Sorry GOP; Where There’s Smoke, There Still Is No Fire
This just in: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has proof that President Biden should and can be impeached.
This also just in: Former president trump and the pillow guy have irrefutable evidence that the 2021 presidential election was rife with voter fraud, causing trump’s defeat.
This just in: Santa is on his way.
I pity the speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. He is tasked with the impossible job of demonstrating that the Biden administration is more corrupt than the trump years. He has as much chance of proving it as I have of hitting a Jacob deGrom fastball. Good luck to McCarthy and to me.
Not that the speaker and his band of merry tricksters haven’t tried. Soon after McCarthy squeaked by to win the speaker post, he announced a whole series of investigations into supposed government corruption and the deep state.
The point, of course, isn’t to prove anything but to cause just enough smoke to make voters wonder about Biden and his administration. The chief bombthrowers on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. and Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., are sure to make incendiary comments that will be all over the Fox headlines.
It’s a tried and true smear strategy. Two political scientists, Douglas Kriner and Erick Schickler, studied 53 years of congressional investigations. They found that the more time Congress spends on hearings into potential executive branch misconduct, the lower the president’s approval rating became. Kriner and Schickler calculated that if lawmakers spent 20 days a month on investigative hearings, the president’s approval rating would see a decline of 2.5 percent in the time frame.
People like that icon of ethics, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., and the equally, rumor mongering House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Kent., claim innocently that all they want to do is shed sunlight on the truth and get accountability at the same time. And smear and defile the Democrats, regardless of those pesky facts.
The Republicans are going to get to the bottom of the scandal over border security, the scandal over Hunter Biden, the scandal over the federal government’s bias against conservatives, the scandal over the origin of the Covid-19 virus, the scandal over the frame-up of trump by the George Soros-supported N.Y. District Attorney. Never mind the facts backing up E. Jean Carroll’s claims that she was raped by trump many years ago.
Regarding Biden, the Republicans are looking for anything to show that the president was involved in his son’s allegedly nefarious business dealings. No evidence has been turned up but, Republicans insist, it will.
Most recently, Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, are demanding a document from the FBI they say outlines an unverified and unspecified “alleged criminal scheme” involving a foreign national and Biden when he was vice president. I recall something about another master smear artist by the name of Sen. Joe McCarthy, R-Wis., who claimed to have evidence in his satchel of a trove of communists in government. Malarkey, all of it.
Republicans said they’d uncovered possible bombshell evidence from a whistleblower imputing Biden in a bribery scheme.
“The information provided by a whistleblower raises concerns that then-Vice President Biden allegedly engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national,” Comer said in a press release . “The American people need to know if President Biden sold out the United States of America to make money for himself.”
To be fair, of course, Grassley conceded that the allegation remains unconfirmed. It reminds me of when a judge tells the jury to ignore statements from a prosecutor and to strike it from the record, but not from their memories.
“What we don’t know is what, if anything, the FBI has done to verify these claims or investigate further,” Grassley said, adding another unsubstantiated swipe that the Justice Department has shown a recent pattern of “botching politically charged investigations.”
Comer and Grassley called on the FBI to hand over a document reflecting an unverified whistleblower tip relating to Biden’s time as vice president.
“The information provided by a whistleblower raises concerns that then-Vice President Biden allegedly engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national,” Comer said in a press release . “The American people need to know if President Biden sold out the United States of America to make money for himself.”
“Committee Republicans have uncovered evidence of federal crimes committed by and to the benefit of members of the president’s family,” Comer said in November, shortly after Republicans won control of the House in the midterm elections. “The Biden family’s business dealings implicate a wide range of criminality.”
Rep. Taylor Greene, who never misses to lodge a conspiratorial innuendo, filed several article of impeachment against Biden since his inauguration. None have reached the house for a vote.
On Wednesday, the congresswoman posted a “breaking news” video on Twitter claiming that a whistleblower came forward to the House Oversight Committee, revealing “very credible” information that would allegedly tie the president to “foreign nationals in an alleged pay-for-play scheme to influence policy decisions.”
“Joe Biden should have been prosecuted for his crimes before he was even allowed to run for President. So many in the government knew. The FBI had evidence. Why did the FBI and DOJ never act?” Taylor Greene tweeted. I can answer that: Because there is no evidence.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas also claimed Biden could be impeached over alleged document he hasn’t even seen.
I would like to see something, anything, to back up these nasty claims.
Comer and Grassley are seasoned enough to know the FBI won’t release documents regarding an ongoing investigation. It’s going nowhere and they know it, despite their claims of being totally transparent.
