Banjo-strummin’ James Comer and his merry band of House Oversight Committee dipshits have spent the last year and a half investigating Joe Biden’s family, dragging the Biden name through the mud while cheekily reassuring the GOP base of diaper-clad lunatics that this time they really had the goods on the president and his son Hunter and his brother James and all their illicit influence-peddlin’ ways.
Early Monday, while the DNC was busy kicking off with great enthusiasm for the party’s prospects this November, the committee released its long-awaited report on what its members have taken to calling the Biden Crime Family. The report calls for Joe Biden’s impeachment for doing … something or other. Using his public position and political power to squeeze bribes out of foreign nations and businesses like a common Trump? No, no, this is totally different for reasons, we’re sure.
Given that the press’s attention is focused on Chicago this week, the report is going to make about as much of an impact on the public as a baby farting in a hurricane. There will be much screaming and hollering and banjo-strumming on Fox News, where already on Monday morning, Fox & Friends hosted former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi to opine on Biden’s corruption. Given Bondi’s history, this is a bit like the BTK Killer opining on Jeffrey Dahmer’s grotesque crimes while Fox identifies him as simply a concerned citizen interested in knots.
Still, the report is 291 pages long! That’s a lot of single-spaced pages in very small type! Surely it must be very bad, right, New York Times?
But the report contains no proof that Mr. Biden, when he was vice president, engaged in any corrupt quid pro quo to benefit his son’s business partners, and Republicans admit they have no direct evidence that he ordered any interference into a Justice Department investigation into Hunter Biden.
Ah, well then.
As best we can tell, the report is a whole lot of insinuation and nonsense that takes every dud of a grenade the committee has lobbed uselessly into the public for the last year and a half and gathers them all together in one giant package.
Hunter Biden called his family from overseas while on a business trip? Check!
Joe Biden called Hunter a lot, sometimes while he was in the middle of a business dinner? Check!
Quoting Hunter’s business partner, Devon Archer, who testified that sometimes Hunter put his father on speakerphone in these meetings to say hello, but conveniently omitting Archer’s testimony that Joe Biden in no way benefitted from any of the deals he and Hunter made? Check!
The report also relies for legal justification on the testimony of law professor Jonathan Turley, which if you know anything about Turley’s history of sucking up to conservative power centers, is a little bit like football being certified as 100 percent safe to play by the NFL’s in-house neurologist.
There are also parts of the report that seem to be there simply to imply that Joe Biden is a doddering old man with the mental capacity of a shoe. Like so, during a discussion of why executive privilege did not justify the White House refusing to release particular video and audio tapes to investigators:
A video and audio recording taken of President Biden’s speech on April 24, 2024, reflects him reading a teleprompter instruction to pause, saying: “Imagine what we could do next. Four more years, pause.”1098 However, the official White House transcript of that same speech initially did not reflect that President Biden uttered the word “pause.”1099 In this case, the video and audio recording is the best evidence of the words that President Biden actually spoke[.]
These instances were already gratuitous cheap shots that were intended to hurt Biden’s re-election chances. But now that Biden has dropped out of the race, they land like the impotent flailing of a bunch of assholes. Which is in fact what they would have been even if Biden stayed in the race.
There will now be some light hollering about impeachment proceedings this fall, which will not actually happen because all the congresspeople will be off campaigning for re-election. So the report fails as both an investigative document and a political hammer with which Republicans can bludgeon the opposition.
Otherwise, good job, good effort, folks!
[New York Times / House Oversight Committee report]
Want to buy Wonkette a beer while we are in Chicago all week covering the most hilarious moments at the DNC? Click the button thing to contribute!
OH MY GOD. The report *flat-out says,* in plain English, that since House Dems impeached Trump for things Republicans don’t consider criminal, Republicans have every right to impeach Biden.
How does anybody this stupid not drown in the rain?
Wait, the same Pam Bondi who took a $25,000 bribe to stop investigating Trump criminality?