The Impeachment Inquiry Against Joe Biden Was Doomed From The Start

Though some Republicans may blame House oversight committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) for their failure to impeach President Joe Biden, the real reason is simple: The whole party bought into long-debunked conspiracy theories peddled by their leader, Donald Trump.

And the impeachment inquiry has been a true team effort, with backing from leadership and Comer sharing investigatory duties with House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) and especially House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

The inquiry spanned a wide range of topics, from Hunter Biden’s million-dollar business deals to his budding art career and to the Justice Department’s alleged failure to lock him up for not paying taxes. Comer and company have highlighted payments to the younger Biden by foreign nationals from all over the world and shown that Joe Biden would occasionally meet and greet his son’s benefactors.

Hunter Biden’s work for the Ukrainian gas giant Burisma, however, received special attention, because when he took a board position with the company in 2014, his father served as the face of U.S. policy toward Ukraine. The Ukraine connection offered Republicans the only potential example of the elder Biden taking an official action benefiting his family. 

But the Ukraine corruption story has been repeatedly investigated, starting in 2019 after then-president Trump tried to coerce Ukraine into announcing an investigation into the Bidens, withholding military aid and getting impeached in the process.

“It was stale, moldy pizza left over from the Ukraine shakedown,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the oversight committee, said in an interview. “The whole Burisma lie has this overwhelming stench of Russian disinformation and propaganda.”

Nevertheless, one Republican lawmaker told CNN this week that people wish Comer had “reined in” his rhetoric about the Biden investigation, so as to temper expectations. Another complained that he should have sent out subpoenas faster. Comer said he wouldn’t have done anything differently. 

As soon as Hunter Biden took the Burisma board seat in 2014, it looked like an obvious conflict of interest. The move even prompted one diplomat to complain to the vice president’s office, since a corrupt-looking job for the vice president’s son made it harder for the U.S. to push for anti-corruption reforms in Ukraine. 

Republicans didn’t take issue with it at the time. But when Trump realized in 2019 that Joe Biden would be his likely opponent in the next presidential election, he made a stink, claiming that when the Democrat pushed for the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor in 2015, he did so to stave off an investigation into Burisma.

However, the same diplomat who complained about Hunter Biden, as well as many other State Department officials involved in Ukraine policy, told Congress in 2019 that they wanted the prosecutor fired for entirely separate reasons — including that he had not prosecuted Burisma’s founder — and said that Trump’s allegation was a conspiracy theory peddled by Ukrainians who were themselves corrupt.

The next year, Trump’s own Treasury Department sanctioned Andrii Derkach, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, for propagating the Burisma story in the U.S., including through his association with Trump’s then-attorney Rudy Giuliani. A press release from the department said that Derkach had been an active Russian agent, with ties to that country’s intelligence services, for over a decade.

“Since at least 2019, Derkach and his associates have leveraged U.S. media, U.S.-based social media platforms, and influential U.S. persons to spread misleading and unsubstantiated allegations that current and former U.S. officials engaged in corruption, money laundering, and unlawful political influence in Ukraine,” the Treasury Department said in a release announcing additional sanctions in January 2021.

In other words, the corruption story about Hunter Biden might have had a grain of truth, but it was also Russian propaganda, certified as such by the Trump administration itself.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans conducted a follow-up investigation into Hunter Biden and Burisma, again interviewing State Department officials and other sources familiar with the younger Biden’s work, only to conclude that it wasn’t clear if Burisma had had any effect on U.S. policy toward Ukraine. That investigation also examined Hunter Biden’s income from other foreign nationals, including from China and Kazakhstan.

As soon as Republicans learned that they’d won control…