It’s not exactly a secret that House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer’s crusade against President Joe Biden hasn’t gone especially well. After nearly a year of trying to uncover evidence of the Democrat receiving illicit payments before reaching the White House, the Kentucky Republican and his allies have come up empty.
It was against this backdrop that Comer tried to make a little news late last week. The Washington Times, an overtly conservative media outlet, reported:
House investigators say they have obtained bank records showing President Biden received a direct payment of $200,000 after his brother James Biden secured a business deal with a rural hospital operator. The money from Mr. Biden‘s younger brother was provided in the form of a personal check in 2018, between the time Mr. Biden left the vice presidency and when he announced he was running for president.
The GOP-led Oversight Committee seemed quite excited about this, publishing a message via social media that read, “We have found a $200,000 DIRECT payment to Joe Biden.”
Well, sort of.
Based on the available information, Joe Biden — in his personal capacity, two years after serving as vice president — loaned his brother some money. Then, his brother paid him back. It’s why James Biden literally wrote on the check itself, “Loan repayment.”
That’s just not that interesting. Indeed, Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell on California noted online soon after, “[Comer] proves Joe Biden generously loaned his family money and they responsibly paid him back. Nice work, detective!”
A day earlier, Steve Bannon, a veteran of the Trump White House and a prominent far-right media personality, labeled the Oversight Committee chairman “Comer the Clown.”
Evidently, Republicans hoped the public would take the story seriously because James Biden repaid his brother after receiving money from a hospital company he was working with. But again, this appears quite anodyne: James Biden needed a loan; Joe Biden helped his brother; and James Biden repaid the loan six weeks later when he had the money. (The future president did not charge any interest.)
In other words, this latest pitch suffers from one glaring flaw: The story isn’t scandalous; it’s boring.
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking member of the Oversight panel, added in a press statement, “The more than 1,400 pages of additional bank records just show what these witnesses and thousands of prior pages of records have already established: that the President was not involved in and did not profit from his family members’ business ventures.”
It might be easier to shrug off Comer’s latest dud if it weren’t part of a larger series of other duds. It was, after all, just a month ago when the Kentucky Republican chaired his party’s first impeachment inquiry hearing, and there was a bipartisan consensus that the event was an embarrassing fiasco. One senior Republican staffer described the proceedings as “an unmitigated disaster.” Another conceded that Comer and his staff “botched this bad.” Steve Bannon, meanwhile, slammed GOP members for being unprepared, while one of his guests said House Republicans “don’t know what they’re doing at all.” It came on the heels of several related failures, with Comer making promises he couldn’t keep, holding hearings that undermined his own partisan efforts, and releasing ostensible “evidence” filled with factual errors. Reflecting on the cascading debacles, a senior GOP aide told Politico, in reference to Republicans’ concerns, “People are just not happy.” Team Comer’s latest misstep probably did little to change that.
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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