Whether Hunter, Wither Biden, Wether GOP Theories

“Without Hunter Biden, What Do Republicans Have?” asks Jessica Tarlov while sitting through the congressional hearings on the subject.

Writing in The Messenger:

As I sat there watching Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) showing off a poster with images of Hunter Biden, naked, in the midst of a congressional hearing, I couldn’t help but smile.

I wasn’t smiling because Hunter looked particularly good (don’t be a pervert!). I was smiling because it was never clearer to me that the GOP has nothing on which to run but a wide-ranging conspiracy theory that the Biden family is somehow akin to the Gotti crime family.

And who in their right mind really believes that?

Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh, since I do personally know, and like, several people who hold this view about the first family. And with a mere 20% of Americans trusting government officials to do what’s right most of the time, according to recent Pew Research polling, you can envision the appeal when you also heap on a layer of thick partisanship.

But the problem with it, as with most right-wing conspiracies, is that it doesn’t hold water if you do even the slightest semblance of digging. It’s a house of cards built for right-wing echo chamber consumption.

Of course, I should state the obvious: Hunter Biden has done a lot wrong in his life. Addiction, which he has acknowledged, is a disease and I’m glad he’s in recovery, but it’s quite clear he has traded on his family name to make a lot of money (like many nepo babies do, including the Trumps). It isn’t ethical and I am all for new rules to limit the practice.

That said, this week’s much-hyped IRS whistleblower testimony showcased just how divorced from reality many Republicans have become. Three key components of the GOP narrative were absolutely shredded — and by their own witnesses!

First and foremost — as we saw with the supposed “Twitter files” that were meant to show off the Biden administration’s censorship — the timeline is off for the Republican narrative to make sense. IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler claimed in both his transcribed interview and public testimony that when IRS investigators wanted to ask questions about President Biden, they were told, “That’s gonna take too much approvals [sic]. We can’t ask those questions.” But what’s left out of the GOP re-telling, and even coverage from news outlets like CBS, is that those directives, congressional staffer Aaron Fritschner points out, came from Trump appointees during the Trump administration.

Hits a little differently when it’s former attorney general Bill Barr’s directive, doesn’t it?

What’s more, under questioning by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley acknowledged that the “vast majority” of times that he told the tax council that he wanted to charge someone, the council decided not to proceed. If it’s business-as-usual to have his professional opinion rejected, why should we take his professional opinion seriously?

Then there’s the pesky issue of whether Attorney General Merrick Garland lied to Congress about the Hunter Biden investigation. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has even threatened impeachment proceedings against Garland. But again, it was all bluster. In Shapley’s words: “Let me be clear, although these facts contradict the attorney general’s testimony and raise serious questions for you to investigate, I have never claimed evidence that Attorney General Garland knowingly lied to Congress.”

Another talking point incinerated.

Both of the whistleblowers’ testimonies undercut the GOP argument that Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney David Weiss was hamstrung in investigating Hunter Biden by a Department of Justice (DOJ) that wanted to protect the Bidens. Of course, the timeline doesn’t add up again. Weiss was appointed in 2018 by then-President Trump and given this investigation by AG Barr. When Biden won the presidency and Garland took over the DOJ, no one interfered with Weiss’s work. And as Weiss has written in two letters to congressional Republicans, he never asked to be a special counsel or to charge Hunter Biden in D.C. As Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) pointed out, Weiss’s story, backed by the whistleblowers, only got more airtight.

And of course, there’s the question of whether any of this is linked to Joe Biden since he is, you know, the guy who’s president and was vice president. CNN’s Brianna Keilar had Congressman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) on her show and asked if the whistleblowers drew any direct connection between Joe Biden receiving illicit payments from his son. All Sessions could offer was that over $5 million was put into Biden family accounts, and that was the direct link. But is it? Certainly not by any recognizable definition of the word “direct.”

The house of cards crumbles.