Border security has always been a near and dear topic for Republicans and they want answers as to why Biden hasn’t shut the doors to illegal immigration like trump did (he didn’t) and why the Democrats under Biden are allowing migrants to sneak into the country with deadly fentanyl (he isn’t). Forget the fact that most of the illegal fentanyl gets to the U.S. through legal border crossings.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., got into the fray when he criticized Biden’s plan to send U.S. troops to the southern border to avoid a massive influx of immigrants. Graham called Biden’s plan “ridiculous theater.”
That is rich considering that Graham supported trump for doing the same thing in 2018 when he was president.
“I feel that Donald Trump did the best job in my political lifetime. When Donald Trump did something, it worked,” Graham said, duplicitously.
Then there is the Republican fantasy about the “weaponization” of the federal government to go after Republicans. One obvious example, obvious that is to the conspiratorial Republicans, is the government’s seizure of secret documents from trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago. The feds could have just asked trump for the documents and he would have produced them. Fact is, they did ask, and he didn’t produce. And why isn’t the government going ballistic over those secret documents found at Biden’s office and home? Maybe it’s because Biden didn’t refuse to turn them over once they were discovered and that the number of documents is minuscule compared with the trove that trump stole.
Want more “facts” showing the weaponization of the Justice Department? Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, has demanded to know why protestors outside conservative Supreme Court justices’ homes were not arrested. Federal law prohibits picketing near the residence of a federal judge with the intent to influence the judge’s official duties. The U.S. Marshals Service, however, was ordered not to engage protesters “unless they attempt to enter private property” which they didn’t do.
“Although federal law prohibits picketing near the residence of a federal judge with the intent to influence the judge’s official duties, recent evidence indicates that the U.S. Marshals protecting the justices were directed to ‘not’ conduct arrests ‘unless it was absolutely necessary,’” Jordan said.
The GOP also will take off the gloves to find out about the origins of the COVID-19 virus and whether the virus leaked from a Chinese bio-lab even though most experts believe the virus came from bats sold at a Chinese market. And the Republicans will burrow into the truth behind the White House pandemic policies, including masking and vaccines. I daresay the Republican sleuths won’t question why trump’s delays in responding to the pandemic cost hundreds of thousands of American lives.
Of course, the McCarthy, Scalise and Greene crowd will cry whatabout the democrats’ supposed, full frontal assault when trump was president. Let’s see, that would be the Russia investigation which resulted in numerous indictments and a report that stopped just short of calling for trump’s arrest. Or the bogus claims about that call to the Ukrainian president, Zelinsky. All trump did was threaten to blackmail Zelinsky into providing dirt on the Bidens or he would hold back military aid. Or that time when trump was simply exercising his right to free speech when he agitated his minions on Jan. 6, 2021. Never mind that his innocent ramblings were enough to foment the bloody insurrection.
McCarthy’s witch-hunts have gone nowhere and now he wants to FBI to turn over a document involving an ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden. Ain’t going to happen. Let’s look at how the GOP investigations have gone so far in rooting out corruption and exposing the deep state.
Catholicism is under attack by the FBI, according to the Catholic Association, a media outlet which is “defending religious liberty, life, and the Church in the public square” and which will challenge “Catholicism Under Attack — First by Woke Culture and Now the FBI?”
The heavy question of the government’s alleged attack on the Roman Catholic Church was explored in opaque, investigative hearings run by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. The proof is allegedly contained in an FBI memo “alleging some kind of tie between what it called ‘radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology’ and “violent extremism,” said a report by the Catholic Association.
The report quotes the memo as saying that “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists in radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology almost certainly presents new mitigation opportunities.” It also says the FBI is working with the Catholic church to identify potential extremists. Oh dear, you mean that the government is keeping a close watch on potential violent extremists involved in a radical Catholic ideology. Good, I say.
And listen to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton who said that the mass shooting last week in Cleveland, Texas, is part of the Biden administration’s “plan” to increase illegal immigration to the U.S.
Days after the attack, Francisco Oropeza, 38, was charged with shooting and killing five people who lived next door after reportedly being asked by the neighbor to stop shooting his gun so their baby could sleep. Authorities said that Oropeza had been deported four previous times before the latest shooting.
Paxton apparently was not aware that undocumented immigrants sometimes try and sometimes succeed in sneaking back into the country. Texas’ top lawmaker also failed to note there is no evidence to suggest that immigrants, either documented or undocumented, are more inclined to commit crimes than any native person or citizen.
