Among the most embarrassing elements of the House Republicans’ impeachment push against President Joe Biden are the GOP’s own witnesses. The trouble, of course, is that they keep saying the opposite of what the party wants to hear.
In August, for example, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and his colleagues appeared quite excited about an interview with a Hunter Biden business associate. That proved to be among the Kentucky Republican’s many duds: Devon Archer actually ended up debunking all of the core allegations against the president. A month later, GOP officials held a hearing in the hopes of advancing the impeachment cause against Biden, and their own witnesses said they didn’t see sufficient evidence to impeach the Democratic president.
This week, it apparently happened again: USA Today reported that Republican investigators interviewed Carol Fox, a trustee for a now bankrupt health care company that worked with James Biden, and she also failed to tell the GOP what it wanted to hear.
So what do House Republicans have left? Not much, though they’ve taken a keen interest in a 2019 text from Hunter Biden that the right sees as highly incriminating. As a new report from The New York Times, it’s really not.
[A] close examination of the circumstances surrounding the 2019 text message, along with others that have been cited by Republicans during the impeachment inquiry and elsewhere to suggest that Hunter Biden’s foreign income was shared with or benefited his father, shows the extent to which the contents of the communications have been misunderstood or outright distorted. And while it does not rule out the possibility that House Republicans could unearth evidence showing wrongdoing by President Biden, it underscores the flimsy nature of the material they have presented publicly so far.
A related Times report, also published overnight, added that “an examination of some of the highest-profile examples cited by Republicans shows that they have been taken out of context, or that Republicans have omitted key messages in email or text chains that often cast the communications in a more innocuous light.” The most charitable explanation is that GOP officials and their aides were careless and clumsy when reviewing the underlying documents. The more unsettling possibility is that congressional Republicans deliberately tried to mislead the public in their zeal to tear down the president without cause. Either way, those anti-Biden partisans who continue to insist that the impeachment inquiry is turning up incriminating information appear to be kidding themselves. The only people being damaged by this fiasco are House Republicans.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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