Here we go: Republicans begin impeachment proceedings against Joe Biden, but they have a lot to admit to themselves.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Republican chairs of the House committees charged with conducting the impeachment trial of President Joe Biden on Wednesday released a 30-page memo. He explains very realistically why such a measure is necessary.
“The purpose of this investigation — and at this point it is just an investigation,” it said at one point, “is to determine whether there are sufficient grounds for the committees to recommend articles of impeachment against President Biden for the committee’s consideration.” To design the entire house.
Republicans are using weak arguments against Joe Biden
It is a document that will remain in an archive somewhere for as long as this nation exists. The Republicans’ goal is to portray their efforts as a meticulous collection of evidence before taking any serious and important steps. But in the document itself, Republican leaders can only draw tenuous connections and preface arguments — not to mention the public offers they made to complement their efforts.
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It is possible, as suggested in the document, that Joe Biden will not be impeached. It is also possible that the investigation will uncover key evidence linking Biden’s power to the dealings of his son Hunter Biden or showing that the current president is using his power to benefit his family.
Impeachment of Joe Biden is very likely
However, for now, it appears that impeachment proceedings will follow even if nothing new emerges, as Republicans and their allies in the right-wing media have already convinced many Americans that Biden acted inappropriately. Instead of building a case based on hard evidence, Biden has been bombarded with accusations, where the volume of misleading or debunked claims has replaced meaning. The advantage of this approach? You can always throw more unsubstantiated claims onto the pile in order to “strengthen” your case.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason T. Smith (R-Mo.) ran into some difficulties when he tried this approach at a press conference on Wednesday. Thus, the committee announced the publication of documents dealing with Hunter Biden’s legal problems. At one point, Republicans showed a message Hunter Biden sent via WhatsApp in June 2017 that mentioned the “family brand.” Smith claimed this indicated that IRS investigators who received the letter were concerned about how Hunter Biden’s business activities were connected to “official government activities while Joe Biden was serving as Vice President of the United States.”
Republicans fake WhatsApp messages from Hunter Biden to his father
Smith has been quick to bring up other WhatsApp messages in the past, using IRS summaries of the messages to create fake screenshots of the communications. But in this case it was a question nbc-Reporter Ryan Nobles Differently: How could a June 2017 news story suggest that Joe Biden was using his position as Vice President to support Hunter Biden if Joe Biden had not been Vice President in 2017? Smith was amazed. “I think the facts speak for themselves,” he insisted. “There are over 700 pages of examples where people should be very concerned.”
He was referring to documents published by his committee, including emails, tax returns and other things. Those 700 pages could actually cover a corkboard to which you could stick some nails and red string, but if there had been conclusive evidence in the middle, this – not all of it – would have been the focus of the press conference.
Republicans have been fighting against the US president since Joe Biden won the elections
Republicans in the US House of Representatives have done this before. In November, the then-House Judiciary Committee minority, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), released a “1,000-page report” documenting the alleged politicization of federal law enforcement. However, the voluminous document consisted largely of repetitions of letters sent by the committee to other people; 290 pages that contained literally nothing but the signatures of the representatives who signed the letters.
On Wednesday, Smith tried to clean up the mess he made a bit by claiming that Biden was a “candidate” in the 2017 election, which he was not. He announced his candidacy in early 2019. This is a useful link to the other major accusation issued this week, made by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.). It is the Comer Committee that will hold its first impeachment hearing on Thursday — the Comer Committee that went to the top in its accusations against the president.
This week, his committee publicly alleged that a payment from a Chinese businessman to Hunter Biden was transferred using Joe Biden’s home address as the receiving address. In a social media post, Comer explained that “the money coming from Beijing was transferred directly to Joe’s doorstep.”
But it wasn’t delivered to Joe Biden’s doorstep that way Washington Post reported on Wednesday. Like all such transfers, it was directed to a bank, that is, to a bank account belonging to Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden had been using his father’s address for some time before the transfers arrived in the summer of 2019, Comer previously noted. In his memoir, Hunter Biden describes living in hotels in Los Angeles earlier this year while battling addiction.
Fox News easily gives Republicans a platform
on Fox News — always the hospitable home to the baseless accusations that Republicans want to peddle — Coomer noted that Joe Biden was already a contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination in the summer of 2019. However, to a more objective observer, this would seem to invalidate that claim. Was Joe Biden, who wanted to be elected president, sending his son money from Chinese business interests to his residence?
The fact that the allegation that Joe Biden was somehow involved in a relationship between his son’s business partner and his son was quickly and credibly explained does not seem to matter. A number of the accusations made by Comer, Jordan and others have been explained, but the miasma of guilt they have created in right-wing media remains.
He ignores, for example, that Coomer made a serious allegation of bribery against Joe Biden last May, and has been completely unable to prove that allegation in the intervening months while the evidence for it has eroded. In fact, this allegation found its way into the 30-page investigative document as if it were as true and incriminating as Comer initially claimed.
It’s always about Hunter Biden and Ukraine
The same is true of the claim Comer and Jordan made on Fox News in July. There they suggested that Joe Biden’s trip to Ukraine in 2015 followed a phone call from Hunter Biden — although that trip had been known for weeks.
It doesn’t matter. No matter how many times the allegations of Comer, Jordan, and others are presented and then explained or contextualized, each new allegation only expands the right’s perception of impropriety. Republican lawmakers and their supporters view each new allegation as incrimination and escalate their anger. When these allegations are debunked, the outrage does not diminish, in part because this debunking often goes unrecognized. It appears that Comer’s repeated false statements and repetition of false statements were with him in his many appearances Fox News It should not attract attention.
Here, too, the investigation could eventually find evidence that Joe Biden acted inappropriately as vice president or was more closely involved in his son’s business dealings than he claimed. we will see. But even if this is not the case, it does not matter. The deluge of accusations and pages of documents, no matter how relevant, will only fan the flames of anger. It doesn’t matter what they say. They will burn.
The idea that Coomer, Jordan, and Smith would simply ignore the fire they lit and not pursue impeachment seems highly improbable.
To the author
Philip Bump He is a columnist for The Washington Post and lives in New York. He writes the newsletter How to Read This Chart and is the author of Fallout: The Final Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English to German.
This article was first published in English on September 28, 2023 on “washingtonpost.com” was published as part of the collaboration, and is now also available in translation for readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.
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