As Rep. James Comer (R-KY) plows ahead with his sensationalized impeachment inquiry premised on Hunter Biden’s business dealings, the Oversight Chairman has alleged that Biden’s opaque financial operations merit investigation, and that people who own corporations have a “responsibility” to maintain proper “books and records.”
But a review of dozens of tax, real estate, and business filings in Kentucky and Tennessee indicate that Comer’s own personal “books and records” are opaque at best—and improper at worst.
Those records include the dealings of Comer’s shell company, Farm Team Properties LLC, which the state of Kentucky has dissolved twice for failure to file annual reports—first in 2020, then again in 2022.
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Kentucky law states that an administratively dissolved business “continues its existence but shall not carry on any business except that necessary to wind up and liquidate its business and affairs.” An official with the Kentucky Department of Revenue told The Daily Beast that a company in administrative dissolution may not legally conduct business in the state—such as executing deals and leases, securing loans, or collecting rent as an LLC.
But in response to questions about the shell company last month, Comer told Fox Business that Farm Team Properties not only holds properties, it also “manages” them, “leases hunting on my 1,600 acres of farmland,” and generates “lots of revenue, legitimate revenue.” (The previous month, he denied having an LLC during a committee hearing.)
While Comer and his wife rectified the first dissolution within a few weeks, they allowed the October 2022 dissolution to languish for more than a year, only reinstating the entity last month, after The Daily Beast first reported on the company and flagged the dissolution on social media. It’s not clear from Comer’s filings whether Farm Team Properties ceased business activity for those 14 months.
The “books and records” questions also run to Comer’s real estate holdings, which directly contradict his recent public statements about his LLC. For one, Comer reports rental income from all of his farmland holdings, but it’s not clear whether that income derives from Farm Team’s alleged hunting leases. If so, experts told The Daily Beast, his records should reflect that, and they do not.
The opacity of Comer’s disclosures—along with his contradictory defenses of the shell company—mean the public still doesn’t have a clear picture of his finances. And Comer’s broadsides targeting Hunter Biden’s cloudy corporate entities would seem to invite parallel scrutiny into the similar haze that has settled over his own business dealings.
A Comer spokesperson did not reply to The Daily Beast’s detailed comment request.
WHAT WOULD YOU SAY YOU DO HERE?
On personal financial disclosures starting from 2017—the year Comer’s wife created Farm Team Properties—and continuing through his most recent statement covering 2022, Comer has listed the income from the company as “none.” But after recent reports from The Daily Beast and the Associated Press raised questions about the shell company, Comer has called into question whether he’s really making no money from the entity.
House ethics rules state that members who “own an interest in a partnership or limited liability company established for the purpose of holding real estate,” must describe “each individual property held by the company.” Members also “must disclose each asset held by the company in which your interest (or that of your spouse or dependent child) had a period-end value of more than $1,000” or had recorded “more than $200 in income during the reporting period.”
House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) participates in a media availability following a successful vote to formalize an impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden.
Elizabeth Frantz/ReutersBrendan Fischer, an ethics expert and deputy director of watchdog Documented, told The Daily Beast that it seems as if Comer should disclose more information.
“For a company created to hold investment properties—which sounds like Farm Team Properties, LLC—a Congressperson not only must disclose the company, they must also provide details about the properties it owns, and the amount of any income (such as rental income) from those properties,” Fischer said, noting that the rules apply “regardless of whether the entity is taxed as a partnership or corporation.”
Comer’s disclosures list his FTP ownership as a business interest, not as investment or real estate, despite the fact that it owns properties and is engaged in “real estate speculation.” This was true in 2017, when Farm Team Properties was created to hold property and obscure Comer’s co-ownership with a campaign donor, the Associated Press reported last month.
Additionally, the Comers describe the company as a “financial, insurance, or real estate” business in Kentucky filings, though the last time they did so was in 2019—those details were not included in their most recent annual report, in 2021.
TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS FIVE
Comer has also apparently publicly overstated how many properties the company holds.
“This LLC that I have has five different properties,” Comer told Fox Business last month. He then repeated that claim, adding, “This is a land speculation LLC and it has five different assets and lots of revenue, legitimate revenue.”
But Farm Team Properties is only listed as an owner on two properties in Monroe County records. The Daily Beast’s review of records in other jurisdictions where Comer owns land—Franklin County, Kentucky, and Macon and Clay counties in Tennessee—also did not turn up any Farm Team holdings.
Comer has never listed the company’s holdings or revenue on his disclosures, which ethics experts have said should be reported and poses a “real problem” for transparency.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer is seen in the Rayburn House office building on Capitol Hill.
Photo by Craig Hudson for The Washington Post via Getty ImagesFor instance, in February 2022—before the company dissolved—Farm Team Properties sold an acre of land that it co-owned with longtime Comer donor Darren Cleary, with the deed showing a price of $50,000. Comer’s disclosures don’t appear to have ever listed that property—which he acquired in 2017—and he did not report the income.
