{"id":1027889,"date":"2023-10-27T18:18:57","date_gmt":"2023-10-27T18:18:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/democrats.org\/?p=1027889"},"modified":"2024-05-23T19:58:47","modified_gmt":"2024-05-23T19:58:47","slug":"icymi-washington-post-mike-johnson-points-to-a-biden-impeachment-even-if-the-facts-do-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/democrats.org\/news\/icymi-washington-post-mike-johnson-points-to-a-biden-impeachment-even-if-the-facts-do-not\/","title":{"rendered":"ICYMI: Washington Post: Mike Johnson Points to a Biden Impeachment, Even If the Facts Do Not"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/democrats.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/image-21.png?w=1024\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1027890\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Key Point: <\/strong>\u201cJohnson\u2019s tenure as leader of his party\u2019s caucus began with his allies shielding him from difficult questions about the 2020 election. He has little choice but to endorse Comer\u2019s efforts, of course, but it does seem that he\u2019s been shielded to some extent from just how thin the allegations concerning the president actually are. \u2026 At the moment, the GOP\u2019s push toward impeachment is not based on substantial evidence at all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>ICYMI: <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/politics\/2023\/10\/27\/mike-johnson-points-biden-impeachment-even-if-facts-dont\/\"><strong>Washington Post<\/strong><\/a><strong>: Mike Johnson points to a Biden impeachment, even if the facts do not<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By: Philip Bump<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>On Thursday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) granted his first cable-news network interview since securing his new role. He was not playing on \u201chard\u201d mode, certainly; his interlocutor was Fox News\u2019s generally pliable Sean Hannity.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Because Johnson isn\u2019t running against Trump, the questioning was gentle, like a dad giving his son a job interview at the family business. But Hannity was able to steer Johnson to dig a little deeper into some of Hannity\u2019s pet issues \u2014 such as his ongoing campaign against President Biden.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Hannity had been pressing Johnson on his views of Biden administration officials and, then, on using impeachment to remove them from their positions. Then he turned to the president \u2014 or, really, to the president\u2019s son and brother, who made millions working as consultants, often with foreign business partners.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>\u201cThey\u2019ve discovered nine particular Biden family members have been paid,\u201d Hannity said of Republican representatives including House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.). \u201cAnd then you have the issue of Joe on tape admitting that he used our money, taxpayer money, to leverage $1 billion in loan guarantees, which was [Barack] Obama administration policy, to fire a prosecutor investigating his son.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>This is not what the facts show. Biden was \u201con tape\u201d participating in a panel discussion where he described applying pressure on Ukraine to fire a corrupt prosecutor, an effort that was the shared goal of a number of international actors. The prosecutor was not investigating Biden\u2019s son, nor was the prosecutor investigating the company on whose board Biden\u2019s son Hunter sat.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Johnson didn\u2019t point these errors out. Instead, he praised Hannity\u2019s presentation as a \u201cpretty good recitation of the facts.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>He praised Comer\u2019s work, which has robustly documented that, in fact, members of Joe Biden\u2019s family did receive money from business partners. He has not shown that Biden himself received any money \u2014 except in the form of a loan repaid to him by his brother. \u201cWe have the receipts on so much of this now,\u201d Johnson said, which, again, is true. It\u2019s just that \u201cthis\u201d is not anything that demonstrably ties Biden to the payments.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Nevertheless, Johnson continued, \u201cthat\u2019s the reason that we shifted into the impeachment inquiry stage on the president himself. Because if, in fact, all the evidence leads to where we believe it will, that\u2019s very likely impeachable offenses.\u201d&nbsp;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>That\u2019s a pretty generous assessment of the process so far. Comer and his colleagues, including House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) have repeatedly presented new allegations as proof of Biden\u2019s wrongdoing \u2014 only to have them slowly be revealed as incomplete, misleading or unimportant. The loan repayment from Biden\u2019s brother that Comer hyped last week is just such an example, presented as money flowing to Biden in proof of Comer\u2019s long-standing allegations, before the nuance became obvious.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>A better example is the testimony of Devon Archer, a former business partner of Hunter Biden\u2019s. In a deposition before Oversight investigators, Archer confirmed that Hunter Biden understood that he couldn\u2019t leverage his father, that he didn\u2019t know of any point at which the president aided the business and that the company for which they both worked saw the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor as a setback.