Although some Republicans may blame House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) for their failure to impeach President Joe Biden, the real reason is simple: the entire party has bought into the long-debunked conspiracy theories peddled by their leader, Donald Trump.
And the impeachment inquiry was a true team effort, with leadership support and Comer sharing investigative duties with House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo .) and in particular House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
The investigation covered a wide range of topics, from Hunter Biden’s million-dollar business deals to his budding artistic career and the Justice Department’s alleged failure to incarcerate him for not paying his taxes. Comer and company highlighted payments made to the younger Biden by foreign nationals around the world and showed that Joe Biden occasionally met and greeted his son’s benefactors.
Hunter Biden’s work for Ukrainian gas giant Burisma has received particular attention, however, because when he joined the company’s board in 2014, his father was the face of American politics towards Ukraine. The Ukraine connection offered Republicans the only potential example of official action by the elder Biden to benefit his family.
But Ukraine’s history of corruption has been repeatedly investigated, starting in 2019 after then-President Trump tried to force Ukraine to announce an investigation into the Bidens, to suspend its military aid and be removed from office in the process.
“It was a stale, moldy pizza leftover from the Ukraine shakedown,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Mary.), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said in an interview. “The whole Burisma lie reeks of overwhelming disinformation and Russian propaganda. »
Nevertheless, a Republican legislator told CNN This week, people wished Comer would “control” his rhetoric on the Biden investigation, in order to temper expectations. Another complained that he should have sent out the subpoenas more quickly. Comer said he wouldn’t have done anything differently.
As soon as Hunter Biden ascended to the Burisma board in 2014, it seemed like a clear conflict of interest. The move even prompted a diplomat to file a complaint with the vice president’s office, as the vice president’s son’s apparently corrupt work made it more difficult for the United States to push for anti-corruption reforms in Ukraine.
The Republicans did not contest it at the time. But when Trump realized in 2019 that Joe Biden would be his likely opponent in the next presidential election, he made a stink, saying that when the Democrat pushed for the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor in 2015, he had done to avoid an investigation into Burisme.
However, the same diplomat who complained about Hunter Biden, along with many other State Department officials involved in Ukraine politics, told Congress in 2019 that they wanted the prosecutor fired for completely unrelated reasons. different – notably that he had not the Burisma founder sued – and said Trump’s allegations were a conspiracy theory peddled by corrupt Ukrainians themselves.
The following year, Trump’s own Treasury Department sanctioned Andrii Derkach, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, for spreading the Burisma story in the United States, notably through his association with Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s lawyer. A department news release said Derkach was an active Russian agent, with ties to that country’s intelligence services, for more than a decade.
“Since at least 2019, Derkach and his associates have exploited U.S. media outlets, U.S.-based social media platforms, and influential U.S. figures to disseminate misleading and unsubstantiated allegations that current and former U.S. officials engaged in corruption, money laundering and illegal political influence in the country. Ukraine,” the Treasury Department said in a statement. press release announcing additional sanctions in January 2021.
In other words, the Hunter Biden corruption story may have had some truth, but it was also Russian propaganda, certified as such by the Trump administration itself.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans conducted a follow-up investigation into Hunter Biden and Burisma, again interviewing State Department officials and other sources familiar with the younger Biden’s work, only to conclude that he did not It was unclear whether Burisma had any effect on U.S. policy toward Ukraine. That investigation also looked at Hunter Biden’s income from other foreign nationals, including China and Kazakhstan.
As soon as Republicans learned they had taken control of the House of Representatives in November 2022, Comer held a press conference announcing that they would dive back into the Biden family, this time with the help of Republican material. Hunter Biden’s laptop. A republican committee report Accompanying the press conference, he highlighted the younger Biden’s various foreign business deals and rehashed the history of corruption in Ukraine.
The following May, Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) demanded that the FBI turn over a document reflecting information that, they described, described “a criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden, and a foreign national.” .”
Republicans had some idea of what the document said, if not all of its contents, but they did not specify which foreign nation was involved. Raskin thought it was telling that they said the FBI information was from June 2020.
“During this same period, Rudy Giuliani and Russian agents, sanctioned by the Trump Treasury Department, peddled disinformation aimed at interfering in the 2020 presidential election,” Raskin said in a statement at the time. Comer responded angrily: in an interview with HuffPostthat Raskin didn’t know what he was talking about.
A few weeks later, Giuliani offered an additional clue in an interview with the far-right cable news channel Newsmax: “This document came to light because at least one FBI agent came out and tried to corroborate what I gave them. »
The FBI refused to turn over the document, warning that the information was raw and unverified, but Comer and Grassley obtained it themselves and made it public. Sure enough, the form reflected a series of conversations an FBI informant said he had with Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma. Zlochevsky suggested he paid $5 million in bribes to Joe and Hunter Biden, and Republicans presented that document as their best corroborating evidence.
When then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced in September that the Republicans’ investigation would evolve into an impeachment inquiry, he highlighted the story.
“Even a trusted FBI informant alleged a bribe to the Biden family,” he said.
In a development heralded by the Trump administration’s warnings about the Russian agent who peddled the Burisma story in 2019 and 2020, the Justice Department said in February that the FBI informant had completely fabricated his conversations with the founder of Burisma – and said he had ties to Russian intelligence services. He is now in a California prison awaiting trial on related charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
The impeachment inquiry has since lost all momentum, with Republicans publicly acknowledging they lacked the votes needed to try to remove Joe Biden from office and Comer saying he would instead fire members and associates of the impeachment inquiry. Biden family to the Justice Department for prosecution.
Hunter Biden, for his part, claimed he was extremely qualified for his position at Burisma and said he joined the board to help send a signal of defiance to Russia. He also acknowledged that the work was light and well paid. He wrote in his 2021 memoir that he did nothing unethical, but also that he would not have taken the job if he had known what backlash would ensue.
In a February deposition, Hunter Biden recalled a 2015 meeting with Amos Hochstein, a State Department official specializing in energy affairs. (In his own interview with lawmakers in 2020, Hochstein said he had monitored an uptick in the number of pro-Moscow media outlets using Burisma “to drive some sort of wedge between the United States and Ukraine” and that (he made then-Vice President Joe Biden aware of it, adding that Hunter Biden later requested the meeting.)
According to Hunter Biden, the two spoke about the recent death of his brother, Beau Biden, and the toll it has had on his family. Then Hochstein issued a stark warning about his work at Burisma, which Hunter Biden relayed to the room full of Republicans trying to impeach his father: “You don’t understand Russian disinformation and how they could potentially weaponize it.”
