Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) is calling for the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate the business dealings and relationships of presidential family members, including a report that a Russian oligarch helped pay for the wedding after-party of President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.
ProPublica reported last week that Umar Kremlev, who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on festivities celebrating Trump Jr.’s wedding in May. Curtis urged the committee to subpoena Trump Jr. — an extraordinary request from a senator whose party controls the White House.
Curtis also asked the committee to subpoena Hunter Biden — whose business dealings Republicans in Congress have investigated extensively — as part of a broader probe into “the use of presidential family relationships for private financial benefit, preferential treatment, or access by domestic and foreign interests.”
“The country should not have to accept one standard for the family of a Republican president and another for the family of a Democratic president,” Curtis wrote Monday in a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Dick Durbin (Illinois), the top Democrat on the committee. “Nor should congressional oversight begin and end when control of the White House changes hands.”
Curtis is the latest Republican lawmaker to buck the Trump administration in recent weeks.
Seven House Republicans voted with Democrats last week to block Trump from ordering further strikes on Iran, and Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Florida) warned Trump in a campaign ad that Hispanic voters “feel betrayed” by his immigration enforcement efforts. Unlike many of those Republicans, Curtis is not up for reelection in November.
Curtis’s concerns about Kremlev financing Trump Jr.’s wedding after-party, he wrote, “are compounded by Donald Trump Jr.’s active promotion of family-backed cryptocurrency ventures, his continued pursuit of international real estate deals involving direct meetings with foreign heads of state, and his reported investments in defense contracting.”
Curtis also pointed to Trump Jr.’s “significant financial and advisory ties to prediction-market platforms that depend on favorable federal regulatory decisions being considered by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.”
Such reports “may create expectations of a returned favor that would not be in the best interests of the American people or our allies, and could even create national security vulnerabilities,” Curtis wrote.
He was more blunt on social media.
“A toaster is a wedding gift,” he wrote Tuesday on X. “A private-island party paid for by a Putin-connected oligarch is something else. Republicans nearly wore out the subpoena machine investigating Hunter Biden’s foreign relationships. We should not unplug it now.”
Bettina Trump, Trump Jr.’s wife, defended accepting Kremlev’s gift last week on social media. The couple’s “dear friend Umar very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding,” Bettina Trump wrote on Instagram, describing those festivities as “an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend.”
President Trump, who did not attend the wedding, said last week that Trump Jr. paid Kremlev back.
Curtis, a freshman senator, does not sit on the Judiciary Committee. He has occasionally bucked his party in the past, declaring in an April op-ed that he would not “support funding for continued military operations” in Iran unless Congress votes to authorize the conflict, but he almost always votes with Republicans.
Curtis also criticized Hunter Biden’s business dealings, writing in the letter that “there is little question that President Biden’s decades in public office gave his son a degree of access, name recognition, and influence that materially enhanced his value in business dealings and opened doors that otherwise may have remained closed” — something Hunter Biden has acknowledged.
Hunter Biden said he would testify without being subpoenaed and suggested that one of President Trump’s other sons, Eric Trump, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, appear as well.
“I say bring it on,” Biden wrote Tuesday on X. “I’ve already given more than seven hours of sworn testimony. More than three dozen witnesses testified across two chambers.”
Durbin endorsed Curtis’s request on Tuesday and praised him for showing “real courage” in standing up to the administration.
“This sort of thing cannot be allowed to happen without some response from Congress,” he said on the Senate floor. “And Senator Curtis was right: the Senate Judiciary Committee is the place to start.”
Still, it is unclear if the committee will investigate. Grassley declined to comment on the letter, saying would not do so until he read it.
Such hearings often take months of preparation, and the Senate is scheduled to be in session for only six more weeks before the end of the year. Grassley is not expected to be chairman of the committee next year due to term limits, and Durbin is retiring.
Durbin argued the committee still has time to investigate even though only a few months remain before the end of the year.
“We’re not overworking ourselves during those few months,” Durbin said. “We have enough resources and staff and talent on a bipartisan basis to call Donald Trump Jr. before the committee for a deposition to answer some basic questions about who paid for his wedding ceremony.”
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