WASHINGTON — Democrats on the House Oversight Committee suggested Tuesday that Republicans erred in promoting a “whistleblower” charged with serious crimes.
In a letter to committee chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Dan Goldman (DN.Y.) noted that the charges revealed Monday charged the alleged whistleblower to act as an unregistered agent. for the Chinese government.
“We are concerned that an official House of Representatives committee was manipulated by an apparent con artist who, while fleeing justice, attempted to bolster his defense by laundering baseless and potentially false allegations through Congress” , wrote Raskin and Goldman.
Federal prosecutors unveiled an eight-count indictment Monday against Gal Luft, a dual Israeli-American citizen who claimed to have incriminating information about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Luft’s allegation, made in a video published by the New York Post last week, centers on Hunter Biden’s advisory tenure for officials linked to a Chinese energy conglomerate called CEFC China Energy in 2017 and 2018.
Part of the scheme, which has been widely reported previously, involved an agreement for the young Biden to provide legal representation to a public official who ended up being charged and sent to prison for paying bribes in Chad and in Uganda. The official, Patrick Ho, ended up hiring someone else to represent him in the case.
Luft also worked for the CEFC, which prosecutors say used him to recruit and “educate” former CIA director James Woolsey as a spokesperson for pro-China phantom statements. Woolsey briefly served as an adviser to former President Donald Trump before taking office.
Luft was arrested in February, released and has since been on the run. In the video, he said the charges against him – failing to register as a foreign agent, illegally arranging arms sales abroad and lying to investigators – are an effort to thwart his testimony before the Oversight Committee.
Comer apparently contacted Luft earlier this year but lost contact after his arrest. On Tuesday, unintimidated by news of the charges, Comer pointed out that Luft and Hunter Biden worked for the same foreign principal.
“The ultimate irony is that one of the charges they brought against him was that he was not a registered foreign agent, which is the main thing that we said the Bidens were – unregistered foreign agents” , Comer said on Fox News.
Raskin and Goldman have asked Comer to investigate whether he was “duped” by Luft and to provide Democrats with any material he received from the fugitive self-proclaimed whistleblower.
“It appears that Mr. Luft applied to you for ‘whistleblower’ status in an effort to defend himself against criminal prosecution while fleeing justice,” Raskin and Goldman wrote. Worse still, this latest episode also raises concerns that Mr. Luft could manipulate your investigation not just for his own benefit, but possibly as part of the CCP’s efforts to undermine US security interests. States and the President of the United States.