Since January 2023, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has been almost single-mindedly focused on uncovering and documenting nefarious actions by President Biden. His committee and his colleagues on other committees have deposed people in Biden’s family and their orbit, hoping to demonstrate that Biden had done … something that might convince House Republicans to impeach the president.
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On Tuesday, the Oversight Committee put forward its case, the product of those months of depositions and, really, efforts that extended back to before Republicans gained control of the House. The social media thread — dropped a day before Biden’s son Hunter appears on Capitol Hill to answer questions — has the aesthetics of a damaging case, with various claims presented and images of highlighted documents offered in support. It also had the desired effect: Elon Musk took a break from sharing right-wing memes to put it in front of his enormous follower base on X.
But neither the aesthetics nor the credulity with which the thread was received made it effective in its actual intent. Instead, it shows that after all of those months of effort, House Republicans still haven’t proved anything of significance.
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Let’s walk through each of the 19 posts in the thread to show why.
The first words here are misleading. Devon Archer was a business partner of Hunter Biden, the president’s son, not of President Biden. Calling him a “Biden associate” is a manifestation of the Republicans’ consistent effort to refer to wrongdoing by the “Biden family” — guilt by association.
This argument manifests another common rhetorical trick the Republicans use: smearing Joe Biden with his son’s — and at other times, brother James’s — efforts to make money off the family name. It has been understood for years that the non-Joe Bidens were making deals based on their last names. If nothing else, the Republican probe has provided lots of examples of how that was demonstrated, the Archer testimony included.
What this post elides, though, is that Archer also confirmed that Hunter Biden had emailed him while they worked together to say the two of them should convince their partners that they’d gotten Joe Biden to act in certain ways even though they had no power to do so. (See p. 115.) In other words, Hunter Biden wanted to demonstrate to his business partners that his last name was worth the money, even though it wasn’t. Archer was also one of numerous witnesses to state under penalty of perjury that Joe Biden was explicitly not involved in their business efforts.
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2. “Selling ‘the brand’ has been lucrative for the Bidens. In our third bank records memo, our committee identified over $20 million in payments from foreign sources to the Biden family and their business associates that occurred during Joe Biden’s Vice Presidency.”
Lucrative for the Bidens — meaning Hunter and James. As The Washington Post Fact Checker tallied in August (before the impeachment inquiry began, mind you), members of the Biden family were paid less than $8 million of this total, with Hunter Biden getting the bulk of that money.
Not all of this money came while Biden was vice president, either. See, for example, the deal Hunter Biden made with a Chinese energy company.
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On Tuesday, the Oversight Committee put forward its case, the product of those months of depositions and, really, efforts that extended back to before Republicans gained control of the House. The social media thread — dropped a day before Biden’s son Hunter appears on Capitol Hill to answer questions — has the aesthetics of a damaging case, with various claims presented and images of highlighted documents offered in support. It also had the desired effect: Elon Musk took a break from sharing right-wing memes to put it in front of his enormous follower base on X.
But neither the aesthetics nor the credulity with which the thread was received made it effective in its actual intent. Instead, it shows that after all of those months of effort, House Republicans still haven’t proved anything of significance.
Sign up for How To Read This Chart, a weekly data newsletter from Philip Bump
Let’s walk through each of the 19 posts in the thread to show why.
The thread
1. “Biden Associate Devon Archer testified Joe Biden was ‘the brand’ that Hunter Biden sold around the world when his father was Vice President of the United States.”The first words here are misleading. Devon Archer was a business partner of Hunter Biden, the president’s son, not of President Biden. Calling him a “Biden associate” is a manifestation of the Republicans’ consistent effort to refer to wrongdoing by the “Biden family” — guilt by association.
This argument manifests another common rhetorical trick the Republicans use: smearing Joe Biden with his son’s — and at other times, brother James’s — efforts to make money off the family name. It has been understood for years that the non-Joe Bidens were making deals based on their last names. If nothing else, the Republican probe has provided lots of examples of how that was demonstrated, the Archer testimony included.
What this post elides, though, is that Archer also confirmed that Hunter Biden had emailed him while they worked together to say the two of them should convince their partners that they’d gotten Joe Biden to act in certain ways even though they had no power to do so. (See p. 115.) In other words, Hunter Biden wanted to demonstrate to his business partners that his last name was worth the money, even though it wasn’t. Archer was also one of numerous witnesses to state under penalty of perjury that Joe Biden was explicitly not involved in their business efforts.
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2. “Selling ‘the brand’ has been lucrative for the Bidens. In our third bank records memo, our committee identified over $20 million in payments from foreign sources to the Biden family and their business associates that occurred during Joe Biden’s Vice Presidency.”
Lucrative for the Bidens — meaning Hunter and James. As The Washington Post Fact Checker tallied in August (before the impeachment inquiry began, mind you), members of the Biden family were paid less than $8 million of this total, with Hunter Biden getting the bulk of that money.
Not all of this money came while Biden was vice president, either. See, for example, the deal Hunter Biden made with a Chinese energy company.
