This week, House Republicans issued a warning to a top energy advisor in the Biden administration, stating that if he does not cooperate willingly with their probe into President Joe Biden’s previous conduct toward Ukraine, they will force him to testify.
According to a letter the chairmen wrote to Amos Hochstein and obtained by the Washington Examiner, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and James Comer (R-KY), who are in charge of the GOP’s impeachment investigation into Biden, threatened to “resort to a compulsory process,” which would involve subpoenaing him if he continued to refuse to meet with them.
In 2020, Hochstein provided testimony to the Senate on his discussions with Joe and his son Hunter in 2015 over Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Burisma Holdings, an oil business based in Ukraine.
During his testimony, Hochstein informed the senators that he was primarily in charge of overseeing US efforts to fight corruption in Ukraine at the State Department.
On December 7, 2015, then-Vice President Joe Biden forced the dismissal of a prosecutor from Ukraine, among other things. The prosecutor had been looking into Burisma, and Comer and Jordan have maintained time and time again that Burisma’s termination helped Hunter Biden.
Hunter Biden made a lot of money as a board member at Burisma. Approximately $1 million was his yearly compensation when he took the post in 2014, according to the Department of Justice. Two months after his father resigned as vice president in March 2017, he received a salary reduced in half, which he continued to receive until 2019.
The Washington Examiner was able to obtain a letter from White House counsel Richard Sauber, who argued to the chairmen that they did not need to talk with Hochstein because they would be doing an interview that was “entirely duplicative” of the one Hochstein conducted with the Senate in 2020.
“It is not a genuine oversight to reinterview witnesses in the hope that they will say something different and validate your ludicrous conspiracy notions. There is nothing else to look into, according to Sauber.
During his testimony, Hochstein informed the Senate that he had discussed his belief that Russia was trying to “sow misinformation among Ukrainians” using Hunter Biden’s name in separate conversations with both Joe and Hunter Biden.
Joe Biden’s pressure on Ukraine to remove the prosecutor, according to Hochstein, was a “coordinated, multi-stakeholder operation” in which Hochstein took part but which had nothing to do with Hunter Biden.
Hochstein told the senators, “I know that it’s not true that the possibility that that was somehow twisted all for a tiny little firm named Burisma that Hunter Biden was on the board of.”
Reiterating Hochstein’s remarks from years prior, Sauber referred to Jordan and Comer’s assertions linking Joe Biden’s behavior to Burisma as a “typical house of cards structure.”
In response, Jordan and Comer said that Sauber’s claims were “unpersuasive” and that it is customary and proper for witnesses to testify in different houses of Congress. Additionally, they said that Sauber’s letter “blatantly ignores other relevant information and seeks to invalidate firsthand testimony acquired by the Committees.”
They cited testimony from Devon Archer, a former business associate, who claimed that on December 4, 2015, Hunter Biden called his father. This was just days before Joe Biden called for the prosecutor’s dismissal, and shortly after, two executives from Burisma had asked Biden for assistance in managing the prosecutor’s Burisma investigation.
But Archer also stated in his testimony that he was unaware of the precise topics discussed in the conversation and that Hunter Biden had never made an effort to use his father’s position to influence American policy.
In order to avoid a subpoena, Jordan and Comer requested that Hochstein get in touch with them by April 2 to set up an interview.
