House GOP to launch critical investigation into just how old Biden is

Who could have predicted that House Republicans would use special counsel Robert Hur’s report on President Joe Biden’s document handling for their political purposes? Hur found that while Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency,” there was not enough evidence to “establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” 

In the absence of actionable malfeasance on the document handling, Hur—a former United States attorney in Maryland, appointed by Donald Trump—did the next best thing he could for his Republican pals: the gratuitous hits on Biden’s age.

Enter three House committee chairs and a new avenue of investigation: Biden’s fitness as president. Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, and Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland Monday evening demanding both a transcript and any video recordings of Biden’s interview, with a Feb. 19 deadline for a response.

Axios reports that the Republicans are planning hearings starring Hur in which they will focus on Biden’s mental acuity, the national security implications of his document handling (to give “investigations” the gloss of legitimacy), and his fitness to lead. “Someone might ask him if Biden is unfit to lead,” a leadership source told Axios. “Give him a chance to frame it.”

Might? They “might” ask Hur about Biden’s fitness? They “might” take this chance to exploit Biden’s age, his biggest political liability with voters, and run with it? They absolutely will give Hur a microphone and put him in front of cameras and the traditional media will absolutely eat it up.

While Republicans are at it, Axios reports, they plan to go after Garland and how the Justice Department conducted the investigation. Call it Comer and Jordan’s revenge for the fact that they haven’t been able to get anything implicating Biden and his son Hunter from the Department of Justice for their sham impeachment.

Jordan and Comer have the blessing of their leadership to do this. Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, GOP Whip Tom Emmer, and Conference Chair Elise Stefanik released a statement last week calling Hur’s remarks on Biden’s age some of the “most disturbing parts” of the report. “A man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office,” they said. 

You might think that those four would have more pressing stuff to deal with, like the fact that there’s another government shutdown looming in a few weeks. Or maybe figuring out how to clean up the horrible messes Johnson has created with his inept leadership. Or just doing anything that would benefit the American people. 

Actually, you probably wouldn’t think that. Why would they change course now?

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The New York Times is determined to make ‘but his age’ the new ‘but her emails’

If there’s anything The New York Times seems to enjoy, it's coming up with a focused attack on a Democratic candidate and then running that attack over and over and over again. Maybe their writers enjoy the simplicity of copy-pasting their remarks. Maybe there’s pleasure in patchwriting existing articles into something “new.” Whatever it is, once the Times has latched on to their Great White “But Her Emails,” they are inclined to never let it go.

For Joe Biden, the line of attack doesn’t even require misunderstanding how email servers work, a pretense that some kind of rule has been broken, or James Comey coming in with a holier-than-thou hot take. Because Biden is old. Case closed. Break out the Xerox machine and just keep slapping that copy button.

Over the weekend, The New York Times filled every slot on its editorial page with a piece attacking Biden’s age and memory. That didn’t just include the Times’ conservative columnists calling for the president to step down, but the paper’s editorial board jumping in to tell you that Americans think Biden is too old. As for 77-year-old Donald Trump? Now there’s someone who “does not appear to be suffering the effects of time in such visible ways.”

How many times can a single article tell you that Biden is old, but Trump is in his prime? Well, there’s the headline:

Why the Age Issue Is Hurting Biden So Much More Than Trump

And the subhead:

Both Donald J. Trump and President Biden are over 75. But voters are much less likely to worry that Mr. Trump is too old to serve.

And then there’s this paragraph about Trump, which has to be read in its entirety to appreciate how embarrassing it would be to Kim Jong Un’s publicist.

Mr. Trump, by contrast, does not appear to be suffering the effects of time in such visible ways. Mr. Trump often dyes his hair and appears unnaturally tan. He is heavyset and tall, and he uses his physicality to project strength in front of crowds. When he takes the stage at rallies, he basks in adulation for several minutes, dancing to an opening song, and then holds forth in speeches replete with macho rhetoric and bombast that typically last well over an hour, a display of stamina.

Strength. Physicality. Stamina. Those are the words attached to Trump.

In the previous paragraph, the same article had different words for Biden: Tentative. Frail. Stiff.

In the middle of this article is a link to a New York Times/Siena College poll that reportedly showed 70% of Americans believing Biden to be too old for his office, while fewer than 50% said the same of Trump.

Gee. Where did they get an idea like that?

On Monday, a story on Biden’s age and memory is still at the top of The New York Times’ editorial page. Even if the contents of that story are far less caustic than the articles that ran over the weekend, it's still written from a tedious middle-of-the-road perspective that is not far off special counsel Robert Hur describing Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” It also serves to keep "Biden," "Age," and "Memory" right at the top of the headlines.

