House Republicans send DOJ criminal referral on Hunter and James Biden, accusing them of lying to Congress

Top House Republicans on Wednesday sent criminal referrals to the Justice Department recommending President Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden and brother James Biden be charged with making false statements to Congress.

The letter from the three GOP committee chairmen to Attorney General Merrick Garland and special counsel David Weiss comes as Hunter Biden is standing trial on unrelated gun charges brought by Weiss in federal court in Delaware. The trial began Monday.

The referrals also come less than a week after former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was convicted by a jury in New York on felony charges of falsifying business records.

Hunter Biden's attorney, Abbe Lowell, blasted the move as “nothing more than a desperate attempt by Republicans to twist Hunter’s testimony so they can distract from their failed impeachment inquiry and interfere with his trial.”

The letter by House Oversight Chair James Comer, R-Ky.; Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio; and Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith, R-Mo., accused Hunter and James Biden of having "made provably false statements to the Oversight Committee and the Judiciary Committee about key aspects of the impeachment inquiry, in what appears to be a conscious effort to hinder the investigation’s focus on President Joe Biden."

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., also supported the move. "If the Attorney General wishes to demonstrate he is not running a two-tiered system of justice and targeting the President’s political opponents, he will open criminal investigations into James and Hunter Biden," he said in a statement.

The ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, mocked the move, which he said only