President Biden’s daughter-in-law Hallie Biden was among several family members who pocketed payouts after a Hunter Biden associate received a $3 million wire payment from a Chinese energy company, a House committee revealed Thursday.
Biden family members received approximately $1.065 million in payments over a three-month period after the Chinese wire transfer cleared, according to a memo detailing the payments issued by House Oversight and Accountability Committee.
Several payments were also sent to companies associated with Mr. Biden’s brother James Biden and son Hunter Biden in addition to Hallie Biden. An unknown account identified only as “Biden” also received transfers from the company owned by Hunter Biden associate Robert Walker in the months after the $3 million wire cleared in 2017.
“From the bank records, it appears that the Biden family received approximately one-third of the money obtained from the China wire,” said the memo from committee investigators who are probing the Biden families’ business deals around the world.
Bank records obtained by the committee show Hallie Biden received two payments in 2017 totaling $35,000 from Mr. Walker’s company after he received the multimillion-dollar payment from State Energy HK Limited, a Chinese company, on March 1 of that year, months after Mr. Biden ended his term as vice president.
Hallie Biden is the widow of Beau Biden who died of brain cancer in 2015. She became romantically involved with her brother-in-law Hunter Biden following Beau’s death.
It was unclear what services Biden associates provided to Mr. Walker “to obtain this exorbitant amount of money,” said Rep. James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the committee.
“The Oversight Committee is concerned about the national security implications resulting from President Biden’s family receiving millions of dollars from foreign nationals,” Mr. Comer said on Thursday. “We will continue to follow the money trail and facts to determine if President Biden is compromised by his family’s business schemes and if there is a national security threat.”
The memo said the committee investigators are particularly concerned with “why Hallie Biden — publicly reported to work as a school counselor — received money” from Mr. Walker’s business.
The memo also notes that a company affiliated with James Gilliar, another Biden family associate, received more than $1 million from Mr. Walker’s business account on March 2, 2017, the day after the Chinese wire transfer.
The payment details were revealed in bank records obtained by the committee in response to a recent subpoena issued to Bank of America. The committee subpoenaed more than a decade of records related to Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the committee, disclosed the Feb. 27 subpoena in a scathing letter accusing Republicans of carrying out a one-sided investigation into the Biden family. He accused Republicans of overlooking suspected conflicts of interest and foreign influence under President Trump.
Mr. Comer justified the subpoena by saying that “by 2017, Biden family members and their associates, including John R. Walker, formed a joint venture with CEFC China executives.”
CEFC China is a defunct Chinese energy conglomerate with suspected ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
“Democrats described our subpoena as providing nothing more than records for Papa John’s and Starbucks, but they failed to mention the records we’ve received documenting the Biden family’s business schemes,” Mr. Comer said on Thursday. “Over the course of several years, members of the Biden family and their companies received over $1.3 million in payments from accounts related to their associate, Rob Walker.”
Mr. Comer has made the Biden family’s financial transactions the centerpiece of an investigation into the long trail of business ventures involving the president and his son.
On Tuesday, Mr. Comer revealed that the Treasury Department had begun handing over documents related to the probe after a months-long standoff with committee Republicans.
Committee Republicans say the Treasury Department is holding on to 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 engaged for months in a fruitless back-and-forth with the Treasury Department to obtain additional information on suspected financial transactions related to Hunter Biden that U.S. banks flagged as suspicious.
Mr. Comer has accused the agency of obstructing the committee’s investigation into the Biden family by refusing to hand over the suspicious activity reports. He said such reports have been made available to members of Congress for decades.
In a November report detailing Hunter Biden’s far-flung business deals that have raised eyebrows for years about potential influence peddling, committee Republicans cited a publicly available suspicious activity report that details “93 wires between 02/03/2014 and 08/02/2019 totaling $2,461,962.60” between Biden associates and “a Shanghai-based investment fund controlled by the Bank of China.”
Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company, also pursued deals with Chinese Communist Party-linked energy tycoons and allegedly pocketed more than $3 million from a Russian businesswoman who is the widow of a former mayor of Moscow.
Citing evidence obtained from Hunter Biden’s laptop and through whistleblowers, Mr. Comer said his committee had uncovered a “decade-long pattern of influence peddling, national security risks and political cover-ups” committed by the Biden family with the knowledge and involvement of the president.