House Republican Oversight Chairman Jim Comer is increasingly coming under fire after months of his committee’s investigations, including public and private hearings, have unearthed no reported factual substantiation of his allegations and attacks against President Joe Biden.
CNN in January reported that Chairman Comer “has cast the president and his family in hyperbolic language – at times going beyond the evidence that’s publicly available. The Kentucky Republican has painted Biden as ‘A President Compromised,’ and excoriated what he calls ‘the entire Biden crime family.’ He’s pointed to a handful of contested or vague emails to suggest Joe Biden’s involvement with his family’s deals.”
Little has changed, except charges from Democrats and even some Republicans that Chairman Comer’s claims about President Biden have never been proven.
On Wednesday, The Washington Post‘s Philip Bump asked point-blank, “So where’s the bribe, James Comer?”
“It has now been more than three months since House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) issued a release in which they accused President Biden of having been ‘allegedly engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national,'” he wrote.
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“On Wednesday, Comer released a new assessment of payments made to Hunter Biden, [Devon] Archer and others while Biden and Archer were in business together,” Bump writes, concluding: “none of the $20 million that Comer claims went to ‘the Biden family and their business associates’ — an intentionally loose description of the recipients — was shown to have gone to Joe Biden.”
“There’s no alleged bribe to Hunter Biden, either,” Bump added.
Even Fox News host Steve Doocy “has repeatedly expressed skepticism over Comer’s allegations that Biden accepted bribes from foreign nationals while he was vice president,” The Daily Beast reported in late June. “Back in May, for instance, Doocy confronted Comer for not including any hard proof in his report that was supposed to make ‘Watergate look like jaywalking’ and would be ‘judgment day’ for the president.
“I know the Republicans said that the smoking gun were these financial records that you were able to subpoena and got your hands on,” Doocy told Comer, according to The Daily Beast. “But that’s just your suggestion—you actually don’t have any facts to that point. You’ve got some circumstantial evidence. And the other thing is, of all those names, the one person who didn’t profit is—there is no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegally.”
CNN on Wednesday reported “it appears” that Comer’s “committee has not found any direct evidence that President Biden personally benefited from any of his son’s business dealings. Republicans are now insisting they don’t have to.”
“House Oversight Republicans laid out their intention to accuse President Joe Biden of corruption even without direct evidence that he financially benefited from Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, a clear shift in their strategy that they said was launched to investigate the president,” CNN added.
The White House is pushing back in a lengthy memo that was published by Mediaite on Wednesday.
“Today House Republicans on the Oversight Committee released another memo full of years-old ‘news,’ innuendo, and misdirection – but notably missing, yet again, is any connection to President Biden,” it begins. “Perhaps that is because – as recently as last week – the House Republicans’ own self-proclaimed ‘hero‘ witness who was ‘going to be able to come under oath and tell us exactly what role Joe Biden played‘ testified that President Biden never discussed these business dealings and was not involved.”
After citing four news reports, the White House memo adds, “This has been a pattern: time after time, Comer hypes up self-proclaimed bombshell findings about President Biden, and time after time, he fails to provide any actual evidence. Today’s release is yet another flop…So after seven months of wasting time and millions of taxpayer dollars on their evidence-free wild goose chase, Comer is making it clear that he is shamelessly moving the goal posts.”
Read the full White House memo at Mediaite.