The chairman of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, is signaling a shift in tactics in his legal pursuit of what he has called the Biden “organized crime” family — a focus on criminal referrals to what he expects will be a Trump justice department in January 2025.  

In a fundraising email sent to supporters on Monday, Mr. Comer said that the criminal referrals in his long-running impeachment inquiry into the Bidens may soon come. 

“I am preparing criminal referrals as the culmination of my investigation,” Mr. Comer said in his message. “This is the best way to hold the Bidens accountable for their crimes, as it’s now clear the Democrats will do anything to hold onto power.”

Mr. Comer says that Democrats in Congress are protecting the president and his family. “It’s clear that Democrats will choose their party over their country and the truth at every turn. They should be ashamed of themselves,” Mr. Comer wrote. 

With Republicans holding a razor-thin majority in the House, passing an impeachment resolution may be difficult. Mr. Comer also points out that Senate Democrats are already threatening to dismiss out of hand the impeachment articles narrowly passed by the House against the embattled homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, for malpractice and lying regarding border enforcement. 

“As it stands right now, the deranged Democrats are refusing to take up the Impeachment Trial of Alejandro Mayorkas and threatening to dismiss it within minutes when it finally is brought up,” Mr. Comer says. 

Just as with President Trump’s two impeachment trials, the Biden impeachment trial was always doomed in the Senate, which is now controlled by Democrats. Mr. Comer believes now that a return by Mr. Trump is the only way to hold the Bidens accountable. 

“When President Trump returns to the White House, it’s critical that the new leadership at the DOJ have everything they need to prosecute the Biden Crime Family and deliver swift justice,” Mr. Comer says. 

Criminal referrals are in essence suggestions for prosecution. They do not require a floor vote in either the House or Senate, but rather they have historically been issued by individual committees. The Select January 6 Committee issued two criminal referrals at the conclusion of its investigation — one against Mr. Trump and the other against an outside legal advisor who advocated for overturning the election, John Eastman. 

A criminal referral typically includes a committee’s findings from its own investigation and can lead to federal prosecutors opening a criminal probe. There is no requirement to do so, however. 

Mr. Trump has promised on the campaign trail to go after his political enemies, including President Biden and his family, among others. “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of America, Joe Biden, and go after the Biden crime family,” Mr. Trump said at a rally last year. 

He did not follow through on his campaign promises to put Senator Clinton in jail after the 2016 election for breaking the law regarding her use of email. 

Mr. Comer’s pivot to criminal referrals began just days after he held a public hearing with Hunter Biden’s former business partners who claimed that the president was actively involved in his son’s business dealings. Those former business partners did not point to an official act the elder Mr. Biden took as vice president or president as a result of his son’s affairs. The younger Mr. Biden refused to attend the hearing and sit next to his former colleagues, one of whom is in prison and another is soon headed there.

Just two days after that hearing, Mr. Comer went on Newsmax to say that he was moving toward criminal referrals being the best “accountability” measure rather than impeachment: “What does real accountability look like? Does it look like impeaching Joe Biden in the House and then the Senate tabling it? Or does it mean providing real criminal referrals to the Department of Justice? I would think the latter.”

The investigations of the Bidens will not end, to be sure. Mr. Comer previously told the Sun that there are more people he wants to talk to as part of the Biden family investigation, even if it isn’t explicitly an impeachment inquiry. “I think we’ve got a good series of people coming in,” he said of his series of depositions. “There are a couple more people that we want to bring in, so we’ve been sending letters, requesting them to come in. If they don’t, then we’ll subpoena them.”