Republicans plan to exploit Hunter Biden Fifth Amendment loophole

A House Republican committee chair has said he will look into whether Hunter Biden’s pardon means he can no longer use the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination to avoid appearing before Congress.

In an appearance on Newsmax, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer said he planned to discuss the matter with Pam Bondi, whom President-elect Donald Trump has nominated to be the next U.S. attorney general.

On Sunday, President Joe Biden announced that he had pardoned his son Hunter Biden, who was convicted earlier this year on firearms charges and pleaded guilty in a federal tax case. The pardon covered any offenses the younger Biden “has committed or may have committed” between January 2014 and December 2024.

In March, Hunter Biden turned down a request from the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee to testify before an impeachment inquiry into the president, which his attorney Abbe Lowell branded a “carnival side show.”

During Comer’s Newsmax appearance, host Rob Schmitt asked if he had “any plans for Hunter Biden” knowing he “can no longer claim the Fifth” to avoid testifying before Congress. The Fifth Amendment gives citizens the right to refuse to answer any questions that may incriminate them.

Comer replied: “Well, I look forward to talking to attorney general Bondi about this. We still have information that we’ve requested that we never received. The White House is still to this day obstructing rightful evidence that we should have obtained.”

The House Republican said he believed there were “pseudonym emails” that showed the president was communicating with “shady associates” involved in money laundering.

Speaking to Newsweek about Hunter’s pardon, Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, previously said, “The failed witch hunts against President Trump have proved that the Democrat-controlled DOJ [Department of Justice] and other radical prosecutors are guilty of weaponizing the justice system.”

Newsweek contacted Hunter Biden’s attorney and the White House press office for comment on Tuesday by email outside regular office hours.

Hunter Biden was due to be sentenced later this month on three counts of lying on a federal firearms application and, in another case, on nine federal charges of failing to file tax returns and falsifying records. The maximum sentence was 25 years imprisonment for the former and 17 years for the latter.

Earlier this year, the president repeatedly said he would not pardon his son. In June, during a G7 summit in Italy, he said: “I am not going to do anything. I will abide by the jury’s decision.”

In his statement announcing the pardon, the president said: “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son—and that is wrong.

“There has been an effort to break Hunter—who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me—and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

Responding to the pardon on Truth Social, Trump accused the president of committing “an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!”