The Hunter Biden Testimony James Comer Doesn’t Want You to See

Representative James Comer has a message for Hunter Biden: When it comes to the Biden family investigation, it’s my way or the highway. But for once, the Republican seems worried about what the target of his inquiry might have to say.

On Tuesday, the embattled first son, via his lawyer, offered to testify in a public House Oversight Committee hearing—part of an aggressive new defense strategy that his legal team has decided to adopt. Comer, who chairs the committee, has spearheaded the probe into the Bidens’ supposed criminal wrongdoing and is one of their most vocal accusers. So far, his monthslong investigation has yet to turn up any proof of malfeasance.

But despite demanding for months that Biden testify, even subpoenaing him in early November, Comer quickly rejected the offer.

“Hunter Biden is trying to play by his own rules instead of following the rules required of everyone else. That won’t stand with House Republicans,” Comer said in a statement on X (formerly Twitter).

“Our lawfully issued subpoena to Hunter Biden requires him to appear for a deposition on December 13. We expect full cooperation with our subpoena for a deposition but also agree that Hunter Biden should have the opportunity to testify in a public setting at a future date.”

Comer’s response is likely to get pushback from Biden’s legal team. Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell accused Comer in a letter on Tuesday of using “closed-door sessions to manipulate, even distort the facts and misinform the public.”

Notably, Comer had also said he would testify about his own business dealings with his brother—so long as Biden testified too. But now that Biden’s offer is on the table, Comer is backing away.

Comer’s behavior in this regard has already piqued the frustration of Oversight Ranking Member Jamie Raskin. “Let me get this straight. After wailing and moaning for 10 months about Hunter Biden and alluding to some vast unproven family conspiracy, after sending Hunter Biden a subpoena to appear and testify, Chairman Comer and the Oversight Republicans now reject his offer to appear before the full Committee and the eyes of the world and to answer any questions that they pose?” the Maryland Democrat said in a statement.

“What an epic humiliation for our colleagues and what a frank confession that they are simply not interested in the facts and have no confidence in their own case or the ability of their own members to pursue it,” Raskin said. “What the Republicans fear most is sunlight and the truth.”

Republicans have repeatedly insisted that Biden and his father, President Joe Biden, are guilty of corruption, even opening an impeachment inquiry into the president over Hunter’s business deals. Not only have they produced no hard evidence, their own star witnesses have repeatedly refuted the GOP’s claims.

The political network founded by Republican billionaire megadonor brothers Charles Koch and the late David Koch endorsed Nikki Haley on Tuesday for the Republican primary, the latest snub in the Koch network’s ongoing (and so far fruitless) campaign against Donald Trump.

Americans for Prosperity Action, the Koch network’s advocacy arm, sent out a memo to conservative grassroots activists announcing its endorsement, as well as a coming multimillion-dollar campaign for pro-Haley online and television ads.

“When we announced our decision to engage in our first ever Republican presidential primary, we made it clear that we’d be looking for a candidate who can turn the page on our political dysfunction—and win. It’s clear that candidate is Nikki Haley,” AFP Action senior adviser Emily Seidel said in a statement.

The Koch network has spent the past year steadily ramping up its strident rejection of Trump. Just Monday, AFP Action sent out leaflets urging voters to “stop Biden by letting go of Trump.”

The network’s efforts to keep Trump from winning another presidential nomination kicked off in earnest back in February, when AFP Action sent out a memo stating that the group wanted to help the U.S. “move on” from Trump. The Koch network launched a wave of anti-Trump digital ads in June, arguing that “Trump can’t win.”

That same month, the Koch network revealed it had already raised more than $70 million to donate to non-Trump political races. Koch Industries and Stand Together each donated $25 million, for a combined $50 million of the total funds raised. David Koch died in 2019, but Charles Koch is a major shareholder in Koch Industries, and he founded the nonprofit Stand Together.

The Koch network is one of the most influential conservative political groups, and yet its efforts to stop Trump have been foiled at every turn. In the months since the Koch network proclaimed that Trump “can’t win,” the former president has established himself as the Republican primary front-runner—by a massive margin. National polls show him with an average of 61.6 percent support. Haley has climbed steadily in recent months, but she’s still sitting in third place with a nationwide average of just 9.8 percent support.

