Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat from Florida, usually wears loud ensembles and sneakers to work. But for this week’s seven-hour deposition of Hunter Biden on Capitol Hill, Moskowitz came in all black: suit, tie and shoes.
“My colleagues and I are witnessing the death of the fake, faux, frivolous Joe Biden impeachment inquiry,” he said by way of explaining his somber garb. “In fact, as a Jewish American, when this is over I will say the mourner’s kaddish for this impeachment inquiry.”
Amen. To the extent there ever was life in the case against the president, it has died after a long illness.
But more fitting than the mourner’s kaddish would be to offer a Panikhida, the Russian Orthodox prayer service for the dead. For the House Republicans’ year-long attempt to impeach Biden, it now seems clear, was based on a Russian disinformation campaign — and House Republicans went along with it, either as useful idiots or knowing accomplices.
The Republicans’ star witness, Alexander Smirnov, has been indicted by a special counsel for fabricating the claim that Joe Biden received a $5 million bribe. He was apparently doing the bidding of Russian intelligence, with which, a court filing shows, he had recent contacts.
Before that, the Republican sleuths’ other key witness, Gal Luft, went missing. It turned out he had been charged in a sealed indictment with arms trafficking and illegal lobbying work — for China. He remains on the lam.
Republicans have also relied on the accounts of one of Hunter Biden’s former business partners, who was sentenced to prison for defrauding a Native American tribe, and of a convicted fraudster House investigators went to visit last week at a prison in Alabama.
Clearly, they will take dirt from any source, no matter how dubious. Even then, they have produced nothing that shows Joe Biden was involved in any way in the businesses of his son.
Of course, Republicans don’t actually need any evidence to impeach the president, if they have the votes. But even the impeachment ringleader, Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (Ky.), has tiptoed away from this goal. He told a group of us staking out the Hunter Biden deposition on Wednesday that “the purpose of this investigation [is] to create legislation” — legislation to stop “the Bidens from continuing to enrich themselves.”
Wagging two index fingers, Comer admonished: “The American people do not want families to peddle access to the tune of $200,000.” Asked whether his legislation would also target the Trump family, which peddled access to the tune of about $2 billion, Comer ignored the question as he walked away.
The indictment of Smirnov is the most damning, for he had provided, in the words of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (Ohio), “the most corroborating evidence we have.” And the fabricated bribery allegation is just the latest case of MAGA Republicans trumpeting Kremlin propaganda.
They let Russia off the hook for its hacking of the Democratic National Committee and its extensive efforts to influence American social media to Donald Trump’s benefit in 2016, dismissing all that as the “Russia hoax.”
During Trump’s 2019 impeachment for trying to strong-arm Ukraine into providing dirt on Joe Biden for the 2020 campaign, House Republicans defended Trump by echoing Russian disinformation claiming that Ukraine, not Russia, was the country that tried to meddle in the U.S. election.
More recently, Tucker Carlson and other Trump allies have promoted Russian propaganda related to its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) claimed that “Russia is open to a peace agreement, while it is DC warmongers who want to prolong the war,” while Carlson, visiting Moscow, called the city “so much nicer than any city in my country.”
Now, House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) and his House Republicans, some of them citing Russia’s talking points, are blocking funds for Ukraine’s war effort that the Senate passed overwhelmingly.
Are they unwitting tools of Moscow? Or willing conduits? At the very least, they don’t seem to care that they are serving as Vladimir Putin’s pawns. A dozen or so witnesses testified to House impeachment investigators that the president was not involved in his son’s businesses. The investigators have produced no evidence showing that the elder Biden benefited in any way from his son’s businesses or took any official action to help his son or his brother.
Yet Comer wants so much to believe otherwise that he’s willing to take the word of the indicted Smirnov over that of the FBI and of David Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney serving as special prosecutor. Weiss’s court filing said that Smirnov acknowledges ties to Russian intelligence agencies and that he met in December with a Russian official “who controls groups that are engaged in overseas assassination efforts.” Smirnov was “actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November.”
“We all thought that after their key witness was indicted for lying to the FBI about Hunter Biden and was meeting with Russian intelligence that they would stop degrading themselves,” Rep. Greg Casar (D-Tex.) said during a break in the deposition. No such luck.
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) argued that “if this impeachment inquiry continues, then Chairman Comer and Chairman Jordan are working with Russia to interfere in the November 2024 election on behalf of Vladimir Putin.”
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tex.), abandoning all qualifiers, declared: “Basically, the Republicans have become synonymous for Russians at this point.”
[W]ithout the Russia-fabricated bribery allegation, Republicans have nothing. Before Wednesday’s deposition, in the O’Neill House Office Building, Comer met with reporters in the lobby and read a list of the “evidence” he had against the president.
“What evidence do you have that either as vice president or as president Joe Biden used his political office in any way to benefit either Hunter or James Biden?” asked NBC News’s Ryan Nobles.
After that start, the deposition quickly devolved into farce, inside and outside the room. In the closed-door deposition, Republicans broke no new ground, instead grilling the president’s son about crucial matters such as his divorce, his drug use (a transcript released late Thursday had dozens of mentions of addiction) and his use of a speakerphone. They were contemptuous of the president’s son, and he of them.
A feisty Biden repeatedly invoked the influence-peddling of Trump’s son-in-law. “Unlike Jared Kushner, I’ve never received money from a foreign government,” he said, and “I don’t think you have Jared Kushner’s tax returns, do you?”
In his opening statement, Biden labeled the Republicans “dupes in carrying out a Russian disinformation campaign waged against my father.” He scolded them: “You have trafficked in innuendo, distortion and sensationalism — all the while ignoring the clear and convincing evidence staring you in the face. You do not have evidence to support the baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies about my father because there isn’t any.”
Had they a scintilla of shame, House Republicans would shut down this embarrassing caper before Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) shares more naked photos of Hunter Biden with the world. But there is no longer such a thing as shame. With a straight face, Comer still declares that “we’ve been very effective in getting the truth to the American people.”
It sounds better in the original Russian.
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