“The Biden administration will never take responsibility for the fact that this is part of what their plan is,” Paxton said. “They realize that a certain number of crimes are going to occur — a large number of crimes across the country — and it’s an acceptable consequence for them to have what they want, which is more illegal immigration.”
“They blame it on guns, and the reality is I’m blaming it on them,” Paxton said. “They’re the ones that allowed this person back in.”
Paxton based his paranoid allegation on the Biden administration’s comments after the killing that prayers “are not enough” and that more has to be done to reduce gun violence.
Paxton commented after Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted following the shooting, announcing “a $50K reward for info on the criminal who killed 5 illegal immigrants Friday.” Not people, but “illegal immigrants” reminding me of a Woody Guthrie song, “Deportees” about a plane that crashes and kills its occupants, only referred to in the news as “deportees.”
And I must end with reports that Biden, a devout Catholic, is against God.
The proof, the conspiracists say, is that in May 2021, Biden became the first president since 1952 to not use the word “God” in his National Day of Prayer proclamation. He did, however, write that the proclamation was signed in “the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-one” and he used the word “God” in his oral remarks to commemorate the day.
It should be underscored that trump mentioned God 11 times in his proclamation recognizing the 2020 National Day of Prayer and we know that trump is steeped in religion.
David Brody, the Christian Broadcasting Network Chief Political Correspondent, tweeted that Biden’s failure to mention God in his proclamation is “pathetic…and not surprising.”
And the Senate’s chief hypocrite, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was equally provoked when he tweeted, “Our Government, which art in Washington, hallowed be thy taxes…”
Republican investigators want America to know, as the song goes, “We’ve Only Just Begun.”
And for the record, at least 10 of trump’s former allies have either pleaded guilty or been convicted of crimes. And that doesn’t include more than 1,000 people who were charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection by trump supporters. The list also doesn’t include trump himself, who has been indicted on fraud charges, in on trial for charges related to an alleged rape and faces more charges from investigations in Georgia, Washington, D.C. and Florida
Former allies include:
Allen Weisselberg, the longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, reached a deal with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, pleading guilty to 15 felonies.
Rick Gates worked as a deputy to Paul Manafort on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to investigators. In December of 2019, Gates was sentenced to 45 days in jail and three years of probation.
Manafort, who chaired Trump’s 2016 campaign and also worked as his campaign manager, was indicted along with Gates in October of 2017. A jury found him guilty of tax fraud and bank fraud. He also pleaded guilty about a month later to charges related to money laundering, witness tampering and lobbying violations. He received a 7 1/2-year prison sentence and was released to serve the remainder of the sentence from home in May of 2020. Trump pardoned Manafort in December of 2020.
Michael Cohen was trump’s lawyer from 2006 to 2018 and also as a vice president of the Trump Organization. He pleaded guilty in August of 2018 to eight counts, related to “hush money” payments to women who said they had sexual encounters with Trump ahead of the 2016 election. He received a three-year prison sentence in December of 2018 but was released to serve the remainder from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
George Papadopoulos, adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign, pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to FBI agents regarding his communication with individuals who claimed to have ties to prominent Russian officials. He served 12 days in prison and 12 months of supervised released. Trump granted him a full pardon in December of 2020.
Roger Stone, a political trickster and former advisor to trump, was indicted in January of 2019 on seven counts related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Stone was convicted and sentenced to more than three years in prison in February of 2020. Trump commuted his sentence and then pardoned Stone.
Michael Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general, served as a national security adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign. Flynn was fired as national security adviser after less than a month into the role after it was reported he lied about his contact with Russian officials. Flynn agreed to a plea arrangement regarding lying to the FBI regarding his Russian contacts. He later withdrew the guilty plea and was pardoned by trump.
George Nader, an informal foreign policy adviser to Trump, reached a plea deal related to charges of possessing child pornography and transporting a minor for sex. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Elliott Broidy was a fundraiser for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and was involved with his inaugural committee. He pleaded guilty to carrying out a secret lobbying campaign in exchange for millions of dollars. Trump pardoned him.
Steve Bannon was the chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 campaign and then a White House strategist. He was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena to appear before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot. He will be sentenced in October and faces a minimum of 30 days and up to one year in jail, as well as a fine.
Bannon also was indicted for allegedly defrauding donors to a crowdfunding campaign to help build trump’s long-promised wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump pardoned him.
That’s trump: at least 10 criminals; Biden: None.