Harsanyi: The GOP's Hunter Biden Probe Is Legit
As a tactical concern, the House GOP’s decision to open an investigation into Biden family corruption is questionable.
It promises limited political return. It would serve Republicans, and the country, far better if the House focused on a hyper-politicized Justice Department that targets the political opposition, labels concerned parents “domestic terrorists” and ignores violence aimed at pregnancy centers, for starters.
None of that, however, means there isn’t sufficient circumstantial evidence suggesting President Joe Biden not only lied about not knowing his son was favor-trading on the family name with corrupt autocracies but that he was a beneficiary of those business dealings. Indeed, precedent says we Republicans have a duty to “democracy” to investigate.
Yet Greg Sargent over at The Washington Post warned, “If Republicans can obliterate the distinction between congressional investigations done in good faith and ones that weaponize the process in bad faith, they win.” You see, only Democrats can launch investigations in “good faith.”
Pathological partisanship can lead to cosmic shamelessness. And you almost have to admire the chutzpah. These are the very same people who spent years championing one of the most unethical investigations in American history.
We now know that Russian “collusion” hysteria was predicated on partisan opposition research and disinformation meant to delegitimize the 2016 election. There was a grand total of zero indictments related to 2016 election “collusion.” So rickety was the evidence that guardians of our sacred norms never even tried to impeach former President Donald Trump over this alleged sedition. I’ll spare you the slew of blown one-source anonymous “scoops” spread by major media organizations in concert with the FBI and Democratic Party. Sargent highlighted them all.
Let’s remember that when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story, virtually the entire left-wing media complex regurgitated the risible claims of former intelligence officials — including known liars James Clapper and John Brennan — that the entire kerfuffle was just Russian “disinformation.” Sargent dismissed the news as a “fake scandal” and worked to discredit the story.
The laptop story always had far more journalistic substantiation than the histrionic and fallacious Russian collusion investigations that Sargent and his paper peddled for five years. Post reporters had interviewed the owner of the Delaware computer shop where Hunter abandoned his laptop. They had Hunter’s signature on a receipt. They had on-the-record sources with intimate knowledge of his interactions. They had Tony Bobulinski, one of two former business partners of Hunter who contend that the “big guy” was Joe.
Now, it’s certainly possible that the computer shop owner and Bobulinski, a Navy veteran who made campaign contributions to progressives like Ro Khanna, were part of an elaborate fascistic cabal spreading “disinformation.” But now, Congress can put them under oath.
Later, emails implicating the president as a participant in Hunter’s schemes were authenticated by forensic specialists. Yet virtually the entire censorious journalistic establishment, with the help of tech giants, limited the story’s exposure to help their preferred candidate win.
“Democracy,” indeed.
Then there is the issue of the president claiming he knew nothing about Hunter’s leveraging of the family name for influence-peddling and never personally profited off any of his son’s schemes. What did the president think Hunter was doing when he hitched a ride on Air Force Two to secure deals with the Chicoms in 2013? Does Joe not remember that two Obama administration officials raised concerns about Hunter’s relationship with the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma?
When finally asked about his son, Biden claimed the “vast majority of the intelligence people have come out and said there’s no basis at all.” His buddies lied — just like they did during the Russian collusion hysteria. This week, only two years late, CBS News confirmed that the Hunter Biden emails were all genuine — just like everyone knew they were. Now we have authenticated emails showing a Burisma executive thanking Hunter for facilitating a meeting with the vice president.
If Joe were a Republican, Adam Schiff would not only have opened an investigation but would have claimed to be in possession of irrefutable proof that the 2020 election had been bought by the Chinese. Sargent would be churning out one hyperbolic piece after the next. We would all be watching another thermonuclear meltdown.
Of course, nearly every congressional investigation in history is to one extent or another undertaken in “bad faith,” and that’s fine. One of the most beneficial roles of political parties is that they will hold the opposition accountable. But Sargent, and other advocates of one-party rule, only see legitimacy in their objectives, which is one of the numerous reasons their claim to be democracy’s defenders is so laughable.
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