The president’s son testified before two GOP-led House committees on Wednesday. After a half-decade of investigations, no smoking guns proving corruption have been found.
The months of fruitless effort by the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee and House Judiciary Committee to unearth evidence supporting an impeachment of President Joe Biden culminated on Wednesday in their long sought-after deposition of the president’s only surviving son, Hunter Biden.
It didn’t go well for them. The phrase “epic fail” comes to mind.
There was no reason for the GOP to be surprised that the deposition yielded no evidence of any wrongdoing by President Biden—much less any smoking guns.
That should have been obvious the night before, when the Oversight Committee neatly packaged its complete lack of evidence justifying an impeachment into a handy social media post on X (formerly known as Twitter). Thanks to a boost from Elon Musk promoting it, the 19 posts got a good amount of views and likes—which only highlighted the lack of substance.
As set forth by Philip Bump in The Washington Post, the thread cherry-picks the best of the GOP’s theories—all of which have been debunked.
Two other bogus claims of “evidence” include money paid to Biden that were clearly repayment of loans made to James Biden—the president’s brother. Both payments were checks that had “loan repayment” written on them—a fact that the social media thread failed to mention.
But the most striking aspect of the GOP-led committees’ epic fail is the fact that the centerpiece of the GOP theory—now-indicted FBI informant Joseph Smirnov’s information about an alleged bribery scheme—turns out to have been a likely fabrication. Recent reporting reminds us there were early signs that the “evidence” was untrustworthy, given the qualms of former intelligence experts as early as 2020.