The fuse is lit and Congress and the Department of Justice are on a collision course this week, with the president squarely in the middle. 

That is because Congressman James Comer, the Republican chairman of the Oversight Committee, has urged the DOJ to hold off on a “slap on the wrist” indictment of Hunter Biden ahead of a press conference Wednesday that Mr. Comer says will produce even more damning evidence of the Biden family’s shady financial dealings with foreign companies that posed a threat to national security. 

“This is much bigger than anyone predicted and it all points toward Joe Biden, the ‘Big Guy,’” Mr. Comer told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday.  

One of Hunter Biden’s business associates, who allegedly panicked when the New York Post broke the story of the laptop the president’s son abandoned, referred to the president as “the Big Guy.”

The escalating tensions at Washington were prefaced by Mr. Comer’s subpoena of the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, last week in an effort to obtain a form from June 2020 that notes conversations with a confidential source that, Mr. Comer wrote, “describes an alleged criminal scheme” implicating the president and a foreign national “relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions” when Mr. Biden was vice president.

Mr. Comer and the Oversight Committee have been investigating the Biden family’s finances in close coordination with Senator Grassley, the Republican of Iowa. Mr. Grassley has previously and unambiguously accused the Democratic Party of orchestrating a coverup of the Hunter Biden investigation.

In a letter to Mr. Wray, the lawmakers claimed that the FD-1023 forms they seek contain “highly credible unclassified whistleblower disclosures” that demand further investigation. 

Against this highly charged background, a White House spokesman, Ian Sams, said last week that the president “has offered an unprecedented level of transparency” about his personal finances by releasing several years’ worth of tax returns. But whether any of those tax returns disclose the sources of all of Mr. Biden’s non-employee income from overseas sources is far from transparently clear. 

Mr. Comer has accused various members of the Biden family of creating bogus limited liability companies to facilitate and subsequently obfuscate money transfers, notably from Communist Chinese-backed companies. 

According to some of his findings, one deal involving the Biden family netted them a profit of more than $1 million that was accrued in more than 15 incremental payments from a Chinese company through a third party. It is presumably this and similar findings that Mr. Comer plans to announce at a press conference that he and other Republicans will hold on Wednesday. 

On Sunday, Ms. Bartiromo asked Mr. Comer, “So is this money laundering, is this racketeering? They [the Biden family] were just taking money and changing policy decisions on behalf of America and pocketing the cash?” Mr. Comer replied that “the LLCs were set up to disguise the sender of the money and to deceive the IRS so they wouldn’t have to pay taxes, or else the countries would have just wired the money directly to the Bidens. But they tried to do it through a web of LLCs. It’s called money laundering.”

Ms. Bartiromo raised the troubling possibility that President Biden’s decision to scrap the justice department’s China Initiative — a Trump-era program to counter Beijing’s theft of American intellectual property — was “paid for” by the Communist Chinese themselves. She asked Mr. Comer, “Was the China Initiative cancellation one of those decisions that Joe Biden got paid for?” To which the congressman replied, “It’s very suspicious why he did it.”

He also said that “the DOJ has a whole menu of options to go after this family, not just the president’s son. I don’t think DOJ realizes how much money the Biden family laundered into their personal accounts.” 

Mr. Comer has requested to see the document in question by May 10 and is concerned that the DOJ  before then might settle for penalizing Hunter Biden with less significant  charges related to taxes and an alleged false statement in connection with a gun purchase. For him, that would be “a drop in the bucket.”

“My message to the Department of Justice is very loud and clear. Do not indict Hunter Biden before Wednesday,” Mr. Comer said on Sunday. He added, “When you have the opportunity to see the evidence that the House Oversight Committee will produce with respect to the web of LLCs, with respect to the number of adversarial countries that this family influence peddled in, and this is not just about the president’s son. This is about the entire Biden family, including the president of the United States. So we believe there are a whole lot of tips that the IRS and the DOJ don’t know about because we don’t believe they’ve done a whole lot of digging in this, and we have.”

He told Fox News that Wednesday’s press conference will present the American people with additional information on the Biden family’s bank records and that the briefing will provide additional information into the investigation led by U.S. Attorney David Weiss. 

As of Monday it was not immediately clear where Wednesday’s press conference will be held, nor whether Mr. Wray would comply with the subpoena request on Mr. Comer’s terms. 

The developments come on the heels of a denial by Secretary Blinken that he organized a letter signed by 51 intelligence community individuals in 2020, in the midst of an election cycle, that miscast the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation. The high-flying Mr. Blinken is facing accusations of making false statements to Congress related to his communication with the president’s son. 

Arguably more significantly, communications retrieved from the mislaid laptop point to influence peddling and pay-to-play on a troublingly vast scale. The rapid progression of the House investigation raises the prospect that Hunter Biden was more than just a high-flying wingman to his father’s carefully constructed financial portfolios when Joe Biden was vice president.

As multiple points of both legal contention and interagency obfuscation converge this week, the press coverage of the possible coverup is thinning like the American public’s patience with this White House’s endless shades of gray.