Bank records suggest President Joe Biden may have paid his brother $240,000 in two installments a year apart, each just weeks before James Biden wrote his brother a check for the same amounts.
The records, obtained by the Washington Examiner, support the White House’s claim that the checks James Biden wrote to Joe Biden in 2017 and 2018 respectively, appear to be intended to pay back loans.
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Republicans on the committee had raised concerns that the checks represented evidence that Joe Biden personally profited from his family’s private business dealings, something he has long denied. James Biden only had the cash to send his brother a $40,000 check in 2017 and a $200,000 check in 2018 because businesses he worked with had paid him similar amounts just before he wrote the checks.
But the pair of wire transfers in the possession of the House Oversight Committee appear to indicate that Joe Biden, through an account controlled by his attorneys, was owed the money James Biden sent him.
The money was sent to James Biden through an account controlled by Joe Biden’s attorneys at the law firm Monzack, Mersky, McLaughlin, and Browder.
The first wire transfer was for $40,000 and came on July 28, 2017, from the account controlled by Joe Biden’s attorneys. James Biden then paid the exact amount, $40,000, back to Joe Biden on Sep. 3, 2017 — 37 days later. On the check that James Biden used to pay his brother back, it said it was for “loan repayment,” and the back of the check indicated it was deposited by the same law firm and into the same bank account as the original payment came from.
The second wire was for $200,000 and was also sent to James Biden’s bank account. Then, exactly two months later, James Biden sent Joe Biden a check for $200,000, which was deposited into a separate bank account then what it was paid out of.
“Comer has repeatedly denied the existence of bank records in his possession that show Joe Biden loaned money to his brother,” a senior House Democratic aide said. “This is further proof that Comer’s impeachment inquiry is based on cherry-picked facts and outright lies in order to exact political retribution on behalf of Donald Trump.”
But an Oversight Committee aide pushed back on the claim that the wire transfers show the money was a loan, saying that the White House and Democrats’ assertion “that the committee already has information in its possession proving the $200,000 and $40,000 checks to Joe Biden were loan repayments is flawed” for a number of reasons.
One of the main reasons for skepticism about the wire transfers, according to the aide, is the law firm from which the original payments came.
“The wires Democrats say show proof came from a law firm associated with several members of the Biden family—including James Biden’s JBSSR Inc., Hunter Biden’s Owasco LLC, Joe Biden’s CelticCapri, and Biden family associate Rob Walker’s Robinson Walker, LLC,” the aide said. “Documents in the committee’s possession do not make clear that the law firm wired money from Joe Biden’s personal account or rather a more generic account the firm could have used to mask the true identity of client transactions.”
Just a few weeks before James Biden wrote Joe Biden the $40,000 check labeled as a “loan repayment” in 2017, a Chinese company working with the Biden family had paid Hunter Biden $400,000. Hunter Biden had then transferred a share to James Biden, whose wife ultimately wrote the check to Joe Biden.
In 2018, a failing healthcare company wired James Biden $200,000 on the same day he wrote a check for the same amount to his brother. The company later said it improperly classified the money to James Biden as a loan.
“Contrary to the White House’s and Ranking Member [Jamie] Raskin’s claims, nothing within the Oversight Committee’s possession clearly shows that Joe Biden did indeed loan his brother large sums of money,” a spokesperson for the House Oversight Committee said. “The White House and Democrats have peddled a false narrative instead of providing the loan documents. The inescapable reality for Joe Biden is that whether the $240,000 were loan repayments or not, it clearly came from funds generated by his family’s influence peddling and proves one of the ways he personally benefitted from this unethical conduct.”
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House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-KY) had previously argued that the payments from James Biden to Joe Biden were significant regardless of whether a loan was involved.
Critics have for decades accused James Biden of using his powerful family name to strike lucrative business deals, both in the United States and abroad. Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, has also faced intense scrutiny for the foreign business partnerships he landed while his father was vice president.