&nbsp;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The Hannity interview was useful in one sense. Johnson\u2019s predecessor as speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), had approved the impeachment inquiry driven largely by Comer and Jordan. When McCarthy was ousted, it wasn\u2019t clear what would happen. Johnson confirmed that it will move forward.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Or perhaps it won\u2019t. In late September, the impeachment inquiry held a hearing involving a handful of witnesses, none of whom could provide any evidence impugning Joe Biden or his son, by their own admissions. The 2019 impeachment of Donald Trump \u2014 probably the target of Johnson\u2019s sniffy disparagement of \u201cthe other team\u201d \u2014 had released its final report about three weeks after its first hearing (which was followed by four more days of hearings). The Biden \u201cimpeachment inquiry\u201d has held no more hearings in the month since the first one. And, by his own admission, Comer doesn\u2019t want to.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>\u201cI don\u2019t know that I want to hold any more hearings, to be honest with you,\u201d Comer said while speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill last week. He complained that it was hard to keep members present for hours on end, given that so many had other commitments. Instead, he said, he preferred depositions, which \u201cyou can do more with.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>There\u2019s a truth buried in that, of course. You can do more with cherry-picked transcripts when your goal is to coat Joe Biden with insinuations and unproved allegations. Had Devon Archer\u2019s deposition been a hearing, the final result would have been that viewers saw him acknowledge that Biden was not involved in his son\u2019s work. There would have been multiple Democrats on hand to evaluate Archer\u2019s testimony critically, something that does Comer (and, by extension, Johnson) no good. In 2019, the witnesses were generally deposed before offering live testimony with cross-examination from Republicans. Comer appears to prefer stripping out that last bit.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Johnson\u2019s tenure as leader of his party\u2019s caucus began with his allies shielding him from difficult questions about the 2020 election. He has little choice but to endorse Comer\u2019s efforts, of course, but it does seem that he\u2019s been shielded to some extent from just how thin the allegations concerning the president actually are. There\u2019s a narrative, carefully tended by Hannity, Comer and others, that continually overstates the case against Biden or that pronounces him guilty by familial association. Perhaps more will emerge, but at the moment, the GOP\u2019s push toward impeachment is not based on substantial evidence at all.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>One would think that at some point, Comer would need to present evidence that withstands objective scrutiny \u2014 including by non-right-wing media outlets. The value of adjudicating these things in public hearings is that they are tested and challenged, making the surviving evidence stronger. We can be more confident that Biden\u2019s role in the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor was not corrupt because the assertion was evaluated during the 2019 impeachment.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>But we know this isn\u2019t really necessary. Johnson and Comer can remain surrounded by their allies, including Hannity, and pluck stuff out of depositions that hops over the low evidentiary bar they\u2019ve all agreed to. After all, it\u2019s what they\u2019ve done so far.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Key Point: \u201cJohnson\u2019s tenure as leader of his party\u2019s caucus began with his allies shielding him from difficult questions about the 2020 election. He has little choice but to endorse Comer\u2019s efforts, of course, but it does seem that he\u2019s been shielded to some extent from just how thin the allegations concerning the president actually [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":263,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1027889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-press-release"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>ICYMI: Washington Post: Mike Johnson Points to a Biden Impeachment, Even If the Facts Do Not - Democrats<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/democrats.org\/news\/icymi-washington-post-mike-johnson-points-to-a-biden-impeachment-even-if-the-facts-do-not\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Democrats\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2023-10-27T18:18:57+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-05-23T19:58:47+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/democrats.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/image-21.png?w=1024\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Claire DePree\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Claire DePree\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/democrats.org\/news\/icymi-washington-post-mike-johnson-points-to-a-biden-impeachment-even-if-the-facts-do-not\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/democrats.org\/news\/icymi-washington-post-mike-johnson-points-to-a-biden-impeachment-even-if-the-facts-do-not\/\",\"name\":\"ICYMI: Washington Post: Mike Johnson Points to a Biden Impeachment, Even If the Facts Do Not - 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