This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

A powerful Republican in Congress investigating Joe Biden and his family members for corruption says the former president's last-minute pardons for his relatives are not only "an admission of guilt," they're also not legitimate.

"I don't think these preemptive pardons would hold up in court," House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., told Maria Bartiromo on "Sunday Morning Futures."

"This is an admission of guilt by Joe Biden. Everybody in America knows it."

Bartiromo replied: "Wow. So you think the preemptive pardons are not legitimate."

"I don't, but there are a lot better legal minds than mine I'm sure," Comer answered.

"But, you know, I don't think the average person that works hard and pays taxes has much sympathy for a president that in his last act in office pardoned his entire family for financial public corruption and didn't have the guts to tell anybody why he did it."

Bartiromo noted her audience was "disappointed" with the lack of legal action against the Bidens, and asked Comer: "With these pardons, should we just expect after all that work you put into it, after all the conversations we've had, they got away with it?"

"I certainly hope not," Comer responded. "The ball's gonna be in [Attorney General nominee] Pam Bondi's court. We're communicating with her people right now. I've had a good meeting with [nominated FBI Director] Kash Patel.

"One thing I'm confident is going to happen and you saw that with [CIA Director] John Ratcliffe, we're gonna hold people in the government accountable that were involved in the cover-up. He's already held the 51 intelligence officials that lied to the American people when they said the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation when most of them, in fact, knew that it was not Russian disinformation.

"Now we want to get the people that were involved in the cover-ups because what we found in our investigation, and I write about it extensively in my book, is that there were four different agencies investigating the Bidens, the IRS, the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission. And, obviously, they wanted to get to Joe Biden because none of this money would be coming into the president's son or brother were it not for Joe Biden.

"Every time they got ready to ask Joe Biden, they were told to stand down by a Deep State actor. I want those people held accountable."