James Comer and the House Oversight Committee are still on the Biden beat and have produced one of the most inane reports the U.S. Congress has ever produced. Philip Bump has the story. He goes through all the Comer atrocities over the last few years and then gets into it:
You will forgive me, then, if I don’t take seriously the Oversight Committee’s new report, alleging that key actions taken by the Biden administration were “illegitimate.” And that’s even before reviewing the report itself, flimsy enough to be at risk of disintegration from even a whisper of wind.
To distill the conclusion, Comer and his majority determined that Biden’s mental capacity was diminished during his last year in office, meaning that maaaybeee people on his staff signed stuff without his knowing it and that maaaybeee that included some of his pardons? If this sounds a lot like something Trump himself would say, that’s not an accident. The probe by Comer’s committee developed in concert with Trump’s rhetoric on the issue, functionally handing over to the president the power of congressional oversight activity.
Trump wants someone to say that Biden’s pardons are illegitimate so that he can push his opponents into the Justice Department’s acquiescent crosshairs. Comer and his friends are happy to give him the pretext. As I wrote for The Washington Post in June, there’s no actual question that those pardons were issued on Biden’s instructions. But the game here has always been to whip up a fog of uncertainty — was the 2020 election somehow stolen? can’t a president just destroy a third of the White House? — that lets Trump move forward with what he always intended.
What an Oversight Committee could be doing, of course, is conducting oversight on the executive branch. There’s no shortage of serious questions about the sitting president that would seem to warrant more urgency than unserious questions about a former one. Trump’s own pardons, the enormous sums of money he’s earning from people who are benefitting from the administration’s decisions, his deployment of the military against nebulously defined actors in the Caribbean — the list goes on. Hell, you’d think that the House might be interested in assessing Trump’s willful disregard for Congress’s power of the purse. But that’s only if you think that the intent of Comer and Oversight is to aid Americans instead of simply siding with the president. (Not that this is a surprise; one of the first things Comer did upon taking leadership of Oversight was kill an investigation into Trump’s finances.)
I write all of this centrally because, despite the past three years, Comer and his committee are still granted the baseline assumption that their work product is offered in good faith. The Post’s coverage of its new report, for example, mentions only in passing that Biden has been an ongoing target of Comer’s and doesn’t add the useful context that his targeting has resulted in any number of misfires. This is the same paper that, in 2023, ran the accurate headline, “Comer mischaracterizes Hunter Biden car payment reimbursement to his dad.” Yet we’re led to assume that his current characterizations should be assumed to be legitimate.
No one would credibly argue that questions about Biden’s acuity were baseless. But no one can credibly argue that the output of a Comer-led Oversight Committee is inherently trustworthy. Comer spent years proving that he would embrace any disparagement of Biden as he ignored any criticism of Trump. That should be a focus of assessments of the committee’s output before we consider the output itself.
On Tuesday morning, the next step of the plan swung into action. Speaking to reporters, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) stated that any Biden administration action that involved the use of an autopen “should be voided,” including pardons. Then come contrived investigations and then come arrests and then come administration lawyers telling district courts that the question isn’t settled and maybe they should just head over and ask Samuel Alito his view of the matter.
Has anyone asked if Trump signed all 1500+ pardons for the January 6th insurrectionists? Maybe he did. But it’s worth asking.
Obviously this is all irrelevant. Biden’s pardons are all valid. It’s just a way to continue to harass him and treat him like shit for the sheer joy of it. There’s no legitimate purpose to any of it, no way to prove the spurious charges they are flinging and no reason for any of this except to give Dear Leader a thrill up the leg.
Meanwhile, he’s walking around Japan like a blind salmon, so out of it it’s clear he has no idea where he is:
Bro has no idea what is going on. This is crazy. pic.twitter.com/Q6qHSMe6uZ
— Jim Stewartson, Antifascist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🏴☠️🇺🇸 (@jimstewartson) October 28, 2025