Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., no doubt hoped that House Republicans’ efforts to impeach President Joe Biden would end in a glorious victory. As chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Comer has poured everything into his crusade to take Biden down, with no witness too sketchy to rely on, no theory too preposterous to consider, and no allegation too absurd to shout. In the end, he and his compatriots were sure, the full horror of the president’s misdeeds would be exposed, the public would recoil in disgust and Republicans would get a Biden scandal to balance the mountain of scandals around the Trump administration. Even if a conviction in the Senate was out of reach, it would be impossible for a humiliated Biden to be re-elected.
Things have not worked out the way Comer and his colleagues wished. The only ones humiliated were the bush-league Javerts of the GOP. CNN has reported that “Comer recently approached one of his Republican colleagues and made a blunt admission: He was ready to be ‘done with’ the impeachment inquiry into Biden.” And Republicans — and their media allies — are hoping you forget all about it.
The Oversight Committee has long been a key forum for the opposition to bedevil the president; it can issue subpoenas, hold hearings and release reports, all in service of its mission to keep tabs on the government. Instead of stocking the committee with the caucus’ best and brightest, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy granted committee seats to the House GOP’s most ridiculous blowhards, including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert and Paul Gosar.
At the first official impeachment hearing last September, the Republicans’ own star expert witness admitted that there was no evidence Biden had committed impeachable crimes. One Republican aide called the hearing “an unmitigated disaster.” And it got no better from there.
In between hearings, Comer and other members would go on TV and toss out words like “bribery” and “money laundering.” They alleged that various interests directed millions of dollars into the president’s pocket, without ever being able to back up their claims. “This is one of the biggest crimes that I’ve ever studied, with respect to American history,” said Comer. The exact details were less clear: “We know [the Biden family] got tens of millions of dollars from bad people in bad countries. We don’t know what exactly they did,” Comer explained at one point. But that just proved what a masterful criminal Biden was.
Again and again, they’d find some new piece of information, rush to the cameras to proclaim that they had located the smoking gun, then watch as their claims collapsed when the mundane truth came out. The president’s brother James Biden gave his brother $200,000 in 2018, Comer breathlessly revealed. Surely there was something fishy going on! But it turned out to be the repayment of a loan the future president gave James two months before. The fact that the check had “loan repayment” written on it might have been a clue.
As the months wore on, the investigation grew more farcical. One key witness whom Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, had touted as a “highly credible confidential human source” turned out to be under indictment for lying to the FBI and falsifying records, and may have been working with Russian intelligence. Each hearing was more absurd than the last, with witnesses shredding the case against Biden and Democrats mocking their Republican colleagues mercilessly.
The fruitless quest to find something criminal Biden did is particularly ironic given that Republicans are working so hard to return Trump to the White House.
The Republican case has always revolved around the president’s pitiable son Hunter, whose struggles with addiction and sometimes dissolute lifestyle are well known. In between displaying his nude selfies, Republicans professed outrage that Hunter traded on his family name — a timeless habit of the well-connected that never aroused Republicans’ ire when, say, Donald Trump’s family did it. Their obsession with Hunter was so intense that even when the president’s son was indicted on tax and gun charges by the Justice Department, Comer spun it as a cover-up.
But as the serial pratfalls of the committee continued, Comer and others realized this was a lost cause. So has the conservative media: In 2023 there were an astonishing 325 segments about Hunter Biden on Sean Hannity’s program alone. Once it became clear that impeachment was fizzling out, Fox News stopped talking about the subject. That silence only drives home that these hearings weren’t designed to root out corruption, but to score political points. You might recall that Trump was first impeached for pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to open a sham investigation of Biden in order to discredit him ahead of the 2020 election. Comer and House Republicans delivered what Zelenskyy refused to. And yet, despite the best efforts of the House GOP’s worst people, the investigation did not find any corruption. That’s not to say Biden is a paragon of ethical purity; he’s done a few questionable things, like taking a position at the University of Pennsylvania after his vice presidency that involved a healthy salary and few responsibilities. That kind of sweetheart deal may be a little unseemly, but it’s neither illegal nor particularly uncommon for someone in his position. Corruption, however, is something very different — and there’s never been any credible evidence that Biden is corrupt at all. The fruitless quest to find something criminal Biden did is particularly ironic given that Republicans are working so hard to return possibly the most corrupt president in history to the White House. Even now, they support him as he argues to the Supreme Court that presidents must be immune from prosecution for any crimes they might commit while in office. So if they want to find corruption, they know where they can look.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
