if anybody's taking money from a foreign entity, that they register. That's all about being transparent and being ethical. But more than anything, being transparent. So when you look at the money the Bidens have taken in that we've already disclosed, the money from China and Romania. And remember, we haven't even gotten to Ukraine, Russia and the Middle East yet or Africa.
But just these two countries, Romania and China, either one or two things happen. Either the president of the United States or then Vice President Joe Biden did something of value, which is illegal as hell. And then the foreign nationals laundered the money through the Biden show companies to the Biden family members. Either Joe Biden did something illegal or Biden.
If Joe Biden's telling the truth, which I don't think very many people believe that, that he had no knowledge of his family's business dealings, then the president's son was a foreign agent. Yeah. There's no option C. It's either option A, Joe Biden did something, or B, Hunter Biden did something. If Hunter Biden did it, then he's a foreign agent and unregistered, and that's a felony. That's about a decade of prison time. Or Joe Biden...
committed some type of treasonous act by taking a bribe. The argument I think that some people would make, including some Republicans, would be that, look, I do think that this family has corruption issues, that foreign entities certainly tried to buy the president via his son in the ways that a lot of these countries, frankly, try to do in other parts of the world.
but I'm not convinced that Joe Biden actually did anything because of it, that there wasn't something at the end of it. And that makes me less concerned, you know, about this. I certainly have heard that, you know, from a number of different independent voters, you know, who I talked to. What's your response to something like that? Where basically you say, Hey, look, this looks bad, but I don't think that Joe Biden did anything. So I'm less likely to care about it. Well,
You have to ask yourself, how are we finding these shell companies and bank accounts? Because if you look at the Form 1023, the oligarch who alleges that he bribed the Bidens bragged that no one investigating this would ever find it because of the maze of banks that they used to funnel the money. This was years before we brought out the fact that the Bidens created all these shell companies and that they were laundering money through banks from these shell companies.
The people, the reason we found those shell companies that were never designed to be found was because there are people that the Bidens have crooked along the way that have helped us. I would say informant witnesses, people that have been advising us along the way. Now,
I've spoken with a lot of these people, and we're going to start bringing people in for deposition. Hopefully within the next two weeks, you're going to start seeing a pretty good line of people that are going to come in that were involved in the Biden shenanigans.
And they all say the same thing. There's consistency with what they say. Joe Biden was very involved. He was front and center. He was the big guy. And he knew that the only way for the family to receive money was to promise things to these foreign nationals. So we believe there are specific decisions that were made while Joe Biden was vice president pertaining to foreign aid and decisions that Joe Biden's made while he was president.
that were paybacks for the people in these foreign countries
that we're sending the Biden family members money. So I just want to hone in on that. We're confident that we're going to be able to tie this in with Joe Biden. So you believe you're going to be very, you're very confident that you're going to be able to tie it in, not just with things that happened before, but things that happened during this presidency. If the people that have been advising us, and they've advised us well on bank accounts and shell companies, remember, no one thought we'd ever find anything because, let's face it, no congressional investigation in history has ever really found anything.
I appreciate your candor, yes. It was when you had a media. No one would have known about Richard Nixon if you hadn't had Bob Woodward out there scratching around, digging around. We don't have that now. This media is bought and paid for by liberal activists, and they just copy and paste whatever the White House sends them.
But if these people, now that they're going to have an opportunity to come and testify, they're going to have an opportunity to come and do depositions. If they tell us 25% under oath of what they've said in private, then I think that there's going to be a pretty clear link between Joe Biden and the money that his family's received from foreign nationals all over the planet. More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this. It's been interesting to see
the different attitudes on the left about the influence that money can have. For instance, there is currently this dark money campaign being run through ProPublica, essentially laundered through ProPublica, backed by a number of different Democrat donors trying to essentially undermine the Supreme Court, go after Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito and others.
uh, for taking basically fishing trips and things like that, where, you know, they didn't have to pay to go and stay at a resort and fish with, you know, rich guys who, you know, the, the implication from ProPublica being that a fishing trip can be enough to, to buy a Supreme court justice who, you know, serves, uh, for, uh, you know, as long as they want for their entire life. Um,
And yet the flip side of that is they they seem to argue out the other side of their mouth that, you know, millions of dollars to under Biden doesn't do anything. It doesn't mean anything. It's just kind of amusing to me that they, you know, they think they think that you can something something as small as that, you know, can can can buy a justice. But, you know, millions of dollars, it just seems to be so hypocritical to me.
But I do think that there is a gap between the work that you're doing, which I agree is very important, and the American public's understanding of it.
