‘He is peddling stories’: Bob Woodward denies Republican’s claim he said Biden was corrupt

The Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward forcefully denied making statements attributed to him by James Comer, the Republican chair of the powerful House oversight committee, in which Woodward supposedly said Joe Biden was financially corrupt.

“The statements attributed to me in what is apparently his book are false,” Woodward said. “I made none of those statements he attributes to me. I repeat none, and not even in a paraphrased form.”

Woodward said Comer was “peddling stories, conclusions and allegations that just do not check out at all”.

Comer lays out his claims in a book, All the President’s Money: Investigating the Secret Foreign Schemes That Made the Biden Family Rich, which will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

The book is named in tribute to All the President’s Men, the seminal account of the Watergate scandal that Woodward wrote with Carl Bernstein, with whom he brought down a president, Richard Nixon.

As oversight chair, Comer led Republican attempts to bring down Biden, by tying the president, his surviving son, Hunter Biden, and other family members to alleged financial corruption involving foreign interests.

Riddled with conspiracy theories and discredited witnesses, Comer’s investigation flopped – publicly so in one high-profile hearing when a key witness, the law professor Jonathan Turley, said evidence against the president fell short of the necessary threshold for impeachment and removal.

Hunter Biden was separately convicted on taxation and guns charges, before receiving a hugely controversial pardon from his father.

In his book, Comer claims Woodward spoke about Joe Biden over dinner in February 2023, after Woodward and Robert Costa of CBS – his sometime writing partner, whose surname Comer misspells as “Costas” throughout his account – interviewed Comer for a book about Biden’s presidency.

“Woodward explained that everyone in DC knew that Joe allowed his family to sell access to him, but as far as he was aware, that was not illegal,” Comer writes. “He added that it should be, but it wasn’t. ‘You will have to prove all of Joe Biden’s wrongdoing,’ he said, ‘and you will likely not be able to do that.’”

He also writes that he asked Woodward “what he thought about my investigation. He replied that he thought Biden had obviously worked the system his entire political career, and that his son and both brothers had a troubled financial history. He predicted that my investigation ‘would either be bigger than Watergate or it would end up being a big nothing burger’.”

Comer also says Woodward bragged about Watergate and disparaged the current Washington political press corps.

In an email to the Guardian, Woodward forcefully denied Comer’s version of their conversation and said he had tapes which proved it had never happened.

“The dinner with Comer was tape-recorded with his knowledge,” Woodward wrote, adding that he had listened again to the tape, which was “two hours and 55 minutes” long.

“The statements attributed to me in what is apparently his book are false,” Woodward said. “I made none of those statements he attributes to me. I repeat none, and not even in a paraphrased form – either about Biden or about the media. I never said Biden was corrupt or sold access.”

Woodward also said: “In the course of the interview Comer made a series of wild and over-the-top allegations about various people and political figures. It was an endless stream. None checked out.

“I say this on the record now. I don’t know any more about him or what else might be in his book. But it is a textbook case of someone seriously misremembering or putting his own comments into someone else’s mouth – in this case, mine. He is peddling stories, conclusions and allegations that just do not check out at all.

“The purpose of the interview was to hear what he had to say. He was the chairman of an important committee … As a reporter, you interview people who should be in a position to know something. At times they do, at times they don’t. This is a case where the person did not. But I’m surprised that someone in an investigative position would so misstate the facts.”

Representatives for Comer did not respond to a request for comment.