It’s also unclear exactly why the Koch network dislikes Trump so much. While in office, he successfully carried out moves long sought by the organization, including the gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency, a single-minded strategy of deregulation to strengthen the hand of private businesses, and tipping the Supreme Court conservative—with a majority that’s proven to be well inclined to favor the interests of big business and the decimation of the administrative state.

Whether or not there is a difference of opinion beyond mere aesthetics, it seems the animosity is mutual. Trump said in 2018 that he never sought the Koch network’s backing because “I don’t need their money or bad ideas.” In September, he once again dismissed the Koch network, calling Charles Koch “highly overrated.”

“Very stupid, awkward, and highly overrated Globalist Charles Koch of the Koch Network doesn’t have a clue,” Trump said on Truth Social. “He said his best years were the four years during the Trump Administration, and now his people are aimlessly throwing away other people’s money.”

Government shutdown is back on the menu. The House GOP has made some ominous omissions from this week’s agenda: the appropriations bills that are meant to forestall—say it with us, once again—the impending government shutdown that is now scheduled to occur in mid-January.

After this week ends, the House will have just 16 legislative days to come up with a solution before the first of a two-part deadline is breached, which will set off a partial shutdown on January 19. Should the House continue to flail after that date, the government will roll into a full shutdown two weeks later, on February 2.

Funding the government for which they work hasn’t been a major priority for House Republicans this year. So far, the caucus has passed two stopgap spending measures, narrowly avoiding shutdowns on crunched deadlines, all while garnering attention for their penchant for toxic infighting, which reached a fever pitch in early October when former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted from his leadership position for daring to arrange a bipartisan spending bill to prevent a shutdown calamity.

It has yet to be determined if the man who replaced him, Speaker Mike Johnson, is operating under the same conditions—risking losing the gavel for simply doing what needs to be done to keep Capitol Hill’s lights on.

“We need to show some real guts [on spending cuts],” Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett told The Hill. “That’s what we’ve kind of asked for.”

While the names have changed atop the House GOP caucus, Johnson faces the same predicament as McCarthy—a divided yet rambunctious GOP with a razor-thin majority, set against a Democratic Party with a strong opposition to any cuts.

Conservatives are hoping to get through all 12 of the government’s annual appropriations bills on a case-by-case basis, a strategy that might give them a slight edge in negotiations with the Senate, reported The Hill.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said he supported that plan on Monday, noting that he’d prefer to see the bills passed before Congress breaks for Christmas. His Democratic counterparts weren’t so hopeful.

“If you can’t do it by September, then you can’t do it by the middle of November, and you can’t do it by December, why the hell do you think you’re gonna get it done in January?” Montana Senator Jon Tester told Politico. “There’s never any urgency around this place to get shit done.”

However, the appropriation bills are just one part of the puzzle. Congress has several big legislative matters on the near-term horizon, including about a half-dozen major priorities that could touch off showdowns of their own, including a border security bill and contentious foreign aid packages to Israel and Ukraine.

The same time constraints apply in these instances as well. But rather than forging ahead on this long parliamentary to-do list, the House GOP will first have to cope with another salacious story that’s returned to the front and center this week: the proposed expulsion of Representative George Santos, who faces 23 charges related to wire fraud, identity theft, and credit card fraud. And if Santos gets expelled, that thin margin that Johnson is working with to prevent a shutdown and keep the lower House on track will become even more fragile.

Hunter Biden’s lawyer offered Tuesday to have the embattled first son publicly testify in front of the House Oversight Committee, a marked shift in what has, until now, been a much less aggressive strategy.

Biden has until recently made a practice of keeping his head down as he battles multiple legal cases—including federal charges for owning a gun while using illegal drugs, as well as the ongoing House Republican investigation into his business dealings. Led by Oversight Chair James Comer, the probe has accused Biden and his father, President Joe Biden, of corruption. It has yet to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by the president.

“Here we are, eleven months into your so-called investigation, and every objective review of your ‘revelations’—including by some of your colleagues—has declared your exploration as one turning up only dry holes,” Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said in a Tuesday letter to Comer, which was obtained by The New Republic.

Comer issued subpoenas in early November to multiple members of the Biden family, including Hunter and his uncle Jim. He has repeatedly demanded that they testify. Lowell accused Comer in the letter of using “closed-door sessions to manipulate, even distort the facts and misinform the public.”

