It\u2019s not like things were going well.<\/p>\n
Republicans were more than a year into trying to prove President Biden was corrupt, tied to his brother\u2019s and son\u2019s dubious business endeavors, but had no luck. They kept interviewing people who directly rebutted that thesis, leaving them with no option but to cherry-pick other circumstantial claims to maintain the perception of progress. At times, Republican leaders would just step outside the boundaries of demonstrable reality \u2014 when they weren\u2019t reiterating long-debunked arguments.<\/p>\n
Then Alexander Smirnov goes and gets indicted.<\/p>\n
Smirnov spent several months of 2023 being anonymously hailed as a trusted FBI informant, someone whose presentation of his interactions were all but essential to federal law enforcement. So when House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) started hyping an allegation Smirnov had made about Biden receiving a bribe, it got a lot of traction. Except that now the Justice Department says \u2014 and reinforced in its indictment with evidence \u2014 that Smirnov made it up.<\/p>\n
The immediate fallout from that indictment was for Comer and other Republicans, like House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (Ohio), to be the focus of largely deserved disparagement for hyping the allegation in the first place. In fairness, Comer and others did at times question the legitimacy of the claim, just as the Bureau had been warning since he and Grassley first elevated it. But mostly they folded it into their broader story about how Biden must be corrupt.<\/p>\n
When then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced that his conference would launch an impeachment inquiry into Biden, he pointed to the debunked bribery claim as one predicate for doing so. But he also pointed to other things that were similarly dubious and that, in the months since, Comer, Jordan and their committees have been unable to substantiate.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s gotten lost in the conversation following Smirnov\u2019s indictment, particularly after a federal court filing noted that Smirnov had ties to foreign intelligence officials. This has repeatedly been incorrectly used to allege that the bribery claim was a product of Russian intelligence, which hasn\u2019t been shown, but either way the focus is on Smirnov.<\/p>\n
Among Republicans, there\u2019s something else going on: an effort to figure out how they\u2019re going to get out of this impeachment quagmire they\u2019ve created.<\/p>\n
Politico reported on Friday that the inquiry is \u201con the brink of collapse,\u201d which is probably too neat a descriptor. It hinges on the significant possibility that the House won\u2019t bring articles of impeachment against Biden but does not address the lingering demand on the right for him to be held to account for what conservatives perceive as his wrongdoing.<\/p>\n
In January, the Pew Research Center found that 9 in 10 Republicans think Biden has done things that are grounds for impeachment. More than half say that\u2019s definitely the case.<\/p>\n
Or, another lens: Since the impeachment inquiry was launched, Marquette Law School has polled Americans on whether they think Biden or Donald Trump have behaved corruptly. More Americans say Trump has, including more independents. But a consistent three-quarters of Republicans say that \u201chas behaved corruptly\u201d describes Biden at least somewhat well \u2014 despite the failure of Republicans to put forth any evidence to that end.<\/p>\n
But then it\u2019s easy to see how this works. Conservative media, like Fox News, gives cover to Republican efforts to hype impeachment, picking up only those circumstantial elements of the case. Hosts Sean Hannity and Maria Bartiromo have been at the leading edge of the effort.<\/p>\n
The people leading the impeachment push play similar games. Consider this social media post this week from the official account of the House Judiciary Committee.<\/p>\n
10% for the Big Guy. pic.twitter.com\/0G9vf0iWTJ<\/p>\n
\u2014 House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) February 22, 2024<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
It mashes together two of the circumstantial components of their case: an email from a third party that at one point referred to money being held for the \u201cbig guy\u201d and a check of a payment to Biden.<\/p>\n
These have been explained. The \u201cbig guy\u201d comment has been presented by Republicans as evidence that Biden benefited from a business deal his family was involved in, but the guy who sent the email has publicly rejected that idea. The check, meanwhile, is for the unrelated repayment of a loan \u2014 it says \u201cloan repayment\u201d in the lower left corner \u2014 that Biden had extended to his brother. It is not Biden receiving a cut of a business deal.<\/p>\n
But these are both little Legos that Republicans keep using to try to create an impressive building.<\/p>\n
Other Republicans take a different tack. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has long been unusually skeptical of the effort to catch Biden in nefarious activity, and he reiterated that point on CNN on Thursday night. That said, he did reiterate one of the bits of rhetoric that has served as a narrative arc for all of this.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do believe when these foreign governments are loading up the entire Biden family apparatus with cash, they\u2019re not doing so to extract some sort of skill or service from these ne\u2019er-do-well Bidens,\u201d Gaetz said. \u201cThey\u2019re doing it to influence Joe Biden.\u201d<\/p>\n
When CNN host Abby Phillip noted that this was just an inference, Gaetz attacked Biden\u2019s son Hunter, referring to his admitted drug addiction.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy do you think Burisma was paying Hunter Biden?\u201d he asked. \u201cDo you think they were paying him to figure out where to go buy crack in L.A.?\u201d<\/p>\n
This, too, has been addressed. Of course, foreign actors (who weren\u2019t \u201cforeign governments\u201d) enlisted Hunter and the president\u2019s brother, Jim Biden, because they hoped to leverage Joe Biden\u2019s power and position. The evidence compiled by House Republicans makes this very clear. In the testimony of Hunter Biden\u2019s former business partner, Devon Archer, for example, we hear that Hunter instructed Archer specifically to foster this idea.<\/p>\n
But we also hear that Hunter Biden admitted in contemporaneous communication that he didn\u2019t have the ability to get his father to do things. Hunter Biden promoted that idea and even, in one case, explicitly suggested that they claim that some action of his father\u2019s was because of his influence, even though it wasn\u2019t. He even worried that doing so might \u201cend up creating too great an expectation\u201d that he could get his father to do other things.<\/p>\n
This is all unethical and seedy, absolutely. But it is also a very obvious explanation for the circumstantial stuff, like Hunter Biden putting his dad on speaker when he\u2019d happen to call during Hunter\u2019s business meetings. It is also contained to Hunter Biden and James Biden, but Gaetz and many other Republicans suggest that it somehow isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
This is the bind. Republicans think Biden is corrupt and want to see him impeached but, even without the FBI informant implosion, Republican leaders have been unable to deliver anything that gets them there. Maybe Hunter Biden\u2019s upcoming testimony will shake something loose, but that seems highly unlikely.<\/p>\n
Instead, the most likely resolution of this is that, sunk in this tar pool they\u2019d created, Republicans stop struggling and sit still for a while \u2014 hoping that Trump wins in November, lifting them from the quagmire.<\/p>\n
If he doesn\u2019t? Well, let\u2019s see what Sean Hannity says.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not like things were going well. Republicans were more than a year into trying to prove President Biden was corrupt, tied to his brother\u2019s and son\u2019s dubious business endeavors, but had no luck. They kept interviewing people who directly rebutted that thesis, leaving them with no option but to cherry-pick other circumstantial claims to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1410,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}