A lawyer for Hunter Biden filed an ethics complaint against Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) on Friday after she displayed sexually explicit photos of Biden during a congressional hearing earlier this week.
Attorney Abbe David Lowell asked the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) to immediately open a review into Greene’s “abhorrent behavior that blatantly violates House Ethics rules and standards of official conduct,” according to a letter obtained by The Hill.
“This week, your colleague has lowered herself, and by extension the entire House of Representatives, to a new level of abhorrent behavior that blatantly violates House Ethics rules and standards of official conduct. If the OCE takes its responsibilities seriously, it will promptly and decisively condemn and discipline Ms. Greene for her latest actions,” Lowell wrote.
“Now more than ever, the House has a duty to make loud and clear that it does not endorse, condone, or agree with her outrageous, undignified conduct and brazen violations of the standards of official conduct that do not reflect creditably on the House of Representatives,” he added.
The incident came during a House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday in which Greene and other members of Congress questioned two IRS whistleblowers who say the IRS, DOJ, and FBI interfered in the investigation into Hunter Biden.
During Greene’s time to question the whistleblowers, she showed posters featuring graphic sexual photos of Hunter Biden from his recovered laptop hard drive. While the faces of other people involved in the photos were censored, the younger Biden’s face was visible.
“Before we begin, I would like to let the committee and everyone watching at home that parental discretion is advised,” Greene warned before she began her line of questioning.
Greene’s questions centered on whether Hunter Biden had violated the federal Mann Act of 1910, which prohibits the transportation of women across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”
Ranking member Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) questioned whether Greene’s demonstrative was appropriate: “Should we be displaying this, Mr. Chairman?”
Raskin later went on to argue that Greene had broken House rules.
“Yesterday they took us to a new low when Marjorie Taylor Greene decided for completely gratuitous reasons to show purported pornographic scenes of Hunter Biden. I mean, if that is not a violation of the rules of decorum of the House, then we don’t have rules of decorum in the House,” he said. “And I’ve been telling Republicans, if those images were in a book, they’d be voting to ban them. Instead, they decided to display them to the whole country in the House of Representatives.”
Meanwhile, Lowell’s letter goes on to accuse Greene of trying to “use the power of her office to generate some clicks online, fundraise, and provide sensationalist clips for Fox News at the expense of harassing and embarrassing Mr. Biden, a private citizen.”
“This political stunt by Ms. Greene will go down as a historic event unbecoming of any member of Congress and beneath the dignity of the House of Representatives,” he added.
Lowell noted that Greene also sent out a fundraising email to her constituents that included a link to a video that also had the explicit photos of Biden. He suggested that email may have violated a federal law concerning transferring obscene material to minors “even if one minor was included among the email distribution or was exposed to her outrage.”
He also suggested Greene may have also broken a House rule that requires members to conduct themselves “in a manner that reflects creditably on the House floor.”
The letter on Friday marks the second time Lowell has asked for an OCE review of Greene’s behavior.
“Representative Greene’s unethical conduct arises from her continuous verbal attacks, defamatory statements, publication of personal photos and data, and promotion of conspiracy theories about and against Robert Hunter Biden,” Lowell wrote back in April.