What’s especially convenient about this storyline for the Times is that they’ve already been doing it for decades. Here are a few past headlines:

The first two items on this list come from the last couple of years. The middle pair are from 2019, when Biden was only starting to gear up for his campaign to win the White House. The last item on that list is from 2008, when Biden had just been selected as Barack Obama’s running mate.

Joe Biden has always been the gaffe guy. If The New York Times assigns someone to cover a Biden speech, they know what’s expected: Forget everything else—just bring back the moment when Biden mixed up a name or mispronounced a city. Just as the Grey Lady had its fixed set of things to say about Hillary Clinton, which it trotted out on any occasion, for Biden it's always there to catch even the slightest slip. "Gaffe-prone" Biden has been their schtick for decades, which conveniently ignores Biden’s well-documented (and largely successful) effort to overcome a severe stutter. Now the Times is delighted to tie its grammar police to the Hur report and claim that this is all about age. Copy-paste. Copy-paste. Copy-paste.

Occasionally the Times will mount a small, milquetoast defense, like the piece titled, “I’m a Neuroscientist. We’re Thinking About Biden’s Memory and Age in the Wrong Way” at the top of the op-ed page at this moment, which powerfully argues that Biden isn’t “Forgetting” as Hur suggests, he’s merely “forgetting.” Because that distinction is certainly something that will be easily conveyed in a 30-second spot.  

Compare that bland language to the explicitly negative editorial columns over the weekend that called Biden "decrepit" and insisted he should step aside. Or this piece that kicks off by comparing Biden to an aging parent with dementia. “One of the most difficult conversations you can have in life is with a parent or peer who is becoming too old and infirm to work,” it declares. Apparently, it’s not so difficult, because the Times is having this conversation with its readers every day.

The New York Times, along with other media outlets, has created an opinion ouroboros. The publication provides stories that emphasize how Biden is old, slipping, and gaffe-prone. Then they circulate the news that people, shockingly, believe them. Then they use those poll results as an excuse to do it all again.

When it comes to Trump … don’t worry about it. He dyes his hair and wears makeup and talks for a long time. According to the Times, that means you shouldn’t be concerned about his age. In fact, they have a poll that shows you’re not concerned. And now, here’s an article about how you’re not worried about Trump’s age. Watch him dance. 

Republicans demanded border security, worked on a compromise deal with Democrats, and now want to blow the whole thing up. Biden is promising to remind Americans every day that the Republican Party is at fault for the lack of solutions to the problems they claim are most important.

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Rep. Matt Gaetz wants to force House GOP to take a Trump loyalty test

On Tuesday, Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz and honorary “Florida man” Rep. Elise Stefanik, and 64 House Republicans presented a resolution to declare that Donald Trump “did not engage in insurrection or rebellion” related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Gaetz began the press conference by saying “We are here today to authoritatively express that President Trump did not commit an insurrection,”

More importantly, Gaetz made it clear that he plans to use this as a MAGA purity test. After thanking Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio for filing a companion bill in the Senate, Gaetz said, “And now it's time for members of the House and Senate to show where they stand on this question.” And just like that, Gaetz’s remarks were followed by a series of Republicans praising dear leader Trump and saying how the insurrection on Jan. 6 was a concoction by “leftists.” 

“[What] we have seen is mass hysteria caused by you, the reckless leftist media,” said Rep. Andy Biggs. “That's what we've seen.”

Stefanik flanked Gaetz during the press conference, suggesting they’ve patched things up since the two spent October bickering at one another’s expense. Gaetz’s resolution reads in its entirety

Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that former President Donald J. Trump did not engage in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or give aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

You can flip the paper over if you don’t believe me.

The idea that after hundreds of arrests, convictions, and prison sentences—as well as a congressional investigation that left very little to the imagination about how very much Trump and his allies orchestrated the insurrection—the horrors of Jan. 6 should be forgotten with a single-sentence resolution is almost hallucinogenic! It also signals how Trump and his supporters expect the GOP to fall in line. Those who sign on to Gaetz’s resolution will be on a list that Trump can point to and threaten Republican officials with for however long he lives.

As of now, two names are conspicuously absent from the list of sponsors of the bill: Reps. Jim Jordan and James Comer, both of whom have been doing Trump’s dirty work as chairs of House oversight committees.

Maybe they are too busy not finding evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden to sign on to a bill as ludicrous as this one. But as former Rep. Liz Cheney knows, Jordan will surely sign on to any bill pretending that Jan. 6, 2021, never happened.

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Nikki Haley suddenly has a problem with Trump’s love of dictators

With the South Carolina Republican primary approaching, Nikki Haley is revving up her attacks on presumptive nominee Donald Trump. 

On Monday, Haley repeatedly referred to Trump as a “New York City liberal” who donated to Kamala Harris. She followed that up by posting a clip of Trump’s interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartoromo where he effused about China’s President Xi Jinping, with this bold take: “Praising dictators is not normal. Make America normal again.”

