Republican Rep. Dan Meuser has demanded the IRS investigate $240,000 in loan repayments President Biden received from his brother, saying the committee probing the financial transactions for foreign business ties has been stonewalled by the White House.
“The potential lack of formal written agreements or promissory notes raises questions about the legality and transparency of these loans,” Meuser (Pa.) wrote in a Jan. 17 letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel.
“Of particular interest is whether President Biden collected interest on these loan repayments, and if so, whether this interest was duly reported in his tax filings,” he added.
“If the payments were neither a loan repayment nor a gift, they were in fact ordinary income received by Joe Biden, Jill Biden, or entities connected to them.”
Meuser, who served as Pennsylvania’s revenue secretary from 2011 to 2015, demanded a “thorough review” and “detailed responses” from the IRS about the payments, saying it was “not only a matter of tax compliance but also one of upholding the public’s confidence in the integrity of our governmental institutions.”
He told The Post that the IRS investigation should be able to “determine the legitimacy of the supposed loan Joe Biden made to his family members that they now claim to be paying back.”
“If the IRS cannot verify the existence of the loans, then Joe Biden, the receiver of the payments, is intentionally misrepresenting what the payments were for and is in violation of state and federal tax laws,” he said.
“This falsifying of records would only be done to conceal payments made indirectly to Joe Biden from foreign entities, including a $40,000 payment from a Chinese Communist Party-linked company. If an average citizen had skirted tax law in this manner, they would be in jail.”
Meuser informed Werfel that he expected a response to his questions about the loans by Feb. 16.
The loans were revealed in bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee as part of its impeachment inquiry into the president and its investigation of his son and brother’s lucrative foreign business dealings.
A $40,000 check from first brother James Biden and his wife Sara Biden landed in Biden’s bank account on Sept. 3, 2017, which Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) called “laundered” money from a deal struck with a Chinese government-linked energy company.
CEFC China Energy paid Hunter and James Biden $6.1 million in 2017 and 2018 as part of a “complicated financial transaction,” according to an Oversight memo released in November.
Roughly $5 million of that sum was wired 10 days after Hunter sent a threatening text on July 30, 2017, to a CEFC associate, in which he said he was “sitting” with his father and demanded to know “why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.”
Emails found on the first son’s abandoned laptop also show that “the big guy” was promised a 10% stake in the deal. Other communications and testimony from Biden family members and associates have given Biden the same title.
Another $200,000 check went into the former vice president’s bank account on March 1, 2018 — the same day that his younger brother James was paid by a now-defunct US hospital chain after he pledged to help it find a Middle East investor.
The former rural hospital chain, Americore Health, had also deposited $400,000 in James Biden’s account earlier that year on Jan. 12, amounting to $600,000 total.
The payments were “based upon representations that his last name, ‘Biden,’ could ‘open doors’ and that he could obtain a large investment from the Middle East based on his political connections,” a July 2022 bankruptcy court filing shows.
After “having reviewed various financial records,” Meuser said the House Oversight Committee had found “no evidence of such a loan’s existence.”
“In November, Chairman Comer wrote to White House Counsel Edward Siskel inquiring about the documentation for the March 2018 loan repayment,” he told Werfel.
“The letter highlights the lack of evidence supporting the White House’s claim that the $200,000 check was a repayment of a loan from Joe Biden to his brother.”
White House Counsel’s Office spokesman Ian Sams has dismissed allegations of the loans’ illegitimacy as “lies and conspiracy theories.”
“After rummaging through thousands of pages of a private citizen’s bank records, they have again turned up zero evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden — and that’s because there is none,” Sams said last October in a statement when the first payments came to light.
“This entire exercise has become a self-debunking wild goose chase that’s only turning up evidence that President Biden did nothing wrong.”
Sams did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hunter, who pleaded not guilty to federal tax fraud charges earlier this month, will be deposed by Comer’s committee about his overseas business dealings on Feb. 28.
James and Sara Biden have yet to schedule their interviews with the panel after they were subpoenaed in November.