New House Oversight Committee chairman vows panel will do its best to eradicate wasteful government spending

Fraudulent COVID-19 spending, Biden family influence peddling that potentially compromised national security, and presidents’ mishandling of classified documents are three areas the House Oversight Committee plans to investigate first, its new chairman, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., said Monday, Jan. 30, during a National Press Club Headliners Newsmaker.

Comer will also direct the committee to look into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, how to better regulate energy companies to avert price increases, and prescription drug prices, he said.

“Oversight needs to get back to its primary mission of rooting out waste, mismanagement and fraud in the federal government,” Comer said.

The $5 trillion in COVID relief funds that “dates back three years, two administrations and that has not had a single congressional hearing” is first on Comer’s agenda.

“I am fed up with the public corruption and excessive spending in Washington, D.C. That is my goal for the House Oversight Committee,” Comer said.

“History will not be kind to the Payroll Protection Program,” which ultimately will be found to be as deceitful as the Big Bank bailout of the 2008 financial crisis, Comer said.

Now that Republicans control the majority in the House of Representatives and hold the Oversight Committee chairmanship, a thorough investigation into the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s family — including subpoenas of bank records and more than 150 bank suspicious activity reports, along with witness testimony — can be conducted, Comer said.

The business dealings of the Biden family, perhaps even the family of former president Donald Trump, and any future president, must be put in check, Comer said.

China is an adversary of the United States, Comer stressed. “They steal our intellectual property, manipulate their currency and have a competitive advantage in manufacturing that puts us at their mercy,” he said.

“If we are at war with China, and Biden family members have been receiving millions and millions of dollars from China, we need to investigate what they were getting from this investment,” Comer continued. “That is the basis of that investigation. I am pretty confident [Biden’s son] Hunter Biden was influence peddling, and there needs to be a legislative fix on influence peddling.”

With the discovery of classified documents in multiple private residences of Biden, where his son was also residing, the investigation may extend to how those documents were used, as well, Comer said.

“This is not a Hunter Biden investigation, but he is a person of interest in the investigation into Joe Biden,” Comer said.

As for the discovery of classified documents in the homes of Trump and Biden, the committee needs to “come up with a bipartisan legislative fix on how documents are classified and removed from office, possibly even reform how presidents and vice presidents have access to these documents,” Comer said.

As for the House Oversight Committee’s work on the national debt, Comer promises “Republicans are going to fight for spending cuts. You cannot spend $1 trillion more a year than you are bringing in. Congress has been on a spending spree for decades, since the Kennedy administration. Everything will be on the table except Medicare, Social Security and military spending.”

The United States’ $31 trillion deficit “is out of control, and COVID made it extremely worse,” Comer said. “We have to get serious about living within our means.”

As for the beating death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five Memphis, Tennessee, police officers, Comer said the Justice Department will take the lead on this investigation, but that the Oversight Committee can help ensure that background and reference checks are shared by police departments throughout the country, especially with there being a shortage of officers and a lot of movement by police officers to jobs in various departments.

Finally, an Oversight select subcommittee will look into the origins of coronavirus, the role of Ecohealth Alliance, royalties that employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received for COVID vaccines, and American tax dollars and grants for COVID research.

“Hopefully, this will be bipartisan,” Comer said. “This is something every American deserves answers for.”