And so I wonder, in terms of what you're telling your colleagues about how to talk about this, how to talk about it openly and fairly and being factual in terms of the statements they make, it does seem like every time they get access to some new document, every time that they're able to actually see something, even if it's heavily redacted, they come out with their eyes big as saucers basically saying, you know, I can't believe what I'm seeing. Right.
But that doesn't necessarily outside of the cohort of folks who listen to this podcast, who watch Fox, who watch, you know, and read a lot of things that come from conservative media or certainly independent media that doesn't have that kind of legacy hold from the Democratic Party. Other than that, there's not a lot of people out there who understand what's really going on. How can you change that? I just keep.
being transparent with the media. I had a press conference, an impromptu press conference yesterday after I looked at the heavily redacted 1023s that the FBI said didn't exist three weeks ago that they brought in that showed allegations of Joe Biden accepting a bribe. And I got on the press corps. I'm like, do you all not have
any curiosity as to how all this money magically flowed through these shell companies that the Bidens created that ended up in nine different Biden family member bank accounts, including the president's granddaughter, who was in college at the time? Is there not any curiosity as to what went on here? So, you know, you look and slowly CBS News.
is starting to talk about this. Catherine Herridge, who ironically is a former Fox reporter, is all over this. You've got CNN, depending on the day, they're at least open to it. They're not as bad as MSNBC attacks me for having the audacity to investigate the most ethical president in American history, Joe Biden, right? So it's...
It's tough. It's tougher to answer your question. The media is worse than I thought, but we're still going to continue to present facts. And, you know, I mentioned this in on an interview and the liberals tried to spin it in a false narrative that I was talking about polls for politics.
The polling shows the American people suspect that Joe Biden accepted a bribe. Oh, the polling suggesting the average American is keeping up. And I think that thankfully, a majority of Americans get their news from sources outside of the Washington Post, New York Times and MSNBC. The podcasts are really doing a good job on this. You've got, you know, alternative sources of media, right?
And I think that the one thing that Democrats and
Republicans, liberals, and conservatives agree on is they detest public corruption. And everyone knows it doesn't make sense for the family members, non-family members of the Bidens, to receive money wired through shell companies from foreign nationals in China and Romania. So I think there's more people paying attention than the mainstream media will admit. And I don't think that
I don't think we need to get discouraged that the average people aren't keeping up with it. Just to bolster your point there, you saw that reaction a couple of weeks ago from John Kirby from behind the podium, behind the lectern at the White House, when he was asked about the recent poll data showing the majority of Americans, in fact, I believe it was 53%, believe that the president is corrupt or has accepted bribes.
And he reacted with shock. And it was and I think that shock was legitimate because I think that's probably something that he didn't see or had not had any reason to to see. But but if you actually do look at the poll data, there is, I think, a very widespread sort of feeling that, you know, this is this guy. There's some real questions about corruption associated with it when it comes to winning elections.
Uh, in, uh, 2024, you know, one of the things that we learned is that, you know, a lot of people who won were folks who focused on, uh,
uh, on outcomes on delivering for their States, you know, their, their, uh, districts, their communities, et cetera. Uh, and a lot of people who lost were people who were either hung up on arguing about the 2020 election, uh, or hung up about, you know, arguing about things unrelated to, you know, uh, to policy or to what they plan to do, how they were going to deliver for the people.
How can you do both? How can you make sure that this is an item of investigation, that you continue into an election year in a responsible manner and get to the bottom of it? And yet also stress to the American people, hey, we're not just about, you know, investing, investigating Joe Biden for the rest of his life. We're about other things, too. Right. Now, I think that's a great, great point with respect to.
What I try to tell my members on the oversight committee, and I have a very passionate group of committee members on my committee, that the Democrats like to attack. And they try to say that this isn't a credible investigation because we have certain members that are firebrands on the committee.
If you go back to December when I announced in a press conference we were going to investigate the Biden family, I said we were going to follow the money. And this was going to be a transparent investigation. And I was only going to present evidence. It wasn't going to be like Adam Schiff. We were going to restore credibility in congressional investigation.
So when I say there's 20 shell companies that the Bidens created to launder money, I have a backdrop that has the exact names of those 20 shell companies. When I say the Bidens accepted money from foreign nationals, I have copies of the bank record. So we're trying to be factual. And I tell the members of...
