House Oversight Committee’s Comer appears to admit that the Joe Biden and Hunter Biden investigation is about helping Trump:
In an interview over the weekend, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer let it slip that his committee’s investigation of President Biden and his family are really about hurting the president and helping Donald Trump win. Is this a scandal, or just something that’s obvious?
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A top Republican in Congress said something this week that’s nominally controversial, but in truth, was merely admitting something that everyone on all sides of politics knows to be true.
Rep. James Comer (R-KY), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, appeared over the weekend on “Fox and Friends” and was asked whether his investigations have “moved the needle with the media.”
“Absolutely. There’s no question,” Comer said. “You look at the polling, and right now Donald Trump is 7 points ahead of Joe Biden and trending upward, Joe Biden’s trending downward. And I believe that the media is looking around, scratching their head, and they’re realizing that the American people are keeping up with our investigation.”
Per HuffPost, this was a gaffe, since Comer probably shouldn’t admit out loud on television that one of the goals of his investigation is the political defeat of the opposite party’s president. It was compared, by HuffPost, to the time in 2015 when Rep. Kevin McCarthy accidentally admitted that the Benghazi investigations were about hurting Hillary Clinton in the polls, ahead of her 2016 presidential run.
This is the sort of thing that’s only surprising, and a gaffe, for people who are either extremely not savvy about politics or were born yesterday.
Were you under the impression that the Congressional committee investigations into the finances of Hunter Biden and other relatives of the president were being conducted in the spirit of dispassionate fact-finding, and not out of pure partisan interest?
They are Republicans investigating a Democratic president, and also seeking to defeat that same president when he runs for re-election. And yes, when Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) was investigating Trump and Russia, he also, at the same time, wanted Trump to lose the next election.
To pretend those motivations exist separately is just to deny the reality of how politics works.
The Fox segment is a bit dishonest, in that it uses a Washington Post op-ed with the headline “Millions Flowed to Biden Family Members. Don’t Pretend It Doesn’t Matter” as an example of how the mainstream media “can just not ignore this any longer.” But that was an op-ed by a conservative writer, of the sort that the Post frequently publishes.
And while the mainstream media certainly did not ignore the most recent Oversight Committee revelations, many outlets did point out that Comer’s committee has established neither that President Biden himself received any improper payments, or that he ever took any action as vice president that was influenced by any business deals engaged in by his family members. And that’s to say nothing of the supposed missing whistleblower.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, reacted to Comer’s comments. But Raskin, too, is clearly committed to helping his own president and party.
“It’s amazing to me that the Chairman of the Oversight Committee openly measures the progress of his work by Donald Trump’s poll numbers,” Rep. Raskin said, per Time magazine. The comment, Raskin added, “tells the world that these wild-goose-chase probes are all about one thing: helping Donald Trump claw his way back into the White House.”
Raskin went on to accuse his Republican counterpart of failing to “honor his public commitment to investigate former President Trump for his blatant profit-taking and conflicts of interest during his time in office and Jared Kushner for profiting off his former position as a senior White House advisor to the tune of billions of dollars pocketed from the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and other foreign autocrats.”
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Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
