A surprise new disclosure from the House Oversight Committee showing that a six-figure payment was sent from Communist China to Hunter Biden, listing President Biden’s Wilmington home as the beneficiary, has given the GOP important new fodder just hours before the first impeachment inquiry hearing begins. 

“Why is @POTUS lying about his family receiving this cash from China?” the chairman of the Oversight Committee, Congressman James Comer, asked on Twitter on Wednesday.

The Oversight Committee, which will be the main venue for the impeachment inquiry into the president, released information Tuesday showing that $260,000 was sent to Hunter Biden from China in 2019 when the elder Mr. Biden was seeking the Democratic nomination for president. The records were obtained from bank records the committee has been combing through since Republicans took control of the House in January. 

“A few months after Joe Biden announced his candidacy in 2019, information available to the Committee shows Hunter Biden received two wires from China for $250,000 and $10,000, including from Jonathan Li,” the committee said on X. “Devon Archer, a Biden business associate, described how Joe Biden met with Jonathan Li for coffee in Beijing, China, had a phone call with him, and wrote college recommendation letters for his children.”

The address listed in the wire transfers to the younger Mr. Biden — which were sent in July and August of 2019 — was his father’s home at Wilmington, Delaware. This, despite the fact that according to a profile of the first son in the New Yorker, the younger Mr. Biden had moved to California with his new wife, Melissa Cohen, in May of that same year. 

Mr. Comer spoke with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham on Tuesday night to discuss the new disclosures. “The one issue in Congress that Democrats and Republicans agree on is we don’t want China taking over industries important to our national security,” Mr. Comer said. “Jonathan Li is the person who represents China … There is a relationship that developed between Joe Biden and Jonathan Li when he was vice president.”

Mr. Biden, during his campaign for the White House, consistently and forcefully denied that he knew anything about his son’s foreign business dealings or that the first son had ever received money from China. At the second presidential debate between the Mr. Biden and President Trump, Mr. Biden said that “my son has not made money in terms of this thing about, uh, what are you talking about? China … Nobody else has made money from China.”

Since then, House Republicans have released tranche after tranche of documents showing large payments to the younger Mr. Biden and other Biden family members from business entities in China, Ukraine, and other foreign countries. GOP lawmakers have also extensively documented contacts between the president and his son’s foreign business partners. Republican lawmakers accuse the elder Mr. Biden of lying to the American people, though his supporters say any interactions with his son’s foreign clients were little more than mere blandishments.

Along with Mr. Comer, the Ways and Means Committee and the Judiciary Committee have been leading the investigation into the Biden family. During a press conference on Wednesday, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Congressman Jason Smith, released documents which he described as “new and alarming material” from Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers that purportedly show that “investigators were concerned there was in fact a connection between Hunter Biden’s global influence peddling, Joe Biden, and official US government activity.”

The first impeachment inquiry hearing into Mr. Biden is slated to begin Thursday morning and last for several hours. Republicans are hoping that these new disclosures about money being sent to the first son and the beneficiary address being listed as the president’s home will act as a kind of smoking gun when making the case the president personally benefited from his son’s affairs. To date, Republicans have failed to provide direct evidence that money was transferred to any of Mr. Biden’s personal accounts.

A spokesman for the Oversight Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The Oversight Committee will host three witnesses during their impeachment inquiry hearing on Thursday — forensic accountant Bruce Dubinsky, law professor Jonathan Turley, and the former assistant United States attorney general for the tax division, Eileen O’Connor.

“Based on the evidence, Congress has a duty to open an impeachment inquiry into President Biden’s corruption,” the committee said in a statement on Monday. “Americans demand and deserve answers, transparency, and accountability for this abuse of public office. This week, the House Oversight Committee will present evidence uncovered to date and hear from legal and financial experts about crimes the Bidens may have committed as they brought in millions at the expense of U.S. interests.”

For months, the committee has taken sworn testimony from and conducted interviews with those close to the Biden family, including a former business partner of the first son, Devon Archer. Over the summer, Archer testified that the younger Mr. Biden was selling an “illusion of access” to his father in order to make millions of dollars from foreign sources. The committee has also subpoenaed and received thousands of pages of bank records from the Biden family and disclosed that the elder Mr. Biden, during his time as vice president, met with some of his son’s business partners from Russia and Kazakhstan.