AUGUSTA, Maine — A day after former President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election, U.S. Sen. Susan Collins said Friday the allegations against Hunter Biden “deserve the same kind of in-depth investigation.”
Collins, a centrist Republican, spoke Friday about President Joe Biden’s son and Trump during an in-studio interview with WVOM in Bangor. Her remarks came after Trump made his initial appearance Thursday in federal court in Washington, D.C., to enter a not guilty plea to four felony counts related to his efforts to reverse his loss to Biden in the 2020 election.
After repeating lines she has given on how Trump’s “legal troubles are piling up” but that he “deserves his day in court,” Collins took a question Friday on the Bidens that host Ric Tyler said came from a listener wondering whether “we will see a thorough investigation or probe into those allegations.”
“The allegations against Hunter Biden are serious, and they do deserve the same kind of in-depth investigation, particularly since in some of the reports, President Biden is cited as well,” Collins replied. “Now, I don’t know whether those reports are accurate or not, but that’s why they need to be thoroughly investigated.”
That was referring to a federal judge in Delaware rejecting last week a plea deal for Hunter Biden in which he would plead guilty to two counts of failing to pay taxes in return for prosecutors recommending probation.
A separate charge of illegally possessing a handgun would have been dropped if Hunter Biden, who has had substance abuse issues for years, followed the terms of a diversion agreement. But U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika blocked the plea deal at least temporarily after saying the agreements are “not straightforward and they contain some atypical provisions.”
“We need to have an equal system of justice here,” Collins said Friday, adding that “surely it is telling” and “unusual” how the judge refused the plea deal.
Hunter Biden and his father also were in the news Thursday when the Republican-led House Oversight Committee released the transcript of testimony from a former associate who served with the younger Biden on the board of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.
The former business partner, Devon Archer, told the committee Joe Biden, while serving as vice president, never talked business when his son put him on the phone to talk with Hunter and other associates and that Hunter never “overtly” told associates he wanted to use his father for a specific purpose.
While the testimony did not strengthen still-unsupported GOP claims that Joe Biden was part of a larger bribery conspiracy, Republicans have focused on Archer’s comments that Hunter Biden did try to prove his worth to Burisma by delivering the Biden family “brand” and the “illusion of access to his father.”
Earlier this week, Collins’ office confirmed she would not support Trump in next year’s GOP presidential primary nor general election, if the former president is the nominee. Trump’s latest indictment is one of three criminal cases the former president is facing, though he remains the favorite to win the Republican nomination to face Biden again in 2024.
Collins, who was one of the few Republicans to vote to convict Trump in 2021 in an unsuccessful impeachment effort over his role in stoking the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, has repeatedly listed off GOP candidates she believes are better picks.
