In a matter of days, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., is set to release his committee’s report on its investigation into the foreign business dealings of presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Johnson hinted during an interview this weekend that what his committee discovered could disqualify Biden from the 2020 presidential election.
“I think it’s time for the American people to see what we’ve got,” Johnson told local Wisconsin radio station WCLO.
“What our investigations are uncovering, I think, will reveal this is not somebody we should be electing president of the United States.”
The congressional probe was headed by Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who currently chairs the Senate Finance Committee.
It focused largely on Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that was the subject of a corruption investigation.
While Hunter sat on the board of Burisma, drawing a million-dollar annual consulting fee, Joe Biden, as vice president pressured the Ukrainian president to fire a top prosecutor who was investigating allegations of corruption at the company.
Documents have revealed that shortly after Hunter joined the board in 2014, Burisma was able to bribe the prosecutor-general and others connected with the probe to abandon it.
However, pressure from US-Ukrainian envoy George Kent led to the appointment of a new prosecutor-general, Victor Shokin, who resumed the corruption probe.
That’s when Burisma began heavily lobbying the State Department, which led Biden to strong-arm then-President Petro Poroshenko by threatening to withhold a billion-dollar loan guarantee.
A week later, Shokin was out and the corruption probe went dormant—until President Donald Trump broached the issue with Poroshenko’s successor, Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a July 2019 phone call that resulted in Trump’s impeachment.
The forthcoming Senate report will be released just days before the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and President Trump, according to Republicans.
It was supposed to be released earlier this summer, but Johnson said the process took longer than expected due to the hesitance of some members of his committee to uncover the necessary documents and interviews.
“I had a devil of a time just getting the subpoena authority that I got,” Johnson explained in July, noting that he didn’t want to push the envelope too quickly because there were “a number of my committee members that were highly concerned about how this looks politically.”
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, specifically, has blasted the investigation as a “political exercise.”
“It’s not the legitimate role of government for Congress or for taxpayer expense to be used in an effort to damage political opponents,” Romney said.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
