Last fall as we were all girding ourselves for the impending “Red Tsunami” and contemplating what it was going to do to the remains of the Biden agenda, I wrote that we should be prepared for Revenge of the MAGA cult and recognize that it was inevitable that the Republicans were going to try to impeach Joe Biden. At that time Georgia Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene had already filed five impeachment resolutions against him and it was well known that Donald Trump would not be very happy if the new Republican majority didn’t issue payback for the two impeachments on his record.
One of the resolutions she filed on Biden’s very first day in office claimed that he had tried “to influence the domestic policy of a foreign nation and accept benefits from foreign nationals in exchange for favors.” That was, of course, based upon the bogus Ukraine scandal that prompted Donald Trump’s first impeachment. Nothing would be more satisfying to Trump than for Biden to be impeached for doing what Trump did when he attempted to blackmail the President of Ukraine into smearing Biden.
The then presumptive new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a staunch Trump acolyte, was asked by Punchbowl News before the mid-term election if would pursue the president’s impeachment and he replied:
I think the country doesn’t like impeachment used for political purposes at all. If anyone ever rises to that occasion, you have to, but I think the country wants to heal and … start to see the system that actually works.
Clearly that whole “system that actually works” thing didn’t pan out so McCarthy is predictably signaling that they are ready to go ahead with an impeachment inquiry. He told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday:
This was always going to happen. As Barton Gelman presciently wrote in the Atlantic before the midterm election:
[T]here is little reason to think that McCarthy can resist the GOP’s impulse to impeach once it gathers strength. He is a notably weak leader of a conference that proved unmanageable for his predecessors Paul Ryan and John Boehner. If he does in fact reach the speakership, his elevation will be a testament to his strategy of avoiding conflict with those forces.
The chaotic and inane House “investigations” into President Biden’s son Hunter and the screaming outrage about the alleged “sweetheart deal” for paying his taxes late and lying on an application to buy a firearm have been leading this way for some time. The notorious laptop, an informant’s unverified statement that Joe Biden was in the room when Hunter was making business deals, another informant who is on the lam from the DOJ, and IRS whistleblowers who say that the Trump appointed US Attorney was hamstrung by the Justice Department from throwing the book and Biden’s son are, so far the extent of “evidence” if you want to call it that, that they’ve produced. The DOJ refutes these charges and that US Attorney is expected to testify when congress comes back into session.
The details of all these investigative threads are opaque but highly suggestive, consisting of unproven speculation, dubious sourcing and a whole lot of smoke and mirrors. But that’s the point. It’s Republican scandal-mongering 101. If you rapidly throw volumes of incomprehensible minutia into the media ether and deliver it with breathless intensity, you can make the public believe that even though they may not understand what it’s all about, there must be something to it or everyone wouldn’t be talking about it.
Donald Trump is the biggest megaphone and he has dubbed Biden “Crooked Joe” and is calling him the most corrupt president in history and repeatedly slandered his family as the “Biden Crime Family.” It may seem as if he’s lost his touch, re-purposing that nickname from “Crooked Hillary” and the GOP’s long standing use of the term “Clinton Crime Family” but he knew what he was doing. He was drawing on all those years of character assassination of Bill and Hillary Clinton and wrapping Biden in them like cozy old sweater.
And he is pushing McCarthy hard to not only impeach Biden as soon as possible but also “expunge” his impeachments which would almost certainly, in his mind, mean that he can go into the election claiming that Biden was impeached and he wasn’t. (You know that’s how he thinks, right?)
This strategy is starting to work, and you know this by the fact that it’s not longer just the usual suspects who are flogging the scandals. Some high profile GOP Trump apostates are getting in on the action to. We saw former New Jersey Gov. and presidential candidate Chris Christie on Face the Nation this past weekend on the alleged “sweetheart deal” for Hunter Biden:
Far be it from me to second guess a presidential candidate and former U.S. Attorney but I was under the impression that prosecutors didn’t reveal all the details about investigations in which they didn’t charge someone because it’s not fair to smear people with innuendo and suspicions of wrongdoing for which there isn’t adequate evidence. But apparently, that doesn’t apply to the sons of presidents.
Christie has at least, to his credit, also raised the question of how Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner got a 2 billion dollar sweetheart deal from the Saudi Investment Fund which is much more than the Republicans in congress have done.
Then we have No Labels supporter and former GOP Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan with this startling comment:
This is the first time I’ve heard anyone suggest that Biden might be facing “serious legal troubles” much less that they might be on par with Trump, who is under two indictments currently and possibly facing at least two more. Hogan did retreat a bit later when pressed by MSNBC’s Jen Psaki who pointed out that Hunter Biden isn’t in the government and that any equivalency between Trump and Biden in terms of “legal problems” is false.
It’s lucky for Biden that the credibility of most of his antagonists is so tattered that people who aren’t already in the fold aren’t likely to buy into it. Speaking of serious legal problems:
According to CNN, Speaker McCarthy has been in close consultation with a former House Speaker who is telling him it’s time to strike. That would be the Newt Gingrich who, when he was Speaker, pushed the Republicans to impeach Bill Clinton — whose approval rating hit an all time high the day he was impeached. It lost Gingrich the Speaker’s gavel and he had to resign from congress over it. It sounds like he’s following that same script today and McCarthy is taking his advice.
No wonder Joe Biden smiled when he was asked about it on Tuesday.