Rep. James Comer criticizes U.S. attorney for not investigating Biden's dead son

Republican lawmakers invoked President Joe Biden’s late son Beau and drug deaths that happened during Donald Trump’s presidency in recent attacks on the Biden family and administration.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) and member Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) made the comments as the committee continues its search for ways to investigate the Biden presidency.

Comer has been running with the right-wing media effort to turn a laptop owned by Biden’s son Hunter into a scandal.

The Daily Beast reported that, during a Feb. 27 interview with former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, Comer lamented the fact that Beau, who died in 2015 of brain cancer, wasn’t indicted when he served as attorney general of Delaware. He blamed U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware David Weiss, who is investigating Hunter Biden, for not going after the Biden family harder:

This U.S. attorney had had an opportunity to go after the Bidens years ago. In fact, it was Beau Biden, the president’s other son, that was involved in some campaign donations from a person that got indicted, as well as Joe Biden was involved in some of these campaign donations when he was a senator, and then when he ran for president against Obama. But nothing ever happened. So I don’t know much about this U.S. attorney other than he’s had an opportunity to investigate the Bidens before and he chose not to. We all know that he’s just been silent for a long time.

According to the Daily Beast, Comer was referring to donations made by Delaware liquor executive Christopher Tigani, who in 2011 pleaded guilty to making straw donations to more than a dozen elected officials. A report resulting from an investigation by E. Norman Veasey, a special prosecutor appointed by Beau Biden, found that none of the recipients had known about the scheme, and none were ever charged.

Greene on Tuesday tweeted a video in which she blamed two fentanyl overdoses in 2020 on “this government.”

“Listen to this mother, who lost two children to fentanyl poisoning, tell the truth about both of her son’s murders because of the Biden administrations [sic] refusal to secure our border and stop the Cartel’s [sic] from murdering Americans everyday by Chinese fentanyl,” Greene tweeted with a video of testimony at a congressional hearing by Rebecca Kiessling, a Michigan woman who spoke about the death of her two sons from fentanyl poisoning.

The Detroit News reported that Kiessling’s sons died in June 2020, when Donald Trump was president and Biden was a private citizen.

After winning control of the House in the November midterms, Republicans promised to launch multiple investigations into Biden and his presidency. Observers say the probes are an effort to hurt Biden politically ahead of the 2024 election, when Biden is widely expected to run for a second term.

Polling shows, however, that this focus on investigating Biden could actually backfire on the GOP. An NBC poll in February found 55% of Americans believe House Republicans will spend too much time investigating Biden and not enough on other priorities.

Meanwhile, the results of an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll published on Feb. 22 show the president having his highest approval rating since August 2021, with 49% of registered voters approving of the job he’s doing.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.