Hunter Biden, the president’s son, is scheduled to appear on Capitol Hill on Wednesday for a deposition conducted by House Republicans who are hunting for evidence to try to impeach his father.
The interview of Hunter Biden, 54, which is expected to be lengthy, comes at a make-or-break moment for the inquiry. Republicans have sought for months to tie President Biden to the alleged misdeeds of his second-born son, but they have struggled with a series of setbacks, including the indictment of an F.B.I. informant accused of making up a story that the elder Mr. Biden took a $5 million bribe.
The deposition is the culmination of a multiyear Republican pursuit of Hunter Biden, whose business dealings and descent into debauchery have long made him a punching bag for the G.O.P. After years of asking “Where’s Hunter?” and spreading the lurid contents of a laptop that contained graphic material of his exploits while he struggled with drug addiction, Republicans will finally have their chance to question him.
The deposition is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. in a House office building near the Capitol.
It will be a major moment in the drawn-out feud between Republicans and Mr. Biden about whether he would cooperate in the impeachment inquiry. He had refused repeatedly to sit for a private deposition, and Republicans threatened to hold him in contempt of Congress for defying an earlier subpoena to do so.
Mr. Biden had maintained that he was worried that House Republicans would selectively leak portions of his testimony to misrepresent his account and try to harm his father. He made two surprise appearances on Capitol Hill in which he challenged Republicans to question him at a public hearing. But after the contempt threat, Mr. Biden relented.
Hunter Biden is already under federal indictment over accusations of tax crimes related to his overseas business interests, including with companies and partners in Ukraine and China. Testifying is a risk for him, because anything he says could be used against him in the criminal case.
Republicans are trying to unearth evidence that President Biden was inappropriately involved in his son’s foreign business dealings, but so far their impeachment investigation has turned up no proof.
They have determined through bank records that from 2014 to 2019, Biden family members received about $15 million through business deals from foreign entities. But they have yet to show that any of the deals were illegal, or that the elder Mr. Biden benefited from them.
House Republicans have uncovered proof that the elder Mr. Biden was aware of and met some of his son’s business partners, raising questions about whether some of the president’s public statements about the deals were intentionally misleading. But a key witness also testified that such conversations were superficial in nature, extending only to niceties like the weather or fishing.