GOP keeps promise to investigate Biden, son

Now that Republicans will control the US House of Representatives for the first time in two years, their main target will be what they had vowed if they won: Joe Biden.

On Thursday, the GOP announced its planned investigation into the business dealings of the president's son Hunter, two years before a potential Biden re-election bid.

The GOP also has said it will investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, allegations of politicization at the Justice Department and the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

But none may match what could be the party's main attention-getter: investigation into the business dealings of the president's son.

The incoming Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Representative James Comer of Kentucky, said Thursday that the panel would focus on trying to link Biden to his son, Hunter Biden, continuing an effort begun in 2018 that did not establish the elder Biden's complicity in any wrongdoing.

Comer told reporters at a news conference that his aim was "to show you this is an investigation of Joe Biden" and not just his son.

Comer and Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, also announced that the committee is taking steps to obtain relevant bank records that would ostensibly tie Biden to his son Hunter's overseas business deals.

"Our investigation is about Joe Biden, and we already have evidence that would point that Joe Biden was involved with Hunter Biden on issues. So we want the bank records. And that's our focus," Comer said at the news conference.

The committee alleged at the news conference that Biden was actively involved in overseas business dealings alongside Hunter.

"Was Joe Biden directly involved with Hunter Biden's business deals and is he compromised? That's our investigation," said Comer.

Kevin McCarthy, the Republican nominee to be speaker of the House, has downplayed an impeachment of Biden, but some more conservative members of the GOP have said they want to do so because of the two impeachments by Democrats of former president Donald Trump.

Republican leaders also haven't ruled out impeaching Cabinet members, including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Meanwhile, Democrats and allies are poised to fight the GOP investigations.

On Wednesday, the Congressional Integrity Project announced that it intended to launch a multimillion-dollar "war room" to undermine investigations from the House, according to Politico.

The political arm of the Center for American Progress, the influential progressive think tank, is planning to cast the Republican investigations as "politically motivated revenge politics", according to its chief executive, Patrick Gaspard, who served as White House political director under President Barack Obama.