Interview: Rep. James Comer on investigating the Biden family, Biden’s next presidential pardons, football, PBMs, and more
Rep. James Comer talks about the Commanders, whether the federal workforce will return to the workplace, his investigations into the Biden family, and much more.
Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.) spent most of his past two years as Chairman of the House Oversight Committee investigating President Joe Biden for alleged corruption, leading to a bombshell series of criminal referrals for members of the Biden family.
Heading into the “re-revolution” of President-elect Donald Trump’s second term, Comer has a different set of priorities in mind, like forcing the federal workforce back into in-person work, passing good government reforms, and bringing the Washington Commanders home to Washington, D.C.
“We think that there's a real once in a lifetime opportunity to pass a lot of good government bills and to do a lot of things in Oversight that will reduce waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in the federal government,” Comer said in an interview with the Washington Reporter.
A bipartisan priority of Comer’s has been reforming pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), a reform he thinks will “be one of the first big bills that passes this Congress.” The Oversight Committee investigated PBMs and found that “they created their own pharmacies, and they're putting pharmacies out of business,” he said. “They're not transparent with fees they charge. They're gouging consumers with expensive drugs. They may make blood pressure medicine cheaper, but then they'll get you on the oncology medicine. That's what our investigation proved, and I think our investigation raised the profile of that issue.”
“Many people, Republicans and Democrats on the Oversight Committee, didn't know what a PBM was when we had our first hearing,” he said. “And now, with the exception of one member of the Oversight Committee, everybody wants to reform PBMs. I think it'll happen.” Trump, along with Republican and Democrat committees, sounds eager to make PBM reform happen.
Comer intends to work closely with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), who will run the Oversight Committee’s new subcommittee dedicated to issues relating to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamay’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“She's got lots of ideas,” he said. “She communicates with people in the Trump administration on a daily basis. She talks to Trump probably more than anyone on the committee. She's wanting to play whatever role they want her to play….I foresee that DOGE, if they find out an agency is misusing funds, I can see the bureaucrats being hauled in front of the DOGE subcommittee, and that won't be a pleasant experience.”
Comer’s bipartisan agenda also included the return of Washington, D.C.’s football team to the District of Columbia. Comer worked closely with Washington, D.C.’s Democratic Mayor, Muriel Bowser in hopes of returning the Washington Redskins (now Commanders) to D.C.’s legendary RFK stadium.
For years, Comer has pushed for the Show Up Act, which would “return the federal workforce to pre-COVID telework levels,” he said. “We never could get accurate accounting of what percentage of federal workers are teleworking in several government agencies, but it's way over 50 percent, it could be 75 percent in Washington, D.C., and that's unacceptable.”
Federal employees who enjoy lax work-from-home policies had “better plan on coming back,” Comer warned. “Trump's going to have to undo some of these executive orders that Joe Biden did to allow for more work from home policies. We have a bill that will pass through the House. I passed it through the House last year. This is part of what Elon Musk and DOGE can work on.”
Comer isn’t done with the Biden crime family. His book, All the President's Money: Investigating the Secret Foreign Schemes That Made the Biden Family Rich, hits shelves this month.
Biden was an integral part of what Comer called the Biden family’s “pay to play scheme.” Comer’s investigations, while repeatedly dismissed by members of both parties at times, yielded significant findings, he said.
The Bidens “had all these 170 bank violations from multiple banks where the banks were concerned,” he said. “They were money laundering. They were susceptible to bribery. These were some of the worst financial crimes you can ever have. And I have a financial background, and I've never seen anything like it.”
Although Biden leaves office this month, Comer expects the president to pardon his brother James before he goes. “I think he'll pardon James Biden unless he's got some health report that shows James Biden doesn't have many years to live, because James Biden's just as corrupt as Hunter,” Comer said. “The only difference between James Biden and Hunter Biden is that James Biden didn't leave a laptop lying around, and he never got on drugs and got reckless in the end.” The other difference between Biden’s brother and son is that while both took millions of dollars from people or groups that were in trouble, the former mostly took payments from domestic sources, while the latter took major paydays from foreigners.
