Breaking down Republicans' accusations against Biden family

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are digging deeper into President Biden and his family's business practices. This comes as part of a probe into the family's financial dealings ahead of the 2020 election. The committee's chairman, Representative James Coma, released the latest accusations earlier today. Now, he accuses President Biden's son Hunter and several other family members of engaging in business with foreign nationals. This committee is investigating President Biden and his family's shady business deals that capitalize on Joe Biden's public office and risked our country's national security. This committee has a duty to ask questions and pursue the facts no matter where they take us. CBS News Senior Investigative Correspondent Katherine Harage joins us now.

Hi there Katherine. Tell us what more does the House GOP investigation allege about President Biden, his family. Before he was elected to the White House. Well what makes this interim report stand out is that the House Oversight Committee has subpoena power and according to the interim report they've been able to receive thousands of records directly from the banks. And the central allegation is that there was a years long scheme through a network of companies to enrich members of the Biden family in some cases with funds from foreign entities. The Congressman Comer, pardon me, he also was asked if he could make a direct link with the president and he said they could really clear the air if you will by providing underlying records to show what these bank transaction fees were all about. If these were legitimate payments and those were legitimate businesses that your family created then I would assume you have invoices, I would assume that you would have books and business models and things like that to tell us what the businesses actually were.

And to final points another member of the committee said that they had found based on the banking records over 170 suspicious activity reports. These are transactions that are flagged by the banks for further review. Sometimes they can be very concerning and there is action taken by the bank or they can be innocuous. In this case we don't know what the final adjudication was of those suspicious activity reports and the committee says that they will be issuing more subpoenas to expand their investigation of all of these financial transactions. And I guess the key question for viewers, I mean it's curious, it's concerning but what was the legal, what law was broken, you wonder, what has been the White House's response to all of this being investigated? Well one of the White House spokesman Ian Samms was live tweeting during the event and it came down to a couple of central questions. He said what has this committee shown the direct link or the data points that link policy changes this allegation of undue influence and Joe Biden. He said that they had not been able to illustrate that to date and he also indicated that it would be important for them to sort of put some meat on the bone to these allegations given that at least two media outlets, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, had not been able to make this connection between payments, Joe Biden and undue influence on policy decisions.

So the White House had a very fulsome response to the news conference this morning. The Republican-led House Judiciary and Intelligence committees also made accusations against the Biden administration saying that they used former top intelligence officials to try and discredit the Hunter Biden laptop allegations ahead of Biden's campaign. What more are you learning from this report, Catherine? Well again, this is an interim report this time from two House committees both controlled by the GOP, the Judiciary and the Intelligence Committee. They released the report based on interviews, transcripts with witnesses and some emails. These were all sort of partials in the report so we can't review the full transcripts or emails independently. But they make the allegation that this letter from 51 former intelligence officials in October of 2020 saying that the laptop had the earmarks of an information campaign was really sort of leveraged by the Biden campaign to tamp down any discussion of the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop. We did our own independent forensic review of the laptop data.

We obtained a copy that mirrored what was provided to the FBI in 2019. And in our case, we did not find any evidence that the contents had been altered or doctored or faked in any way. Alright, Catherine Harridge, thank you very much. You're welcome.

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