“This is the way credible investigations are conducted,” he later insisted about the process he’s advancing.
“This is a credible investigation,” he told Newsmax’s Eric Bolling in a separate interview. “This is substantive.”
You would be forgiven for thinking that Comer is feeling a bit defensive. But he should be. Rather than digging deep into core claims of wrongdoing, the investigation he’s been leading since Republicans regained control of the House in January has been spread thin over a broad area without unearthing anything implicating Biden in a significant way. He has shown that President Biden’s son Hunter leveraged his last name to generate business, but this was already obvious. Beyond that? Overheated insinuations.
Comer’s central failing has been that, through credulity or cynicism, he is endlessly eager to respond to the enormous right-wing demand for information incriminating the Democratic president. His profile has skyrocketed over the year as the leader of this probe — pardon me, this credible probe — that keeps churning out things that resemble inculpatory evidence. But for months now, including over the course of the formal “impeachment inquiry,” he has been left arguing that the real, robust evidence proving Biden’s criminality remains only a subpoena away.
There’s one line of argument from his interview with Hannity, though, that comes up over and over in efforts to suggest that Joe Biden (rather than his son Hunter or brother James) deserves condemnation. It is entirely unfounded but a staple of right-wing chatter about the president.
COMER: We know the Biden family has received millions and millions of dollars from our enemies around the world. We don’t know what they did to receive the money. We don’t know a lot of things about how the Bidens have been able to afford such lavish lifestyle[s] when we really don’t know what they do for a living. …
HANNITY: We do know that Hunter admitted himself that he had no experience in energy, oil, gas or Ukraine. But yet he was dealing with Burisma, and his father took actions as vice president, withheld $1 billion, leveraged that billion dollars to get an investigative prosecutor fired. And in six hours, the guy was gone. The investigation is over. Hunter got paid. And this was five days after, you have been able to chronicle, a phone call that came from Hunter from Dubai with Burisma executives. Is that correct?
COMER: That is correct.
That is not correct. But let’s start at the beginning.
First, there’s this argument that “the Biden family” received “millions and millions of dollars from our enemies.” Comer and others usually say that the “Biden family” took in $20 million through these efforts, though, as The Washington Post documented in August, the actual figure is around $7.5 million. Nor did it come from America’s “enemies.” There was money from a Chinese energy company linked to that nation’s government but the “enemies” line here otherwise relies on conflating foreign governments with individuals from those countries. It’s rhetoric.
Then Comer offers up his standard “what’d they do for this money???” line. This, too, is rhetoric: He has solicited testimony that explains how Hunter Biden, an attorney, provided consulting services to business partners. In the case of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, on whose board he sat, that meant helping to overhaul its corporate governance structure. This is gauzy business-speak, unquestionably, which helps Comer performatively throw up his hands and marvel at the whole thing as phony. (The donors of the $30,000 Comer has raised from self-identified consultants since 2021 — not to mention the $80,000 he has raised from attorneys — might understandably feel frustrated by this charade.)
But then we get to the heart of the thing, this presentation by Hannity (repurposed from Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio) about how Biden leveraged his position when he served as vice president to aid Hunter Biden.
The reality of what happened is this:
While Joe Biden was vice president, Hunter Biden took the gig with Burisma, something he himself has publicly attributed to his last name. (The money from Burisma accounts for about a third of the $7.5 million he took in from foreign partners.) This raised eyebrows both within the administration and, in December 2015, the media.
Earlier in 2015, the Obama administration had begun more forcefully calling for the ouster of Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin. In September, the U.S. ambassador called out Shokin; in October, an assistant secretary of state did. In mid-November, Biden announced a trip to Ukraine the following month.
The issue was that Shokin was seen both by American and other foreign officials as turning a blind eye to corruption. Britain had been investigating Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky for money laundering, for example, but Shokin rebuffed British requests for information. International pressure mounted for Shokin’s removal.
In early December 2015, Hunter Biden attended a Burisma board meeting in Dubai. At one point, he and Zlochevsky made a call to “D.C.,” according to testimony from Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer, who wasn’t privy to the call itself.
Hannity (and Jordan and Comer) argue that this was a key moment, the point at which they claim Hunter Biden told his father that, because Shokin was pressuring Burisma, he and his partners needed the vice president to lean on the Ukrainian prosecutor. As Hannity noted, Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine a few days later.
But this is nonsense, as the timeline above shows. Joe Biden was already planning on going. There was already pressure on Shokin, and not simply from Biden. It seems very possible — if not likely — that the call from Hunter Biden and Zlochevsky to D.C. was centered on responding to those media questions about his board role, questions that were in hand while Hunter Biden was in Dubai.
Most importantly, though, there’s no evidence that Shokin was putting particular pressure on Burisma. Since his firing, Shokin has claimed there was, but the entire point is that his ethics are dubious. Archer also testified that he was told by Burisma staffers “that Shokin was under control and that whoever the next person that was brought in … was not good, because [Shokin] was under control as relates to Mykola.”
The rest of what Hannity offers, about the withholding of a loan guarantee, which did happen, is a good demonstration of how this whole process works. It’s not that there is accrued evidence that informs a conclusion about Biden’s actions. It’s that there is a conclusion for which various incidents are presented as supportive evidence. The evidence doesn’t even really matter, since Hannity and his audience already believe that Biden did something nefarious. They just require a few evidence-like things that can be offered up to validate the belief they already have. It’s like one of those TV shows about ghost hunters: They’re going to point at toppled tchotchkes and floating dust as evidence of the paranormal because their livelihoods depend on identifying something, but their credulous audience accepts a very low bar for doing so.
Hannity gets other stuff wrong, too, like the timeline on the Shokin firing, but that’s barely worth mentioning.
There’s no mystery about why Hannity is doing this or why Comer is doing this. There’s no mystery about why Jordan reiterated the same false theory about Ukraine in a news conference on Wednesday morning. It’s dishonest and the most serious allegation they can present against the president. There’s no money route that’s been drawn to Joe Biden and no evidence that Hunter Biden’s business deals were intentionally facilitated by his father. There’s just this thing that, stripped of context and accuracy, seems like the sort of thing a corrupt politician would do.
Unfortunately for Comer, it is not a credible allegation.