“All the people who sent the Bidens significant sums of money, were in trouble in some form or fashion,” he said. “It's just tragic that that family was allowed to peddle access like that to bad people. This isn't like special interest. This isn't like, ‘oh, they're taking money from the tobacco companies because they don't want to regulate nicotine.’ These are from oligarchs. These are from China that steals our patents and our intellectual property and is a national security threat. They took money for all the things that this Congress wants to do to prevent China from doing, like buying farmland. That's what the Bidens wanted to help China do: buy farmland, buy manufacturing, get their foot in American energy, and all that. So I just think that this was a president and a family that instituted a pay to play scheme.”
Ultimately, Comer believes that “the government covered up [the Biden family scandal] not because they love Joe Biden, not because they feared a threat to democracy if he was topped, but because they hated Donald Trump, and the most important thing for the mainstream media was that Donald Trump not return to office,” he said.
Below is a transcript of our interview with Rep. James Comer, lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
What you want to do now that you're going to have a GOP trifecta coming in and just under two weeks. How are things different for you on the Oversight Committee?
Rep. James Comer:
I can't think of one single thing this White House did to work with us in the last Congress. The only thing that comes to mind at all was the very last bill that came out of this Congress which was the RFK stadium bill and Joe Biden signed it because there were enough Democrats for it, I guess. But they didn't turn over any information we requested. Being able to work with an administration to try to find out things will be new. We didn't just ask the Biden administration for stuff pertaining to the the Biden investigation. We asked them about improper payments. We asked them about grants. We asked them about lots of funding. They would not even respond to anything. If they responded, it would be to say that they can't provide us anything, or they don't understand why. So we're excited about this new Congress, because we're going to have an administration that we feel like we'll be able to work with, and we will be able to pass legislation that will pass the Senate, because a lot of good government bills that we passed out of the Oversight Committee and passed out of the House, they never took up in the Senate. So we think that there's a real once in a lifetime opportunity to pass a lot of good government bills and to do a lot of things in Oversight that will reduce waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement in the federal government.
Washington Reporter:
You mentioned the RFK Stadium bill. When do you think that RFK Stadium will have the first Commanders home game ready?
Rep. James Comer:
If everything works out construction-wise, I would say about the 2028 season.
Washington Reporter:
Are you going to attend? I hope they give you field access for that.
Rep. James Comer:
I didn’t get an invitation to the bill signing at the White House, it must have been lost in the mail.
Washington Reporter:
Do you have an NFL team as a Kentucky guy?
Rep. James Comer:
The Tennessee Titans.
Washington Reporter:
Are you excited about that number one draft pick?
Rep. James Comer:
My family got season tickets when they moved from Houston to Nashville. But they're terrible. They're the number one overall pick for a reason.
Washington Reporter:
Who should they take?
Rep. James Comer:
They probably should pick Travis Hunter. What do you think?
Washington Reporter:
I'm a Patriots fan, and we just beat the Bills for no reason to go from number one to number four in the draft. We should have traded it for a king's ransom. You might need a quarterback, though.
Rep. James Comer:
That’s what they get for drafting a quarterback from Kentucky. I almost think it's better to get a veteran quarterback, like Tampa Bay did. That's probably a safer bet. Tennessee needs an offensive line, wide receiver. They need another running back. Their defense is terrible.
Washington Reporter:
Ryan Tannehill is still a free agent. It sounds like the Titans have their work cut out for them, but so do you. We're sitting here today, which is Jimmy Carter's funeral. Joe Biden is leaving office soon. Biden said in his exit interview that he hopes his legacy is to be remembered as an honest president who did his best. What do you think his legacy is?
Rep. James Comer:
Joe Biden is dreaming if he thinks history is going to paint him in the same light as history has reported Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter, though his policies were bad, like Joe Biden's, that they had in common, was a good, decent, ethical, honest man, and he spent his entire life post-presidency doing good things. He was a good Christian man. He led and was the face of what I think is one of the most effective charities: the Habitat for Humanity. I think that's the greatest charity out there. They've done work in my district after storms and stuff, tornadoes and things like that. So getting to Carter, we remember him as probably one of the best Christian, decent, ethical presidents, but where Biden and Carter will be remembered in the same vein is that their policies were horrible, they had the wrong policies on energy and the wrong policies on foreign policy, and they set America back and led to a revolution, so to speak, the Reagan Revolution and then the Trump re-revolution, I guess you could call it.
