Senate panel tees up subpoena vote in probe related to Hunter Biden
Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson has teed up a vote next week on a subpoena for a public affairs firm as part of his panel’s Ukraine investigation involving former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.The committee has scheduled a business meeting next week to vote on a subpoena to Blue Star Strategies, a public affairs firm that worked with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm that hired Hunter Biden. The panel will consider the subpoena along with the nomination of Brian Miller, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the special inspector general for pandemic recovery, on May 20, according to a committee notice obtained by CNN.
Johnson has been investigating Burisma and Ukraine heading into the 2020 presidential election season, and has received documents from the State Department and the National Archives as part of the probe. Before the pandemic hit, Trump suggested he would make Ukraine a major part of the election should Biden be the nominee, while Trump and his allies have repeatedly made unfounded and false claims to allege that the former vice president and his son acted corruptly in Ukraine. Johnson told CNN last week that he could issue a report on what his committee has found later this year.
“We’ve got a lot of information from the Archives, from the State Department,” Johnson said. “We’ll probably assemble all that.”
While Johnson has insisted the investigation is not related to election-year politics, Democrats on the committee have slammed it as an effort to undermine Biden, and one of the committee’s Republicans, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, said earlier this year that the probe felt political.
Sen. Gary Peters, the ranking Democratic member on the committee, condemned the move to vote on a subpoena as a “distraction” on Wednesday. Peters opposed the subpoena when Johnson first sought to issue it, which is why a committee vote is necessary to authorize the subpoena.
“We should be focusing on Covid issues,” Peters told CNN. “It’s not related at all to the crisis and so why are we spending time on it?”
CNN has reached out to the Biden campaign and Blue Star Strategies for comment.
The subpoena to Blue Star Strategies comes after Johnson scrapped an earlier vote to subpoena a Blue Star contractor, Andrii Telizhenko, who has made unfounded allegations about Ukrainian election interference in 2016 and is allied with the President’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. Telizhenko told CNN in March the allegations against him were part of a smear campaign.
Burisma was at the center of the House’s impeachment of Trump last year, as it was the company that Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate in their July 2019 call.
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