Impeachment: The GOP’s botched inquiry
“Witnesses Say No Evidence Against President.” That was the headline nearly everywhere last week, said Charles P. Pierce in Esquire, after the House Oversight Committee embarrassed itself in its first, farcical impeachment inquiry into President Biden. It’s been previously established that Hunter Biden called his father on speakerphone during business meetings with foreign clients and that Biden appeared at a dinner with his son and associates—but there’s zero evidence that the then–vice president received any money or made any policy decisions to benefit those clients. The Republicans’ witnesses admitted as much, with forensic accountant Bruce Dubinsky saying there was no clear evidence linking Biden to “any improper or illicit activities.” Lacking evidence, the committee relied on “convoluted attempts to make connections through supposition and suspicion,” said Chris McGreal in The Guardian. Committee chair James Comer “spun a vision of Biden Sr. sitting atop a sprawling crime family that would be the envy of the mafia.”
Congress should investigate what role Biden played in his son’s “influence-peddling scheme,” said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review, but this inquiry is “a mistake.” Launching an impeachment inquiry without a full House authorization vote makes it seem purely partisan, and undermines the committee’s “crucially important” work. Between 2014 and 2019, Biden’s family and associates brought in about $20 million from shady foreign businessmen. How “complicit” was Joe Biden in his family’s corruption? We may never know. There’s “no chance” Biden will be impeached in a narrowly divided House or convicted in a Democratic-controlled Senate, and by giving the White House an excuse to portray this inquiry as an illegitimate attempt to impeach Biden, the committee made “a strategic error.”
In the bizarro world of right-wing media, however, the hearing was “a huge success,” said Philip Bump in The Washington Post. On Fox News, Republicans spread “false, baseless, or debunked claims” about Joe Biden—even inserting incriminating words in texts that weren’t in the originals—that went unchallenged or unchecked. The Fox/Trumpist right wing now lives inside “a closed terrarium” that’s “self-sustaining,” so information from the real world can’t penetrate. There’s nothing the rest of us can do but sit outside their bubble, “attempting to convey reality like we’re dropping leaflets into North Korea.”