Washington Reporter:
You just wrote a book about the Biden family. What made you want to write this? Do you feel like the media has dropped the ball in covering your work on investigating the Biden administration?
Rep. James Comer:
I wrote the book to set the record straight, because the media was so dishonest about the Biden investigation. It came out later that the Congressional Integrity Project was feeding and generating all the press releases. It came out a few months ago that George Soros was funding this. So George Soros was writing all the talking points for the mainstream media, like ‘no evidence, no evidence.’ We had overwhelming evidence in the form of bank records, in the form of emails, in the form of depositions and interviews, in the form of pictures, and now more pictures have come out. History will show that was a very effective investigation. When we started that investigation, the laptop was Russian disinformation. That's how far we came. We took it from the laptop as Russian disinformation to show America they had all these 170 bank violations from multiple banks where the banks were concerned. They were money laundering. They were susceptible to bribery. These were some of the worst financial crimes you can ever have. And I have a financial background, and I've never seen anything like it, so I think that the book needed to be written to summarize everything, and it was very difficult to explain the financial schemes. For example, I would get an opportunity to go on Hannity for four and a half minutes. He would talk three minutes of the four and a half, so I would have 90 seconds to try to explain how money was sent from a shady foreign oligarch with a hard to pronounce name through three shell companies; I learned most people didn't know what a shell company was that had very odd, hard to pronounce names and how it ended up in the Biden bank accounts through incremental payments, it was very complicated to explain. So I felt like if I could write a book, I could go into depth and detail on every transaction, and it's listed in there, every transaction. The thing that I think a lot of people didn't realize is that all the people who sent the Bidens significant sums of money, were in trouble in some form or fashion. They were being investigated, or they were later prosecuted, and they were all from rogue nations, the ones that sent Hunter money were foreign, and the ones that sent Jim money were domestic people who were all in trouble. And I think that the book goes into detail about who these people were and why they were sending the Bidens money, because the Bidens never did say, and the media never did say, what did they do to receive $35 million? If you count the wires plus the loans that they never repaid, it's $35 million which is a lot of money to most people, and according to the IRS whistleblowers, they didn't pay a penny in taxes. The IRS whistleblowers were the most helpful people throughout the whole investigation. They never would have come forward if we hadn’t demonstrated a credible investigation. The last thing the book describes is that there was a lot of opposition: opposition from a weaponized media, opposition from a high-priced legal team, and opposition from the White House. And then we had, unfortunately, internal problems in our conference. We had a terrible motion to vacate after a difficult election for speaker to begin with. It really explains all the transactions, who the shady characters were, what we found versus what the media reported, and then all of the obstacles we had to overcome to get information out and to relay that information to the public, because the print media, like the Washington Post and the New York Times, they had no interest. To be as interested in that investigation as they were, and they handled this multiple times a day for a year and a half, then these pictures come out, showing Joe introducing Hunter to President Xi Jinping and showing Joe with three Chinese guys that are sending him all this money that Joe said he never met. The media never reported on it. I saw Annie Grayer [editor’s note: a CNN reporter]. I said, ‘Annie, have you lost interest? You were so interested in this story, and then those pictures came out, and she goes ‘we reported it,’ I said ‘no you didn’t,’ she said ‘I think we did.’ I said, ‘I know you didn't.’ That's what the book goes into great detail about. I've had a lot of questions about why didn't this happen, or why didn't that happen? And I think there's a lot of answers in there. Jason Chaffetz, Trey Gowdy, and I talked about this. They were both chairmen of the Oversight Committee. There's this misconception of what we can do. I can't go in and arrest Merrick Garland. Even though I had a member or two of my committee go on TV and say ‘we should have the sergeant at arms go and arrest Joe Biden, or arrest Merrick Garland,’ that's not a thing. The book kind of explains what committees can do. I was asked by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and our conference to investigate bank records. And that's what I did, and we did it. No one thought we would get bank records. No one thought we would ever get bank records.
Washington Reporter:
Biden just gave a blanket pardon to Hunter. Do you think he is going to pardon James and Frank Biden before he goes out the door?
