At a hearing Wednesday in which witnesses discussed the atrocities that Russians in Ukraine have reportedly committed — including using rape as a weapon of war and indiscriminately bombing civilian targets — one GOP congressman used his time to ask about President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
The query so angered one of his Democratic colleagues on the House Foreign Affairs Committee that he used his time to say he was “horrified and disgusted” by it.
“It’s sickening. It’s disrespectful. This is not about Hunter Biden,” Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) said in response to Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry’s remark.
“This is about Vladimir Putin. It’s about genocide. It’s about depravity. And it’s about war crimes. That’s why we’re here.”
Perry is chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservatives and libertarians within the larger House Republican conference that prides itself on pushing the Republican Party ever further to the right.
At the hearing, Andriy Kostin, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, said the country was investigating about 80,000 reports of war crimes, including the kidnapping of about 20,000 Ukrainian children who were taken to Russia. He asked for continued U.S. logistical and financial support for the prosecution efforts.
Some House Republicans, especially among Perry’s group, have been skeptical of U.S. support for Ukraine. Republicans’ leading presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump, has mused that he would have allowed Russia to keep some of Ukraine’s land in exchange for ending the war, a position Ukrainians overwhelmingly oppose.
Perry’s question, which appeared to catch Kostin off-guard, came the same day another Republican, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), had also invoked the Biden family in an unrelated hearing — and yet another high-profile Republican had disrupted an immigration hearing.
“The president’s family will wish they had thought of Switzerland,” Comer said at an Oversight Committee hearing on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, in a reference to the notorious reputation Switzerland has for bank secrecy.
Meanwhile, Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Ga.) was reprimanded at a Homeland Security hearing for calling Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas “a liar,” in violation of the decorum that is supposed to be afforded to witnesses.
Perry started his tangent by listing incidents of alleged Ukrainian corruption dating back to 2011, then said an investigation into the gas company Burisma had been halted because the CEO could not be found.
“But we probably can locate Hunter Biden,” he said, a reference to the younger Biden’s work for the company.
“What is your office’s position that Burisma needs further investigation,” Perry asked Kostin, “and will you commit to investigating Burisma to the full extent, no matter what pushback you get and no matter who you need to call as a witness, including Americans that might be involved in the corruption and malfeasance and loss and theft of taxpayer money in your country?”
After what had been an otherwise sympathetic hearing for about two hours up to that point, Kostin, the Ukrainian prosecutor, took almost 10 seconds to finally respond to Perry’s question. He did so slowly, with his arms crossed.
“Congressman, you started with the dates and facts. I will add one date and fact: March 2023,” Kostin said.
That’s when the Council of Europe’s Group of States Against Corruption said that Ukraine had made enough progress to be taken off its blacklist of nations with severe corruption issues. Kostin added that a new director of a national anti-corruption bureau had also been named.
“With regard to the case you have mentioned, it’s not, unfortunately, the topic of our committee hearing, so I am not entitled at the moment to give you more information about this case,” Kostin said.
The next questioner, Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.), took a shot at Perry, who had already left his seat on the committee dais by then.
“I believe that you were just subjected to a diatribe from somebody who didn’t actually hear the testimony earlier today, which is a shame,” she told Kostin.