This is about Joe Biden. It's not about Hunter Biden. It was never about Hunter Biden. It's about Joe Biden. It has nothing to do with Donald Trump. And you see the Democrats, just with the FBI document, remember the FBI tried to cover up. And the reason the whistleblowers came forward and told Grassley and me about the Form 1023 alleging Joe Biden took a bribe is because they were frustrated. The whistleblowers, FBI,
They were frustrated that the FBI never investigated it. They never investigated it. So they don't know whether it's true or not. All they know is the FBI covered it up. And so I think the American people that are paying attention, I think more are paying attention, not as many as I would like, but I think over a majority of Americans are paying attention, realize that the Department of Justice,
And the FBI has not investigated the Biden, whether that's because they hate Trump so bad or whether that's because they don't want to get involved in another election or whether they're covered up because they've already waited too late and the statute of limitations has expired and a bunch of this stuff.
Whatever reason, they haven't investigated. The only entity out there in the world that's investigating it is the Oversight Committee. And it's important, when I talk to the conference about messaging, that we say this is about following the money with Joe Biden. We're not getting sidetracked on the prostitutes that...
That Hunter Biden ball, we're not getting sidetracked on the pictures on the Internet. The Daily Mail can handle that well into itself. It's about the money. And then I think that we've got to be truthful with the American people. We are accomplishing our legislative agenda.
The problem is that we have only one third of the equation in Washington. The Democrats control the Senate and the Democrat controls the White House. We're passing an agenda. And I know people are frustrated because Joe Biden hasn't signed our good conservative legislation into law. But there's really no way to do that. Yeah. With the Democrat Senate and the Democrat White House. Well, so I want to ask you just with the time we have left.
You obviously are regularly interacting with Chris Wray, the FBI, other Department of Justice officials. The concern that I have is that there's a there's a portion of the Republican electorate that basically wants to burn the whole thing down and start start from scratch. You know, they just don't think that we can save these institutions. They view them as being utterly politicized, etc.,
That type of extreme take from my perspective historically, you know haven't been around Washington for quite a while that take tends to lose Because it's it's viewed as too extreme and people don't want to live in an America that doesn't have an FBI or doesn't Have a functioning Department of Justice. That's not what the people actually want They want one that actually works and this one doesn't work well, even when it's trying to do its job from my perspective and
So how can you fix that problem and how can you get back to a point? I've heard certain suggestions of getting back to a point where there's less of a unified entity there that perhaps you split things up in different ways. You have a very clear assignment for the FBI that takes it away potentially from some of these foreign cases. What's your preferred approach to get back to an FBI and a DOJ that Americans can have confidence in?
We're going to have to significantly reform the DOJ and the FBI. I think that starts by forcing new leadership at the top. The only way we're going to be able to do that is to specifically cut the funding and use what's called the Hallman Rule to cut the funding of the salaries down to $1. That's what the rule allows, the Hallman Rule, of the top leadership in both the DOJ and the FBI.
get new people in there, and then reform the FBI. We're going to have to reform the way that they operate. Unfortunately, there's a majority of Americans that have lost confidence in the FBI. And I agree with you. We need an FBI, but we need a reformed FBI. And if the FBI is doing good work in a courtroom in the South or in Kentucky, where I reside,
And they come and they say, well, this witness lied to us. Lying to the FBI is one of the main tools in the toolbox, how they get people. A jury's not going to believe that. They're going to believe the drug dealer over the FBI at this point. That's how bad the FBI has lost credibility. So the FBI is going to have to start recording conversations like law enforcement. The FBI is going to have to start wearing body cameras when they go in and raid, whether tomorrow.
whether tomorrow Largo or whether they raid some crack house in Chicago.
We're going to have to treat the FBI like normal law enforcement. They're going to lose all their privileges in this new reform because they squandered it. We're going to have to reform the FISA process. They've lost confidence in that. And we're going to have to be very specific as to who provides oversight over the FBI. Right now, the FBI thinks they're immune to oversight. That's going to change. There's going to be some committee, whether it's my committee, the Oversight Committee, or Jim Jordan's committee, Judiciary Committee, somebody...
Or the Intelligence Committee. Somebody's going to have to provide oversight, and they're going to have to account for how they spend money, and they're going to have to share information
with investigators as to why or why not they can't provide information. So I think there's going to have to be some significant reforms, and I think that's a priority for this House Republican majority, and it's going to start in September. We're going to have to utilize the power of the purse and hold them accountable with their budgets.
Well, look, I think that this group of Republicans that you're part of has already proved that they're able to hold together and do a lot more than anybody in Washington really expected them to. And I certainly hope that on this count, you're able to hold together because I think it's of the utmost importance. We can't keep going in this direction. We can't have an FBI that doesn't think it works for America. So thank you so much for taking the time to join me today, Congressman. A pleasure to speak with you. And I know you're a very busy man. So thanks for taking the time. Thanks for having me. Enjoyed it.
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