Rep. James Comer:
I think he'll pardon James Biden unless he's got some health report that shows James Biden doesn't have many years to live, because James Biden's just as corrupt as Hunter. The only difference between James Biden and Hunter Biden is that James Biden didn't leave a laptop lying around, and he never got on drugs and got reckless in the end. You look at the people who were giving James Biden money, and they were more on the domestic front, but he still got some of the international money through the incremental payments to all the family members. But his LLC was called Lion Hall Group, it was a consulting entity, but these people were giving money, and he never could answer questions like ‘what are you consulting for?’ He’d say ‘well, this was a loan.’ He’d be asked ‘do you have loan documents?’ He’d say ‘no.’ He’d be asked ‘have you made any interest for principal payments?’ he’d say ‘no.’ He’d be asked ‘are you going to pay it back?’ He’d say ‘I plan on it someday.’ He's 78 years old. He's not going to pay it back. It's just tragic that that family was allowed to peddle access like that to bad people. This isn't like special interest. This isn't like, ‘oh, they're taking money from the tobacco companies because they don't want to regulate nicotine.’ These are from oligarchs. These are from China that steals our patents and our intellectual property and is a national security threat. They took money for all the things that this Congress wants to do to prevent China from doing, like buying farmland. That's what the Bidens wanted to help China do: buy farmland, buy manufacturing, get their foot in American energy, and all that. So I just think that this was a president and a family that instituted a pay to play scheme. And the worst part about it is that the government knew all along, and the government covered it up. And I believe the government covered it up not because they love Joe Biden, not because they feared a threat to democracy if he was topped, but because they hated Donald Trump, and the most important thing for the mainstream media was that Donald Trump not return to office.
Washington Reporter:
We’re sitting here in person. You were just talking about the Bidens getting paid a lot of money to not do a lot of work. For years, you’ve been pushing for a return for the federal workforce to be in person. What do you think that actually will look like with the GOP trifecta coming in? Are you optimistic that this will happen? Do you think these people have already bought second homes in Florida and are never coming back?
Rep. James Comer:
They’d better plan on coming back. Trump's going to have to undo some of these executive orders that Joe Biden did to allow for more work from home policies. We have a bill that will pass through the House. I passed it through the House last year. This is part of what Elon Musk and DOGE can work on. My bill is called the Show Up Act. That's going to return the federal workforce to pre-COVID telework levels. You're always going to have some employees that telework. For example, in my district office in Kentucky, I have 15 employees. I have three field representatives. They have an office, but they're on the road most of the time, so they're not stationed to just that. They have an office, but their job is to go to the city council meetings and the Chamber of Commerce meetings and funerals and things like that. So there’s always going to be a percentage of federal workers that telework, so to speak. But you know what? What's happened now is that more than 50 percent of the federal workforce in Washington is working remotely — probably more than that, because some are just going in for two days of work, and they're counting two days a week in the office as in-person work, even though they're working from home three days a week. We never could get accurate accounting of what percentage of federal workers are teleworking in several government agencies, but it's way over 50 percent, it could be 75 percent in Washington, D.C., and that's unacceptable.
Washington Reporter:
I reported in the past about how the Democrats closed Congress and shuttered all of their offices here during the post-COVID era. They had newspapers piled up to your ankles outside virtually every Democrats’ office and the entire Capitol Hill press corps has never once covered this. You were just mentioning DOGE, and the Oversight Committee is going to have a DOGE Subcommittee. Can you talk about that? Have you discussed this with Elon Musk?
Rep. James Comer:
Marjorie Taylor Greene is gonna chair it. She just texted me. She's got lots of ideas. She communicates with people in the Trump administration on a daily basis. She talks to Trump probably more than anyone on the committee. She's wanting to play whatever role they want her to play. Obviously, we've got legislative jurisdiction over the federal workforce, over a lot of the buildings, the information technology, all of it. They want to upgrade information technology to be able to prevent improper transactions, better prevent fraud in the form of improper payments. That's our jurisdiction. They're wanting to sell off government property. If there aren’t any federal workers going to work, reduce the federal workforce, all of that is in our jurisdiction. So we'll be doing a lot of stuff legislatively for a full committee. And I foresee that DOGE, if they find out an agency is misusing funds, I can see the bureaucrats being hauled in front of the DOGE subcommittee, and that won't be a pleasant experience. Or if they're not forthcoming, if they're not transparent. The DOGE subcommittee will play a big role in just fighting the bureaucracy, because it’s going to be a battle, and I think Musk sees that. If you see what he tweeted today, he's backing away from the pledge to cut $2 trillion, but God bless him for trying, because nobody's trying. I've been here eight years, and nobody's really tried to cut spending. You’ve got the media focusing on what Rand Paul says, he'll talk about a $250,000 earmark for some kind of museum. And I agree that's a waste, but you're talking about $250,000 and we're talking about $2 trillion. So the real savings are going to be tough, because you're talking about government programs that are going to need to be reformed and eliminated, and things like that. So the good thing about the Oversight Committee and the DOGE subcommittee is that you’ve got people on that committee who want to get it done, and they're not afraid of the battle or are concerned about the Washington Post writing a negative story about them, or anything like that. They want to sincerely make government more efficient. So I think there'll be other committees that will probably have a DOGE subcommittees, but we're always going to be the most high-profile committee, and then we've got so much legislative jurisdiction over what DOGE wants to do to make a government more efficient. Right now, Speaker Mike Johnson says he's not going to do any select committees, which is why we’re making this as a new subcommittee.