Since first running for Congress in 2016, Comer has reported earning a combined personal outside income of between $524,000 and $1.9 million, on top of his $174,000 official salary, while increasing the value of his personal assets by more than $2 million. His total assets as of his 2022 disclosure are worth between $4.9 million and $10.5 million.
But while Comer came into office boasting assets worth as much as $8 million, his two most valuable properties had been essentially gifted to him by his father in 2012—for $10 a pop through quitclaim deeds. Those parcels are now valued at a combined $1.5 million. He reports those assets as generating thousands of dollars in rental income.
Fischer said the comparatively small amount of rental income raises questions about the accuracy of Comer’s disclosures.
“He’s reporting between $5,000 and $15,000 in annual rental income for each of his sizable farm properties, which are worth as much as $1 million,” Fischer said. “He is supposed to be disclosing gross rental income, not net, and I’d be surprised if he were charging less than $15,000 per year in rent.”
Fischer also noted that if the rent income came from the shell company’s leasing activity, it should be attributed to the company.
THE MONROE DOCTRINE
After The Daily Beast first reported on the shell company in November, Comer attacked the reporting on the committee room floor as “bullshit” and the kind of thing that “only dumb, financially illiterate people pick up on.”
He has insisted that, despite expert claims to the contrary, Farm Team Properties is not a shell company, reasoning that the entity has a purpose—it holds property, “manages” it, and leases it. Any doubters, he said, can “come to Monroe County and look at all the land that is titled in that LLC.”
But you don’t have to travel to Monroe County to verify that claim. Tax and real estate records show that Farm Team Properties only appears to own two properties there. One is the commercial parcel the Associated Press investigated last month. The second is a home that The Daily Beast previously reported, which Comer and his brother inherited from their father in 2019. That July, Comer sold his half to his brother for $100,000, then bought back the full property for $218,000 in December that same year; Farm Team Properties LLC was a partner in the buyout. (Comer listed this home, held by his father, as his own address in 2015 in Kentucky candidate records.)
However, Farm Team Properties is also listed as a “borrower” on a $215,000 mortgage that Comer and his wife took out on a different Monroe County property the same month they bought back the house, according to county records. Comer and his wife, however, are the only guarantors and agents on the document.
That mortgage appears to have been taken out on the same property that Comer used to secure a separate $350,000 mortgage in September 2014, for a property acquired from his brother in 1998. The Comers extended that 2014 mortgage twice before satisfying it in 2019, county records show, before taking out the separate, new mortgage in December. Comer’s disclosures do not appear to reflect these mortgages, though he did report taking out a $750,000 line of credit on this same property in June 2022, extending it last year.
But unlike FTP, Comer and his wife are personally listed on numerous other real estate documents in Monroe County.
That includes an oil and gas lease from 2015, in which Comer leased drilling rights on 300 acres of farmland to an entity called Bertram XP, for the term of two years. Bertram XP is owned by John Bertram, who—according to Kentucky campaign finance records—donated to Comer’s state campaign the year before the $1 lease was signed. The deal, for $1, gave Comer 15 percent royalties from the drilling over the course of the two-year deal, according to the lease.
Comer never itemized any royalty income from that deal on his 2016 or 2017 disclosures, and it’s unclear whether Bertram ever drilled there.
The Comers also took out a new commercial real estate mortgage for a $750,000 promissory note, on March 12, 2021, secured by a 350-acre parcel acquired in 2003, according to Monroe County records. But Comer’s disclosures don’t seem to account for that mortgage, either. His disclosure covering the 2021 calendar year only shows one liability—a farm—which Comer has disclosed on all his federal forms dating back to 2016 as a liability first incurred in 1996.
The 2021 loan is not recorded as an extension of that mortgage in Monroe County, and it is not connected to any other mortgage in county records.
House Ethics guidelines stipulate that all members must disclose their liabilities, including mortgages and home equity loans on personal residences, promissory notes with the name of the debtor, loans and debts on which they are co-signers, and liabilities of a business if the member is personally liable for the debt.
SHELLACKED
Farm Team’s one commercial property is co-owned with Comer campaign donor Devin Cleary, as the Associated Press previously reported. Cleary has given about $70,000 to Comer’s political efforts, per the report.
Comer attacked the AP’s report in his Fox Business interview last month. However, one week before that interview, FTP was not even an active entity in Kentucky, and hadn’t been for more than a year. Comer’s wife only reinstated it on Dec. 7.
That fact didn’t stop Farm Team Properties from endeavoring into new deals. The commercial parcel was listed for sale while the company was dissolved. An archived web page shows that the September listing, hosted by Proffitt Real Estate, was for $625,000, the same asking price currently on the site. Comer purchased his half of the parcel in 2015 for $128,000, AP reported.
The report also indicated that Comer had created the company in order to mask his co-ownership with a campaign donor, and that it functioned as a shell company. Business law experts also told The Daily Beast that Farm Team Properties matches that description.
