After an initial coronavirus-fueled delay, Senate Republicans’ inquiry into Hunter Biden, son of Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden, and his business dealings in Ukraine will continue. But the pandemic puts unprecedented physical constraints on the process—namely, subpoena votes cannot be held remotely, and confidential materials cannot be viewed by senators, whose tentative return to Washington is set for April 20. Still, Senator Ron Johnson, chair of the GOP–led Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, reignited the controversial investigation, which has faced numerous setbacks, this week.

The Wisconsin Republican’s office informed Politico on Friday that the nationwide outbreak is not diverting attention from the probe. “While the chairman is primarily focused on the once-in-a-generation crisis we’re experiencing, our oversight staff is continuing to push ahead with their work,” said Johnson spokesperson Austin Altenburg. “Nothing has changed in our long-term plans for our investigations.” A source also told Politico that a Senate staffer involved told a witness’s legal team several weeks ago that the national emergency would not change their trajectory.

In the days leading up to the implementation of strict social distancing guidelines, Johnson opted to cancel a key subpoena vote to bring forward Andrii Telizhenko, a former consultant for Blue Star Strategies, which represented Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, where Hunter Biden had been a board member. Telizhenko purports to have been tasked with opposition research work targeting Trump’s 2016 campaign. “Out of an abundance of caution, and to allow time for you to receive additional briefings, I will postpone a vote to subpoena records and an appearance from...Telizhenko,” the chairman informed committee members at the time. Politico reported that Johnson has dismissed all subpoena plans for Telizhenko, whose credibility has been called into question, including by a Russian-American editor Vladislav Davidzon who told CNN the consultant once pitched him on a scheme to lobby U.S. lawmakers at the behest of Russia–allied media outlets. Johnson has said he is looking into additional leads related to Blue Star Strategies.

Meanwhile, the committee’s ranking Democrat, Senator Gary Peters, has resisted Johnson’s efforts, issuing a March statement criticizing the probe as “an inappropriate use of committee resources, especially as we confront a global pandemic that threatens the lives and economic security of Americans.” Fellow Democratic senators on the committee haven taken Peters’s concerns a step further, as Chris Murphy asserted the investigation is "designed to damage the president’s political opponents,” and Martin Heinrich tweeted that Johnson is morphing his committee into “an instrument of Russian disinformation.” Behind closed doors, Democrats Maggie Hassan and Jon Tester pushed back against Johnson’s line of inquiry in a recent briefing, sources told Politico. “Sen. Tester expressed concern over the reliance on reportedly untrustworthy foreign nationals and cautioned his colleagues against playing politics with national security,” a spokesperson for the lawmaker told the outlet, while Hassan’s office advised Republicans not to “play a role in enabling” Russian election tampering ahead of November.

In a statement to the Hive, the Biden campaign condemned Johnson's maintained focus on Hunter Biden amid the coronavirus outbreak. "It is disgusting that Senator Johnson–who was recently excoriated by Dr. Anthony Fauci for saying 'we don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways' and that 'getting coronavirus is not a death sentence except for maybe no more than 3.4 percent of our population'–is diverting taxpayer-provided Senate Homeland Security Committee committee resources away from the coronavirus pandemic and instead using them to prop-up conspiracy theories in an in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign," wrote Andrew Bates, director of rapid response for the Biden campaign, in a Friday email.