Republican oversight chair takes aim at ‘Biden family influence peddling’ – live

Key events

Show key events only

Please turn on JavaScript to use this feature

The Republicans are determined to probe two potential scandals involving Joe Biden: the president’s possession of classified documents, and the business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden.

Or are they, in fact, one scandal? At the National Press Club, Comer made the case that they are. Here’s what he said:

It’s really one investigation. It’s not really two, because the reason that that I’m concerned about the Biden documents is because there’s some reason that China has donated so much money to the different Biden interests. I don’t think they’re doing it out of the kindness of their heart. Look, China’s an adversary.

According to Factcheck.org, there is no evidence that China was able to see the classified material, or that the country funded the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Biden’s former office at the center was one of the locations where the secret documents from his time as vice president were discovered.

'I'm just an average guy with average ability': top GOP investigator strike bipartisan tone

In his speech at the National Press Club, James Comer, the Republican chair of the House oversight committee, cast his inquiries as an important part of Congress’ oversight, regardless of who is in the White House.

“There’s going to be a lot written that says this committee’s partisan or whatever, I believe … I have demonstrated, I’ll do what I think is right, what I think is best. That doesn’t mean that’s the right decision, that doesn’t mean I’m going to be right 100% of the time,” Comer said. “But I’m sincere about trying to do the right thing, and I’m just an average guy with average ability, at best, that’s fed up with the process in Washington DC. I’m fed up with the public corruption. I’m fed up with the excessive spending, and I want to do something about it.”

He said the oversight committee could “play a huge role in investigating this administration,” and named “the Biden family influence peddling” as among his priorities. But he also cited the business activities of Donald Trump’s son-in-law and top aide Jared Kushner in saying, “I think there was a problem in the last administration with influence peddling.”

“If we don’t do something about influence peddling. It’s probably only gonna get worse,” Comer said.

Elsewhere in Congress, Black lawmakers want to revive stalled police reform talks following the beating death of Tyre Nichols, the Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt and Edwin Rios report:

An influential group of Black elected officials has called for a meeting with Joe Biden to discuss police reform, as calls for changes to American policing intensify after officers’ deadly beating of Tyre Nichols.

The chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Steven Horsford, said the group of 60 members of Congress had asked to meet with the president this week to “push for negotiations on much-needed national reforms to our justice system – specifically, the actions and conduct of our law enforcement”.

The appeal to Biden, who has called for Congress to pass police reforms, came as protests prompted by Nichols’s killing continued in Memphis over the weekend.

Nichols, a Black man, died on 10 January, three days after Memphis police officers beat him by a traffic stop. Nichols’s parents, who have been invited to attend Biden’s State of the Union speech on 7 February, said the 29-year-old was driving home after photographing the sunset.

Video footage released by Memphis officials last week showed officers kicking and punching and Nichols and hitting him with a police baton.

In addition to House oversight chair James Comer, another Republican who will be leading the investigation campaign against the Biden administration is Jim Jordan.

The judiciary committee chair is one of the best-known conservatives in the chamber, and made headlines earlier this month by leading the creation of a subcommittee to investigate the “weaponization of the federal government”. He has already sent a flurry of demands for documents and testimony to the justice department, but in a five-page response, a top attorney cited longstanding practice in refusing to share details of ongoing investigations with Jordan, one of Donald Trump’s closest allies in Congress.

In an interview with Punchbowl News today, Carlos Uriarte, the justice department’s point man for legislative affairs who authored the letter to Jordan, elaborated on its approach. He told the outlet that the point of the letter “was to really demonstrate our interest and willingness to cooperate with [Republicans] in their investigations”, but only to the extent it kept with historical norms that he said dated back to the 1940s.

Asked if he sees Jordan as an “honest broker”, Uriarte replied, “I think Representative Jordan, just like any member of Congress, has a set of goals that he wants to accomplish as chair.”

The Democrats retook control of the House of Representatives midway through Donald Trump’s term, and did what the party not in the White House often does: used its power in Congress to hold the president to account.

Its most potent investigation came after Trump left office in the form of the January 6 committee, which spent months unveiling shocking revelations about the former president’s conduct as the Capitol was attacked, and his attempts to undo his 2020 election loss.

The GOP is now back in the majority in the House for the first time since 2018, and plans to give Democrats a taste of their own medicine. They’ve already jumped on the revelations that Joe Biden had classified documents in his personal possession, as well as the surge of migrant arrivals at the US border. The 2024 presidential election looms large here: should Biden run again, the Republicans hope they will have unearthed enough damning details that people who supported him in 2020 change their minds.

GOP to kick off investigation campaign against Biden administration

Good morning, US politics blog readers. Today will start with a 10am eastern time speech from James Comer, the Republican chair of the House oversight committee, who is to detail the party’s plans to use its control of Congress’s lower chamber to hold the Biden administration to account. The GOP has made no secret of its plans to put a campaign of investigations against the Biden administration at the center of its strategy in Congress, since finding bipartisan agreement with the Democratic-led Senate may otherwise prove challenging. Comer and other committee chairs have already kicked off inquiries into a range of White House affairs, including the classified documents found in Joe Biden’s possession and the alleged “weaponization of the federal government”. We’ll see what else Comer has in store when he speaks at the National Press Club.

Here’s what else is going on today:

• Biden is heading to Baltimore to discuss how the infrastructure package he signed in 2021 will help pay for the replacement of an aging rail tunnel, one of several events promoting the law the president has planned this week.

• Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell and the Congressional Integrity Project – a group formed to hit back at the Republican investigation campaign – hold a press conference at 12pm eastern time.

• Vice-President Kamala Harris will be in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she’ll talk about the Biden administration’s efforts to help small business owners.