Treasury Department sent information on Hunter Biden to expanding GOP Senate inquiry
Yahoo News
LUPPE B. LUPPEN
Feb 6th 2020 12:22PM
The U.S. Treasury Department has complied with Republican Senators’ requests for highly sensitive and closely-held financial records about Hunter Biden and his associates and turned over “‘evidence’ of questionable origin” to them, according to a leading Democrat on one of the committees conducting the investigation.
For months, while the impeachment controversy raged, powerful committee chairmen in the Republican-controlled Senate have been quietly but openly pursuing an inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business affairs and Ukrainian officials’ alleged interventions in the 2016 election, the same matters President Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani unsuccessfully tried to coerce Ukraine’s government to investigate.
Unlike Trump and Giuliani, however, Sens. Charles Grassley, the chairman of the Finance Committee, Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, and Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee have focused their efforts in Washington, seeking to extract politically useful information from agencies of the US government. They’ve issued letters requesting records from cabinet departments and agencies, including the Department of State, the Treasury, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the National Archives, and the Secret Service.
Grassley and Johnson have sought to obtain some of the most sensitive and closely held documents in all of federal law enforcement--highly confidential suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by financial institutions with FinCEN, an agency of the Treasury that helps to police money laundering.
The senators’ requests to the Treasury have borne fruit, according to the ranking Democratic Senator on the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden, who contrasted the cooperation given to the Republican Senators with the pervasive White House-directed stonewall House Democrats encountered when they subpoenaed documents and witnesses in the impeachment inquiry.
“Applying a blatant double standard, Trump administration agencies like the Treasury Department are rapidly complying with Senate Republican requests—no subpoenas necessary—and producing ‘evidence’ of questionable origin,” Wyden spokesperson Ashley Schapitl said in a statement. “The administration told House Democrats to go pound sand when their oversight authority was mandatory while voluntarily cooperating with the Senate Republicans’ sideshow at lightning speed.”
The ‘rapid’ production of sensitive financial information from the Treasury Department in response to Congressional requests is apparently uncommon. A source familiar with the matter said that the Treasury began turning over materials less than two months after Grassley and Johnson wrote to FinCEN on Nov. 15, 2019 requesting any SARs and related documents filed by financial institutions regarding Hunter Biden, his associates, their businesses and clients.
Just a couple weeks later, Senator Wyden and Sen. Sherrod Brown complained to FinCEN in a letter that “information requests from Congress, including legitimate Committee oversight requests related to Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), often take months to process, and we understand that certain such requests have yet to be answered at all.”
“Senator Wyden’s warning was spurred by concern that the agency would prioritize Republican requests over Democratic requests,” Schapitl said of the December letter to FinCEN. “Treasury’s subsequent actions have made his concerns even more urgent.”
With the Senate impeachment trial concluded and the Democratic primaries in full swing, the efforts of the Republican-led investigation may soon appear at the center of the political stage. The flow of information from the administration to Senate Republicans has prompted concerns among Democrats that any damaging information uncovered may be deployed at a time of maximum political advantage for the Trump campaign.
“Republicans are turning the Senate into an arm of the president’s political campaign, pursuing an investigation designed to further President Trump’s favorite conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election and smear Vice President Biden,” Schapitl said. The Biden presidential campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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