WASHINGTON — The Republican-led House Oversight Committee said Wednesday that Hunter Biden has been invited to testify publicly this month at a hearing focused on the GOP impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.
It was not immediately clear whether the president’s son had agreed to appear at the March 20 hearing. Sources told NBC News this week that as of Monday the two sides had not discussed a possible date for public testimony.
Rep. James Comer, the Oversight Committee chair, said in a statement Wednesday that given the president’s son’s “repeated calls for a public hearing, I fully expect Hunter Biden to appear for a scheduled Oversight Committee hearing on March 20, alongside Biden family business associates.”
The hearing will “examine inconsistencies among the witnesses’ testimonies in order to get the truth for the American people,” Comer, R-Ky., said.
The committee also invited Devon Archer, Jason Galanis and Tony Bobulinski — all former business associates of Hunter Biden — to testify on March 20.
When Hunter Biden was provided testimony last week at a closed-door deposition on Capitol Hill, he denied that his father had any involvement with his business dealings. According to a transcript of the deposition, Biden called Bobulinski, who he backed out of doing a business deal with, “incompetent and an idiot,” and a “bitter, bitter man.”
Bobulinski told the committee at his own deposition last month that the only reason Hunter Biden was able to make millions from a variety of foreign sources was because his father was vice president at the time.
Galanis, another one of the invited witnesses, will almost certainly not attend in person — he is serving a 14-year prison sentence for two multimillion-dollar fraud schemes. The House committees leading the impeachment inquiry conducted an interview with him on Feb. 23 from the federal prison camp in Montgomery, Alabama.
Biden’s closed-door testimony on Feb. 28 came after months of a heated back and forth with the committee. He initially said he would only be willing to testify at a public hearing, citing concerns that Republicans might take portions of his testimony out of context.
GOP lawmakers rejected his offer to testify publicly, and Biden defied a subpoena for closed-door testimony, instead holding a news conference outside the Capitol in December.
House Republicans then pushed for a resolution to hold him in contempt of Congress. Biden relented after GOP lawmakers issued new subpoenas after formally announcing an impeachment inquiry.
Asked at his Feb. 28 deposition if he thought Archer, Bobulinski and Galanis had any expectation that his father could be involved in their business dealings, Hunter Biden responded: “Not an expectation from me. And I think that you’d see in my communications to them, there was never a single time that I can remember in which I say, ‘Hey, we’ll get my dad involved,’ ‘Hey, let’s get my dad on the phone,’ ‘Hey, you know, let’s — you know, what can we get from my dad out of this?’”
Rebecca Kaplan reported from Washington, and Dareh Gregorian reported from New York.
