The Senate GOP has picked up the slack of President Donald Trump’s attempt to bribe Ukraine into investigating the Bidens after his impeachment over the scheme — most of them have, at least. Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) quite directly criticized his fellow Senate Republicans’ investigations of the Bidens during a conversation with CNN’s Manu Raju this Thursday. Trump and Republicans have alleged that then-Vice President Joe Biden acted corruptly in trying to get Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who’d supposedly been looking into a company that Biden’s son worked for — but in reality, many world leaders at the time had concluded that the prosecutor was too lenient on corruption cases. The evidence of nefarious Biden plotting simply is not there.
Referring to the company that VP’e Joe’s son Hunter worked for, Romney told the CNN reporter:
‘There’s no question but the appearance of looking at Burisma appears political. And I think people are tired of these kind of political investigations… We also have a lot of work to do on matters that are not related to Burisma. We probably ought to focus on those things.’
Mitt Romney, a member of Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, told me of Chairman Ron Johnson’s Burisma probe: “There's no question but the appearance of looking at Burisma appears political. And I think people are tired of these kind of political investigations”
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) March 5, 2020
Romney added: “We also have a lot of work to do on matters that are not related to Burisma. We probably ought to focus on those things.”
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) March 5, 2020
Remarkably, Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has seemingly directly tied his own panel’s investigation into Burisma and the Bidens to the ongoing Democratic presidential primary race, which Joe Biden is currently leading. On Wednesday, he said that his committee — which Romney is a member of — is preparing to release a so-called “interim report” about their probe within one to two months or so. He claimed:
‘These are questions that Joe Biden has not adequately answered. And if I were a Democrat primary voter, I’d want these questions satisfactorily answered before I cast my final vote.’
Johnson’s work has driven Democrats to “brace for an all-out GOP assault on Biden and his son over an issue that was litigated at length during President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial,” POLITICO notes. Biden has already answered the questions that Johnson is referring to, and importantly, there’s still no actual apparent evidence that the then-vice president had any kind of secret ulterior motive! It’s just not there. Yet, in the name of solving where all the metaphorical smoke is coming from that they’re just blowing out of their own investigations, Johnson and other Republicans are pressing on.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) insisted, referring to the documented Russian conspiracy theory that Ukrainian authorities led 2016 election meddling rather than Russia’s own team:
‘I am concerned to see that in the Senate there seems to be a renewed interest in furthering these bogus Russian narratives through the use of their investigative powers. I just think it’s so deeply destructive to be effectively working in a concert with Russian propaganda artists.’
Yet, they are.
The Biden investigations — which have included the transfer of documents from the Treasury and State Departments, who, under Trump, flatly refused to comply with recent Congressional investigations when they happened to be led by Dems — coincide with another Senate GOP push to investigate the investigators of the Russia investigation. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced just the other day that his panel held their first closed door deposition in that probe.
