Rolling on with Impeachment
Terry H. Schwadron
Feb. 23, 2024
Oblivious to fact, lack of witnesses or even the straight politics involved, those House Republicans like Rep. James Comer of Kentucky and Jim Jordan of Ohio continue to flail in finding an impeachable offence to hang on Joe Biden.
They were at it again this week, trying their best to tie foreign business projects by brother James Biden to his brother, again coming up short of any evidence that would persuade non-politicians that the president was involved in family businesses as vice president a decade ago. Instead, there was more testimony about James repaying loans from Joe.
The obsessive effort to pursue impeachment just cheapens the seriousness of the charge and leaves people like me thinking that the Republican leadership can’t discern fact from wanted fiction, or face reality of incoming information.
As inquiries into stupid self-promotions by son Hunter Biden’s 10-year-old and abandoned business ventures in Ukraine and China continue, the news this week was that the Justice Department had arrested ex-FBI informant Alexander Smirnov for having fabricated his contributions to the Hunter Biden story. Indeed, court documents suggested that Smirnov admitted that officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing key adverse information about Hunter Biden.
But Jordan and Comer insisted that finding that their star witnessed had lied to them did not change the basic idea that the vice president had almost certainly benefited from his family’s private businesses, and that Biden interfered in official ways in his family’s business ventures.
We’re a good number of witnesses and months down the impeachment inquiry road, and none of it look good for the hoped-for Biden Crime Family hunters.
The Evidence Lacking
In his own pending criminal trial on tax and falsified gun-purchase charges, Hunter Biden and his lawyers challenge a photo being brought into evidence as a pile of cocaine. Apparently, they said, it was a pile of sawdust. Oops.
Hunter’s various business partners all told House investigators that Biden as vice president or afterwards never did more than greet them and engage in small talk with them but had no interest in their actual business efforts. Another strike,
In the summer of 2020, Smirnov told the FBI and members of Congress that he had met over time with executives from the Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma Holdings and that they told of hiring Hunter for a no-show job, that Biden forced Burisma officials to pay bribes towards firing a top Ukrainian prosecutor, that there were 17 recordings and other evidence with evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens. It ended up as a raw FBI report that never was fact-checked.
Last week, Justice said it was entirely fabricated and charged Smirnov, who is out on bail. And there were broad suggestions that it was all scripted by Russian intelligence officers.
The Washington Post reported that many of the details don’t even match with the testimony presented by Hunter’s business partners, never mind that the story somehow dwells on removal of that Ukrainian prosecutor who had adverse outcomes in mind for
Burisma. Sorry.
In the End, Not Enough Votes
Comer said recently that an impeachment vote might not happen at all, given the House Republicans’ tiny majority and the apparent inability to get enough even in that party to believe there is a case here. He now discounts the importance of his own would-be star witness, but other emails and testimony just show Hunter to be strange and do not show that the father was engaged in wrongdoing.
Yet the effort goes on, despite wars in Europe and the Middle East, despite the apparent assassination of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, despite perceived crises on the border, in the classroom, and across an inflated economy.
Perhaps the appearances of James Biden — and soon, Hunter Biden — before the Oversight and Judiciary committees will offer House Republicans a final chance to rekindle this impeachment effort.
But unless someone has new verified evidence to offer, it is difficult to see why these efforts should continue — even for strictly political reasons.
One must wonder why there are no consequences — political or legal — for continuously pushing materials in the Congress that are known to be false, which is exactly what Republicans had argued about connections that then Special Counsel Robert Mueller had pursued between the Donald Trump campaign and Russian intelligence operatives. The case involving Smirnov rekindles the same embers of Russian manipulation of U.S. politicians.
Somehow, the endless commentary about Biden’s age, the gap between some policies about immigration and the lived experienced on the border, unhappiness about consumer prices and some criticisms of foreign policy are not enough to satisfy the get-Biden crowd in Congress.
As last week’s re-scheduled impeachment vote against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas shows, Republicans finally getting the answer they said they wanted is no guarantee that there will be conviction with a Senate controlled by Democrats.
Maybe we should drop dead-end efforts in the House.
##