Washington Reporter:
Elsewhere in terms of policy, you've been one of the vocal critics of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) within the GOP. What do you think Trump and Senate and House Republicans will want to do on PBM reform?
Rep. James Comer:
Some people were concerned over putting it in the CR and the number of pages. But I think now the president clearly wants to, and he always did want to, reform the PBMs. He understands that's a good driver of savings for Medicaid. PBMs are costing Medicare and Medicaid every day, not to mention costing the private sector with needless sums of money tacked on. It's an unnecessary level of bureaucracy in the prescription drug chain that was created with good intent, but unintended consequences have happened in the form of them becoming vertically integrated. They created their own pharmacies, and they're putting pharmacies out of business. They're not transparent with fees they charge. They're gouging consumers with expensive drugs. They may make blood pressure medicine cheaper, but then they'll get you on the oncology medicine. That's what our investigation proved, and I think our investigation raised the profile of that issue. Many people, Republicans and Democrats on the Oversight Committee, didn't know what a PBM was when we had our first hearing. And now, with the exception of one member of the Oversight Committee, everybody wants to reform PBMs. I think it'll happen. I think it'll be one of the first big bills that passes this Congress.
Washington Reporter:
Committee chairs like yourself are going to meet with President Trump in the coming days. What do you want to tell him, and what do you think will come out of that meeting?
Rep. James Comer:
He's going to have to play a big role within our conference, because on January 20, it's 217-215 for the next 90 days. And I think that, for speed's sake, you've always got these members that want to hold everything up and get media attention and all that. And I think he's going to have to crack the whip. No one should vote for something they don't want to vote for. But our conference has to understand, the American people gave President Trump a mandate. And they're frustrated with Congress. They think Congress is more the problem than the solution. So I think that Trump will have to really work hard. It's always the same 10 to 12, and I think that if they're going to criticize everything that Trump proposes, they should have run for president themselves.
Washington Reporter:
Kentucky could see a lot of action on statewide races for governor and for senate in the coming years. Do you have interest in running for either of those?
Rep. James Comer:
I've always wanted to go home. I believe in term limits. So running for governor is something I'm very seriously considering in 2027. I've got a lot of encouragement, but that's two years away. I have two more years in my chairmanship, and then I'll be term limited out. We'll see what happens, but it's something I'm very seriously considering.
Washington Reporter:
Finally, we saw Joe Rogan, for example, in this election, emerge as one of the most important people in media. You’ve also seen Trump bring in these heterodox people into the GOP, like RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, et cetera. You were criticizing the media earlier and its coverage and lack thereof of a lot of your work. What do you think the media's role will look like in the second Trump term? They've talked about shaking up the White House press briefing room, for example. What do you sort of see that relationship looking like moving forward?
Rep. James Comer:
Well, hopefully the media will be fair and balanced, and I think they need to be if they want to continue to exist because everybody's ratings are down, subscriptions are down. There's more competition, which is good, but the American people have lost confidence in the liberal media, and you know, they’ve just been wrong about too many things, from COVID in the Wuhan lab to the Steele dossier, to Russian collusion, to Biden being in perfect health, to there being no evidence of Biden wrongdoing. They just have been wrong on so many things. And the American people gave the liberal media the middle finger in November.
Washington Reporter:
Congressman Comer, thanks so much for chatting today.