While “shell company” is not a legal term, it is one that Comer has thrown around in the Hunter Biden allegations as suggestive of a nefarious intent. That prompted The Washington Post to issue a fact-check in August pointing out that the committee’s staff memo “never says that Hunter Biden used ‘shell’ companies,” only listing “real companies, with active websites and real business functions.”
Ben Edwards, a specialist in business law at the University of Las Vegas Nevada’s William S. Boyd School of Law, told The Daily Beast that the term fits Farm Team Properties. (The company does not have any presence online or elsewhere, aside from its land and business filings.)
“When you use a term like ‘shell company,’ that’s not a legal term of art, but a term we use to describe a business entity or series of business entities that helps to obscure the ownership of underlying assets,” Edwards said. “Knowing that someone has an interest within a company doesn’t necessarily tell you what that interest is worth, or what it entitles them to.”
Edwards noted that LLCs have different tax options, either as personal income, a partnership, or a corporation. “If this entity has land, and the land is secured by a mortgage, and he’s getting income from things like rent, that doesn’t mean he’s getting taxable income,” Edwards said. “He could be using those funds to pay down indebtedness or offsetting costs.”
The problem, Edwards said, is that the public is in the dark.
“It’s natural for the public to be concerned about elected officials receiving payments for entities they own—who’s paying them, and how much. Particularly so if entities are businesses they’re supposed to be overseeing as regulators,” Edwards said.
As The Daily Beast previously reported, Comer held government positions with direct oversight over the agricultural industry for nearly two decades straight—including on the House Agriculture Committee, which he only left in 2020 after he shifted his business from farming land to leasing it. And Comer has claimed that his LLC’s revenue is “all money from basically farming and selling land in Monroe County.”
Comer’s disclosures state that FTP has increased in value, from between $250,000 and $500,000 in 2017 to between $500,000 and $1 million in 2022. However, its two properties are not assessed that high in tax records. And its alleged “farming” revenue is invisible. (Notably, Comer claimed an agricultural tax break on a parcel in Tennessee last year, assessing property taxes at “use value” instead of fair market value if the property generates a certain amount of agricultural income, as The Daily Beast previously reported.)
According to Comer’s financial statements, his FTP income would be paid in the form of “dividends”—portions that the company would periodically distribute to him and his wife as its members. It’s possible that Comer has not taken any of those dividends, but that does not in itself appear to negate disclosure requirements of the company’s holdings, according to House guidelines.
MOM & POP OPERATION
The dividends issue leads to another question—about Comer’s wife, T.J. Comer, who created the entity.
Alan Dubin, a veteran real estate lawyer with Arent Fox, called the LLC management arrangement “odd,” saying that he couldn’t quite figure out what Comer was trying to achieve by creating the company. But one likely reason, he said, would be to steer money to his wife.
“A two-member LLC like this is by default treated as a partnership; treating it as a corporation would be unusual, but possible,” Dubin told The Daily Beast. “And one reason to form a partnership is to split income.” If Comer uses the LLC to manage his real estate, he said, “it’s likely because he’s trying to shift some income to his wife.”
Dubin observed that Comer could have just paid an unrelated management company, “but the effect here could be that he’s instead paying those fees to this partnership, so that the other partners are sharing in some of the rental income—diverting income away from him to his wife,” Dubin said. “But it’s hard for me to know what the hell he’s doing or why. I just can’t understand what his objective could be.”
Fischer noted that House rules only require disclosure of the source of a spouse’s earned income—such as the name of their employer—but not the amount. But assets and unearned income are treated differently, and members “must report the full value as if it were their own.”
“Even if the dividend income from Farm Team Properties was only going to Comer’s wife, he’d still be required to disclose that income on his financial disclosure report,” Fischer said.
Comer personally appears to own far more property than FTP does—in both Kentucky and Tennessee—and while Comer reports earning rent from all of his farmland, it’s unclear how many of those holdings the company “manages.”
Recently—in January 2021—Comer purchased a 98.3-acre farm in Tompkinsville for $236,000, about $60,000 below the appraised value, tax records show. Back in 2003, he snatched hundreds of Monroe County acres in apparently adjoined parcels. Two of them cost $301,281, and another set him back about $100,000. Another property, “Richardson Farm,” was inherited from his father in 2019, and appraised that year at $246,000, according to tax records. One year later, that appraisal had more than tripled, to $852,000.
Comer also bought a new personal home in 2022 for $642,500 from 2014 state campaign donor Kevin Wall. The property had been appraised at $474,000. Comer sold his old home that December for $725,000, when it was appraised at $445,000.
Comer also holds more than a million dollars of land just south of the Kentucky border, most of it in Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee. He acquired that acreage from his father in 2012 for a mere $20, via quitclaim deeds. One parcel is currently assessed at $545,000, with the two other tracts pegged at just over $1 million combined.
But Comer has also offloaded some of his Tennessee land. In 2015, he sold a Macon County parcel for $618,000, land records show.
The buyer was Corby Brown, yet another campaign donor.
