By Steven Richards

Evidence uncovered by House Republicans and Just the News in the intervening years show that, in fact, there is significant documentary evidence that Hunter Biden and his father engaged in an influence peddling scheme in Ukraine while the younger Biden was serving on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

The final report from House Republicans’ own impeachment inquiry into President Biden over the issue furnished several pieces of evidence to back this claim. Most importantly, evidence first reported by Just the News showed then-Vice President Biden changed official policy by calling an “audible” on a flight to Kyiv, linking a $1 billion loan guarantee for the struggling country to its firing of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma’s founder, Mykola Zlochevsky.

This evidence contradicted claims from several government witnesses and congressional Democrats during the 2019 probe that Joe Biden did not change U.S. policy and that the Ukrainian prosecutors were not investigating Burisma at the time Hunter Biden worked for the company.

Now, Sen. Johnson says Joe Biden’s pardon of his son paves the way to call in Hunter Biden for his complete testimony on how his business role intersected with his father’s political responsibilities in Ukraine.

“But what is interesting is, with the hunter Biden’s pardon, he has no Fifth Amendment right not to testify and tell the truth, and so he could be we could prosecute him for lying to Congress,” Sen. Johnson said.

“He’s going to have to answer truthfully. So that’s a real possibility. Again, we’d have to get our ducks in a row. You know, you know me, I want documents, I don’t want to just come in for a show trial,” he continued.

The Jan. 6 Probe

“The President of the United States inciting a mob to march on the Capitol and impede the work of Congress is not a scenario our intelligence and law enforcement communities envisioned for this country,” the committee’s Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., wrote in the final report.

“Donald Trump lit that fire,” Thompson added. “But in the weeks beforehand, the kindling he ultimately ignited was amassed in plain sight.”

However, evidence uncovered by House Republican investigators led by House Administration Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., show that the Jan. 6 Committee selectively framed its narrative, ignored significant evidence of security failures from Democratic leadership and the Pentagon, and even appeared to have coached witnesses.

“If I were Liz Cheney, I’d be very concerned about being prosecuted for witness tampering. I think what she did in that J6 hearing, as well as Bennie Thompson everybody else participate in that sham of a committee, it was grotesque,” Sen. Johnson said.

Just the News reported in October that, while vice chairwoman of the select committee, Cheney used an encrypted phone app to directly and indirectly communicate around defense counsel — and possibly ethical rules — with a witness who would later change her testimony in shocking fashion.

The witness, a one-time aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson came under fire after records show that Hutchinson changed her testimony to the Jan. 6 committee after jettisoning her Trump-aligned lawyer.

After retaining lawyers recommended directly by Vice Chair Cheney, Hutchinson filed errata sheets with the committee amending her earlier testimony and adding new, allegedly “factual” accounts, including the infamous story of then-President Trump allegedly grabbing the wheel of the presidential vehicle in anger after the Secret Service allegedly refused to take him to the Capitol.

Chairman Loudermilk has already asked the FBI to investigate then-Congresswoman Cheney for witness tampering, concluding in a December report that “numerous federal laws were likely broken” by Cheney when she “tampered with at least one witness,” Just the News previously reported.