If you’ve been observing politics for a while I’m sure many of you caught House Oversight Chairman James Comer’s not-so-subtle implications that Joe Biden and his “crime family” are killing off his political enemies over the weekend. It’s redolent of the old Clinton Kill List that was an article of faith on the right back in the 1990s.
JAMES COMER, THE REPUBLICAN WHO CHAIRS the House Oversight Committee, has been widely mocked for claiming during a Sunday interview with not-yet-fired Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo that the “informant” in his committee’s investigation of the Biden family’s business dealings went “missing,” hampering Republicans’ ability to drop the long-promised “bombshell” evidence.
While this dung-faced performance merited all the mockery it has received, those of us whose sonar is more closely calibrated to the fainter sound waves of the conservative media world caught something more sinister in the congressman’s subtext.
Here’s the transcript, see if you can catch it:
Nine of the ten people that we’ve identified that have very good knowledge with respect to the Bidens, they are one of three things, Maria. They are either currently in court, they’re currently in jail, or they’re currently missing. So, it’s of the utmost importance that the FBI work with us to be able to try to identify what research they’ve done, what investigations they’ve done, because we have people that wanna come forward but honestly, Maria, they fear for their lives.
People mysteriously missing. Others fearing for their lives.
Why exactly? What evidence is there that anyone needs to be worried or that foul play is afoot? It’s not clear.
And yet here we have a GOP committee chairman strongly implying that the Biden family’s intimidation tactics might even go so far as to result in death.
After the Comer interview, Bartiromo asked another guest, the national conservative writer Josh Hammer, to react to these claims, which she described as “chilling.” Hammer says ominously, “Maria, what is actually going on here? You and I both know exactly what is going on here” before laying into a diatribe about how the “Biden Crime Family” and “everyone at the top” of the intelligence community are “pulling out all the stops imaginable” to protect the president. The Washington Examiner followed with a credulous report on Comer accusing the White House of “intimidation.”
For conservative media consumers what Bartiromo et al. are trying to get across is unmistakable. It is part of a long history of vague and not-so-vague accusations that Democratic political elites and the Deep State are willing to go so far as murder in order to silence whistleblowers who might harm the Democratic Party. This tactic was employed most notably against the Clintons with the “Kill List” rumormongering in the 1990s. In the last decade, it was most prominent in the slander surrounding the Seth Rich murder in 2016.
That this was not missed by its intended audience is clear by the response you can see in certain corners of the MAGA internet.
Charlie Kirk, misunderstanding Comer, tweeted about how 9 of the 10 informants are missing, which Kirk also calls “chilling.”
Patriot News Network headlines it “Huge: Biden Family Crime Informant Has Gone Missing!”
On Truth Social the notion that the informant was “Epsteined” and that he or she might be dead was spread by various accounts.
THIS COMES IN THE WAKE of another story last week that you would have seen only in the MAGA media bubble: Tara Reade, who during the 2020 campaign accused Biden of having sexually harassed her years earlier, suggesting that Biden might try to have her killed. “If something happens to me, all roads lead to Joe Biden,” she tweeted. “I am not suicidal.”
“If something happens to me…Biden accuser posts bone-chilling message” was the headline in Conservative Brief, which was shared on Twitter by Chuck Woolery, the conservative crank and former Love Connection host. “Tara Reade fears assassination attempt? All roads lead to Joe Biden” screamed American Action News. Bongino, Rebel News, Breitbart—they all sang from the same hymn book.
Tara Reade always had a strange affection for Vladimir Putin. Lately she’s been pushing the virtues of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She is one weird person with a knack for getting attention on both the right and left.
All of this just proves that this stuff isn’t a result of Donald Trump’s ignominious reign. They’ve been doing this stuff for decades and the GOP establishment has always been happy to exploit it for their own purposes.