The biggest problem with the congressional Republicans’ crusade against President Joe Biden is that the party simply can’t find any incriminating evidence, despite months of desperate searching. The second biggest problem with the GOP crusade is that key figures in the party’s investigation keep telling truths that Republicans don’t want to hear.
One of the more dramatic examples of this came last month, when the public first saw the transcript of Devon Archer’s Q&A with the House Oversight Committee. Archer was a former Hunter Biden business associate, which created real excitement among Republicans — right up until the witness discredited each of the party’s core claims against the president.
Eric Schwerin, meanwhile, was also a Hunter Biden business partner, which also created an opportunity for the GOP. But as we learned last week, Schwerin told Republican investigators that the president wasn’t part of his son’s private-sector work.
Perhaps former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko would tell the party what it wants to hear? As it turns out, no.
To briefly summarize, during his tenure as vice president, Joe Biden urged Ukrainian officials to fire the country’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin. This was the position of the United States government; it had bipartisan support; and it reflected international frustration that Shokin was lax in prosecuting corruption.
The GOP argument has long been that the then-vice president actually sought Shokin’s ouster as part of a plot to help his son and Burisma, but these claims were thoroughly discredited years ago, and Republicans have done literally nothing to substantiate them since.
Nevertheless, the party and its allies aren’t giving up. In fact, Fox News had Shokin on last month, and he voiced support for Republican conspiracy theories.
It was against this backdrop that Fox News also spoke to former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, perhaps hoping that he’d help advance the case against Joe Biden. As The New Republic noted, he ended up doing the opposite.
Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Monday completely — and hilariously — destroyed one of Republicans’ main arguments to prove that Joe Biden is corrupt. … Fox News host Brian Kilmeade played Poroshenko a clip of Shokin saying Biden wanted him fired because he had been investigating the oil company Burisma Holdings while Hunter Biden served on the board.
“First of all, this is [a] completely crazy person,” Poroshenko explained, referring to Shokin. “This is something wrong with him. Second, there is not one single word of truth.” amazing – during a Fox News interview w/ Brian Kilmeade, former president of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko denounces Victor Shokin, who plays as a leading role in Kilmeade's conspiracy theories, as a "completely crazy person" & says "there's something wrong with him" as Kilmeade melts pic.twitter.com/MXedG1FmrB He then asked that Kilmeade “not use such person like Shokin to undermine the trust between bipartisan support and Ukraine.” Poroshenko went on to say that the ousted prosecutor plays a “very dirty game, unfortunately.” In other words, Fox News aired an interview with a former Ukrainian president who effectively knee-capped the Republicans’ corruption case against Biden. A Washington Post analysis added, “The news here is that Fox, which has been an essential platform for every unfounded allegation from [the GOP’s congressional investigators], accidentally stepped on its own messaging. Sure, Poroshenko is not the most reliable narrator himself. But his disparagement of the credibility of Shokin joins a hefty amount of other evidence on the lower side of a lopsided scale.”
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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