The Republican ‘impeachment probe’ ends the way it began: with nothing

Congressional committees have sweeping power that can be deployed to uncover wrongdoing or waste or malfeasance that directly or indirectly harms the American people. But they are granted that power with the tacit expectation that it will be deployed in good faith, to earnestly target questionable actions and actors.

The release of the final report from the House committees tasked with evaluating whether President Joe Biden should be impeached reinforces the downside to that power: It can also be deployed by bad-faith actors in an explicit effort to politically damage rivals.

News reports and comments from the House leaders driving the probe launched in September suggest that it had been in its final stages since late last year. Yet the final report wasn’t published until Monday morning — the day the Democratic convention gets underway in Chicago and the day on which Biden is scheduled to speak. To assume that this is a coincidence is to grant the benefit of the doubt to House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.).

None of them have earned it on this subject.

There is almost nothing in the final report that wasn’t known or understood before the formal investigation began. If anything, the point of the probe seems to have been to generate enough transcribed quotes from people adjacent to people adjacent to the president to give the appearance of investigatory rigor, like a middle-school student plucking sentences from random points in the middle of a book to give the impression of having read the whole thing.

Last August, for example, The Washington Post Fact Checker explained how Republicans were exaggerating the actions of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and brother, James, to impugn the president, overstating how much money Hunter and James Biden received from business partners and depicting explicable legal entities as dubious “shell companies.” Yet the summary of the impeachment probe’s findings centers on these claims.

It reads:

Sounds bad! Which is the point.

Hunter Biden worked as a consultant for a number of (often clearly dubious!) individuals and entities, doing so at times by giving the impression that he was able to influence his father’s decision-making. This has been clear for some time. The investigation into Biden, before the formal “impeachment probe,” elevated comments Hunter made to his partner Devon Archer in which the younger Biden suggests reinforcing that idea.

Archer got a lot of that money, by the way, and it’s not clear how the millions he took in is supposed to be part of a “conspiracy” aimed at enriching the Bidens. The Post’s August assessment, in fact, found that people with the last name “Biden” got only about $7 million of the $20 million that had been elevated at that point. The “shell companies,” meanwhile — an intentionally loaded phrase — were generally LLCs that represented different partnerships.

What the GOP probe was never able to do was tie any of that money back to Biden. The summary above notes that Biden was “provided” hundreds of thousands of dollars — but as has been established clearly, these were repayments of loans from his brother. One hint that they were loan repayments is that they were made with checks identified as “loan repayments” — a weird thing to put on a 2018 check (when Biden was out of office and not running for office) just to throw potential future investigators off the scent.

Since this is so thin, they throw in that this “required Joe Biden’s knowing participation in this conspiracy” — again using the loaded word “conspiracy.” Why was it required that Joe Biden know that Hunter Biden was being paid millions of dollars (cumulative, from various partnerships over a number of years)? Because question-begging at least gets you talking about the question.

The second element of the summarized impeachment report, incidentally, are warmed-over allegations that, as vice president, Biden used his position to undercut an investigation into a company for which Hunter Biden was working. This was all adjudicated back in 2019 when it was introduced as a rebuttal to the first impeachment of Donald Trump; in short, there’s no evidence that Joe Biden called for the ouster of Ukraine’s top prosecutor for any reason other than that the international community believed he was corrupt.

Comer and Jordan thought they were onto something last summer when Archer testified that officials from the energy company, for which he and Hunter Biden worked, called D.C. in December 2015. Archer originally testified that the call had been made to “his dad,” meaning Vice President Joe Biden, but he admitted that he wasn’t party to the call. On Fox News — a hospitable platform for every new development in the anti-Biden probe — Jordan suggested that this call was why Joe Biden a few days later traveled to Ukraine.

But it wasn’t. The trip had been announced weeks prior. So, instead, the final impeachment report suggests, without evidence, that it’s why Biden decided, en route to Ukraine, to amplify pressure on the prosecutor. The report cites The Post on that point, but fails to note that the snap-decision aspect of the decision is debated and that the Obama administration generally agreed with the move. There also remains no evidence that ousting the prosecutor aided the company at issue. Archer testified and other evidence suggests that, in fact, the prosecutor was protecting the company. What the impeachment report offers is simply a chain of incomplete claims in an effort to suggest something nefarious.

What’s striking about the report, too, is what it excludes. No mention of the repeatedly hyped claim from Comer and Jordan that the Bidens might have accepted a multimillion dollar bribe — because the sole person making that claim was indicted for lying about it. No mention of the claim made by Comer that Joe Biden had received thousands of dollars in direct payments from Hunter — because those were demonstrably repayments for a truck Hunter Biden bought. No mention of Hunter’s team coordinating with the White House, one of the central allegations (along with the debunked bribe story) triggering the impeachment push according to then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) last year. That’s because the communication was centered on news reports questioning Hunter Biden’s Ukraine work — reports that likely triggered the December 2015 call in the first place.

The Republican chairs tasked with the impeachment probe produced nothing more than a basket of cherries they’d picked, one that back in September seemed like an essential tool in the effort to block Joe Biden’s reelection and to return a Republican — specifically Trump — to the White House. The insincerity of the effort is epitomized by the complete and overt disinterest Comer and his allies had in similarly investigating Trump and his family, recipients of far more money far more directly tied to foreign governments. In fact, when Comer took over Oversight, he shut down an existing probe into Trump.

Comer’s interest in deploying his power in service to Republican electoral prospects has been made repeatedly obvious since Vice President Kamala Harris became her party’s nominee. Now House Oversight plans to investigate Harris’s role in managing the U.S.-Mexico border and now House Oversight plans to probe her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, for having lived in China at one point. Last year was 12 months of Comer and his side tossing up baseless allegations about Biden in hopes of getting Fox News coverage and maybe landing on an electoral winner. This month, they’ve shifted to Harris.

If House leaders believed that Joe Biden deserved to be impeached over his son’s and brother’s business deals, they would impeach Joe Biden. Instead, having failed to convince even other Republicans of Biden’s culpability — and, critically, with Biden set to retire — they’ve just released their overheated report on the first day of the Democratic convention in a last-ditch effort to wring some political utility out of it.

History will not record that Comer and Jordan helped protect the American public from nefarious activity. It will, instead, remember this effort as a failed, ultimately useless attempt to protect the Republican Party and the electoral prospects of Donald Trump.