Headed into this week, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer was on a year-long losing streak. As recently as last week, following months of humiliating failures for the Kentucky Republican, Politico reported that behind the scenes, GOP officials were quietly admitting that Comer’s impeachment crusade against President Joe Biden has been “hobbled by embarrassing setbacks.”
A day earlier, ABC News pointed to multiple sources familiar with the sentiment on Capitol Hill who agreed that the impeachment inquiry was essentially “falling apart.” Punchbowl News, meanwhile, quoted a House GOP leadership aide who said Comer and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan were “becoming the chairmen who cried wolf.”
This comes on the heels of related recent reporting about Republicans describing Comer’s and Jordan’s crusade with words and phrases such as “clueless,” “disaster,” and “parade of embarrassments.”
It was against this backdrop that Comer scheduled a hearing yesterday, and the apparent point was to prove that the entire endeavor had at least some merit. It instead became the latest in a series of duds. The Washington Post reported:
Lacking support and evidence, the GOP-led impeachment inquiry against President Biden continued to sputter out, even as House Republicans on Wednesday held a hearing that featured witnesses who reiterated thin allegations that members of the Biden family capitalized financially on their father’s name.
To drive home the farcical quality of the Republicans’ case, it’s worth noting that one of the party’s witnesses at yesterday’s hearing testified remotely from Alabama — where he’s serving a federal prison sentence for having perpetrated fraud schemes.
A USA Today report noted that the hearing “ultimately did not break new ground,” and the GOP impeachment crusaders still haven’t “produced evidence” that the Democratic president did anything wrong. An Associated Press report added that the inquiry has produced “no hard evidence of presidential wrongdoing,” making it clear that “the lengthy GOP impeachment inquiry is all but coming to a close.”
A Daily Beast report noted that Comer “stepped on rake after rake during the hearing, consistently undermining his own conference’s case.”
My MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown made a compelling case that this latest hearing, all things considered, was actually worse than Comer’s previous efforts, suggesting the entire effort is moving in the wrong direction.
It’s reached the point at which even conservative media anchors are finding it difficult to keep up appearances. A Newsmax host told Jordan shortly before the hearing, “It kind of seems like you’re chasing your tail at this point.” Fox News’ Dana Perino added, “It just feels like they keep doing the same hearing over and over again.”
A Fox News legal analyst — and veteran of Attorney General Bill Barr’s office — concluded, “I do think maybe people are becoming a bit tired of all of this.”
Ouch.
On the one hand, the committee’s ranking member, Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, described the inquiry as “the most spectacular failure in the history of congressional investigations.” On the other hand, there were a variety of conservative media voices conceding that Raskin was probably correct. Last week, White House counsel Ed Siskel took the unusual step of writing a detailed letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson, making the case to the Louisiana Republican that it’s “obviously time to move on” from the failed impeachment effort. A Washington Post analysis added soon after that the correspondence might’ve been a tactical mistake: GOP officials would inevitably resist ending the inquiry in response to the letter, for fear of giving the appearance of retreating under pressure from Team Biden. But what if that was the point? What if the White House wants to keep this fiasco going, knowing that it’s making Comer and his cohorts look ridiculous? As part of yesterday’s proceedings, the panel’s members heard sworn testimony from Lev Parnas, a former Rudy Giuliani associate who shed fresh light on a Republican scheme to smear Biden ahead of the 2020 elections. At one point, Democratic Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts explained, “When you review the entire record of evidence of these hearings going back over a year, you’ve actually provided more evidence to impeach Donald Trump for a third time than you have in so much as laying a glove on Joe Biden.” It was that kind of day for the GOP’s impeachment crusaders, who no longer appear to have any face-saving options.
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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