Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, has released a lengthy statement that details the major gaps in the ostensible case that Republicans have been building amid a corruption investigation targeting the Bidens. In short, the leading Democrat argues — as do others — that there’s just nothing there directly tying the president in financial terms to even mildly suspicious business dealings.
Despite the serious questions about the basic credibility of the arguments that Republicans have been pushing, many continue talking up the possibility of an impeachment inquiry targeting President Joe Biden, and it seems likely that talk of supposed corruption in business would be a key focus of such a push. But again — where’s the evidence?
“House Republicans constantly insist that they are investigating President Biden, and not his adult son,” Raskin said in his remarks. “In that case, we can form an obvious judgment on their investigation: it has been a complete and total bust—an epic flop in the history of congressional investigations. The voluminous evidence they have gathered, including thousands of pages of bank records and suspicious activity reports and hours of testimony from witnesses, overwhelmingly demonstrates no wrongdoing by President Biden and further debunks Republicans’ conspiracy theories.”
Accompanying Raskin’s statement is a lengthy recap of some of what investigative efforts have actually shown — including no known payments to the president.
This lack of specific evidence directly contradicts comments made by Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chairman of the Oversight Committee in this Congress. “We’ve got a President of the United States who’s taken millions and millions of dollars from bad people and bad countries around the world,” he said at one point — which is plainly not correct. In other examples, Comer tried to characterize the current president’s past use of a pseudonym in an email message that went to his son as somehow indicative of corrupt plotting around what Republicans continue to claim was then-Vice President Biden’s compromised pressure for the removal of a certain prosecutor in Ukraine. Government officials using pseudonyms in personal emails is routine, and an email central to the discussion came after the foreign prosecutor was already out.