“We therefore propose opening the door,” Lowell wrote. “Mr. Chairman, we take you up on your offer. Accordingly, our client will get right to it by agreeing to answer any pertinent and relevant question you or your colleagues might have, but—rather than subscribing to your cloaked, one-sided process—he will appear at a public Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing.”

Based upon recent reporting, this more tenacious approach to Hunter Biden’s legal defense will become the norm, as his legal team abandons an old strategy that sought to keep the president’s son out of the spotlight. As Politico reported in its Tuesday morning edition of Playbook, Biden attorney Kevin Morris says the rationale behind the shift to a more “bare-knuckled approach” is simple: “We want to go on offense because we know we can win. That’s the whole point.”

In addition to offering to publicly testify, Biden has threatened to sue Fox News for former host Tucker Carlson’s claims that Joe and Hunter Biden were involved in a money-laundering scheme. Biden has sued Rudy Giuliani and his former lawyer Robert Costello for allegedly hacking into and distributing Biden’s data.

Biden has also sued the IRS for allegedly failing to keep his tax information private, and he has attempted to subpoena former Trump Justice Department officials, including former Attorney General Bill Barr.

This new strategy has ruffled feathers at the White House, where officials worry it could hurt the president’s reelection chances, Politico reported Tuesday. But some political experts think the new approach might pay off in a way that benefits the president.

“The American public likes to see people fight back,” Jamal Simmons, a former communications director for Vice President Kamala Harris, told Politico. “People who fight for themselves tend to get the benefit of the doubt from the public. And I actually think that probably does help the president in the long run.”

Something funky is going on at Sports Illustrated—several of their authors don’t seem to exist.

According to an investigation by Futurism, the illustrious sports magazine lately seems to be relying on work produced by artificially generated journalists, who sometimes publish artificially generated articles, as well.

“Drew has spent much of his life outdoors, and is excited to guide you through his never-ending list of the best products to keep you from falling to the perils of nature,” read the bio of Drew Ortiz, one of the publication’s new robot stowaways. “Nowadays, there is rarely a weekend that goes by where Drew isn’t out camping, hiking, or just back on his parents’ farm.”

Ortiz, however, has no social media presence and no publishing history outside of Sports Illustrated. One thing the son of a farmer and allegedly avid hiker does have going for him, however, is a profile picture harvested from a website selling A.I.-generated headshots, according to Futurism’s Maggie Harrison, who confirmed with several sources at Sports Illustrated that Ortiz’s content was fabricated.

Ortiz is apparently not the only digital apparition hard at work in their newsroom.

“There’s a lot,” one anonymous source told Futurism regarding the fake authors. “I was like, what are they? This is ridiculous. This person does not exist.”

Over the summer, Ortiz’s account vanished, and in its wake the author’s byline suddenly redirected to a new A.I.-generated writer with no social media presence, no publishing history, and a profile picture from the same A.I.-photo marketplace: someone named Sora Tanaka.

None of these changes came with editor’s notes or corrections explaining the switch-up. What’s more, Harrison’s inquiry was met with a puzzling response: “After we reached out with questions to the magazine’s publisher, the Arena Group,” Harrison reports, “all the AI-generated authors disappeared from Sports Illustrated’s site without explanation.”

Sports Illustrated is not the only publication that’s gotten caught dipping its toes into the murky, plagiarism-laden waters of A.I.-generated content. In January, CNET was caught red-handed publishing A.I.-generated articles containing what have been charitably referred to as “very dumb errors.” In August, newspaper giant Gannett opted to pause its own A.I. experiments when it became clear their bot had no idea how to describe a high school football game. (It’s still unclear if the national publication is still utilizing A.I. for product reviews.) The U.K.-based publications The Daily Mirror and The Express also began publishing artificially generated content in 2023, though their owner says they’re not looking to fire their journalists anytime soon.

Meanwhile, the media industry cut more than 17,000 jobs in 2023 alone—a record number—thanks in large part to dwindling subscriptions and a slow ad market. Losses were felt at some of the industry’s largest and sometimes revolutionary players, including the Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed, VICE, Vox Media, NPR, and The Washington Post. We may never know what, if anything, Drew Ortiz thinks about that—or anything else.