Rep. James Comer (R-KY) has for months used his power as House Oversight chair to assail Hunter Biden’s involvement in a failed business deal with a Chinese energy company. But The Daily Beast has obtained emails and other documents showing that when Comer was running for governor of Kentucky, he himself was involved in a failed Chinese business deal.
It involved importing Chinese hemp seeds through Comer’s office, when he was Kentucky’s agriculture commissioner, to benefit a campaign donor’s company that Comer had fast-tracked for his industrial hemp pilot program. The documents—which The Daily Beast obtained after the Kentucky government released them to a third party in response to open records requests—contain a stunning revelation: while the emails show the involved parties clearly intended to import only legal hemp, two rounds of tests revealed the plants were essentially Chinese pot, containing illegally high levels of THC —the psychoactive compound that gives marijuana users a high. The records chalk up the error to the decision to order seeds that “do not have good breeder documentation,” warning that the parties may “run into this issue again.
” Emails show an intent to destroy the plants after the second test. If the plants were destroyed, however, it was not documented in the thousands of emails and attachments that the Kentucky Department of Agriculture (KDA) and Murray State University (MSU) produced in response to the open records requests..