Newsflash: Trump has something of a preoccupation with dictators. Maybe you think you didn’t read that right. Yes, the twice-impeached former president goes all fanboy for dictators and his history of praising tyrants like the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte goes way back. 

There was the time Trump described himself as a “big fan” of Turkey’s strongman autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Trump has called Hungarian Prime Minister (and authoritarian racist) Viktor Orban “his friend.” In fact, Trump has been throwing around Orban’s name so much that he’s mixed him up with Erdoğan.

Even when Trump’s Fox News buddy Sean Hannity attempted to help Trump walk back his praise of dictators like Vladimir Putin, Trump couldn’t help but to boast about how well he gets along with authoritarian monsters.

The good news here is that while Haley isn’t going to beat Trump and there is very little in the way of facts or logic that can seemingly penetrate the MAGA-brainscape these days, she can continue to remind independent voters of why they don’t want another round of Trump as president.

Enjoy Trump going gaga over China’s Xi Jinping.

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Stability or chaos: The turnover rate in the Biden vs. Trump Cabinets speaks for itself

The success or failure of a presidency can often depend on the people chosen for Cabinet-level posts. President Joe Biden has just passed the three-year mark of his first term. His administration has been a model of stability and competence. This follows the four years of chaos and incompetence that marked Donald Trump’s miserable administration.

And that point is clear when you look at the turnover rate in both administrations among the 15 Cabinet members in the line of succession for the presidency as well as the nine additional Cabinet-level positions.

RELATED STORY: Republicans actually published a blueprint for dismantling our democracy. It's called Project 2025

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a visiting fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, has written detailed analyses on overall staff turnover in the Trump administration and the Biden administration. There’s Biden, who kept his promise to make his Cabinet the most diverse in U.S. history with more women and members of color, all of whom had considerable political experience. His Cabinet includes Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay person to be a Cabinet-level secretary, and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve in a president’s Cabinet.

And so far only one Cabinet member has resignedLabor Secretary Marty Walsh, the former Boston mayor, who stepped down in March 2023. A longtime Boston Bruins fan, Walsh accepted an offer to become executive director of the NHL Players’ Association. Julie Su is serving as acting labor secretary because the Senate has yet to confirm her nomination.

And just two of the nine additional Cabinet-level positions have seen change. Longtime Biden aide Ron Klain stepped down as White House chief of staff at the mid-point of Biden’s term, and was immediately replaced by Jeff Zients, who effectively ran Biden’s COVID-19 response operation. He remains in the post.

The second is Cecilia Rouse, the first Black woman to serve as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, resigned in March 2023 to return to Princeton University and resume her work as a professor of economics and public affairs. She was replaced by longtime Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein.

That means that 21 of 24 of Biden’s original appointees remain in their positions heading into the fourth year of his term. National Journal White House correspondent George E. Condon Jr. wrote:

In his three years in office, the president has been determined to keep his top team mostly intact, and that team in turn has been determined to avoid the leaks, backstabbing, and controversy that have led to purges and makeovers in almost all the nine presidencies Biden has witnessed in his half century in Washington.

National Journal review of past administrations found that one has to go back 171 years to find a more stable first-term administration.”

Condon wrote that Biden’s 87.5% retention rate in these top positions is topped in U.S. presidential history only by Franklin Pierce, elected in 1852, whose seven-member Cabinet remained intact during his four-year term. Condon added:

The contrast is particularly sharp compared with Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump, whose Cabinet chaos was matched by no president in almost two centuries. By the end of his term in office, only four of Trump’s original 15 Cabinet members remained and only one of nine Cabinet-level appointees had survived. His retention rate of 20.8 percent exceeded only the president whose picture he brought to the Oval Office—Andrew Jackson, who had only one of six Cabinet members remaining at the end of his first term.

In January 2023, midway through Biden’s term. Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware told NBC News, “Not one single member of the Cabinet has left in disgrace, is writing a tell-all book or has bad-mouthed the president. There are no leaks, no backbiting, nothing.”

Only recently has there been a major controversy surrounding a member of Biden’s Cabinet which is under investigationDefense Secretary Lloyd Austin was criticized for his failure to notify the White House, Congress, and the media about his hospitalization resulting from complications related to a procedure to treat prostate cancer.

And House Republicans have scheduled a Homeland Security Committee meeting for Jan. 30 to mark up articles of impeachment for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for his handling of border policy. Democrats have accused House Republicans of launching a “baseless political attack” instead of focusing on a bipartisan solution to the immigration crisis, Axios reported.

Presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky, author of “The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution,” told National Journal:

“Trump’s Cabinet chaos reflected the broader chaos in government. It’s a reason why most people elected Biden. It was because they felt like he would bring calmness and stability back to government and back to the nation.”

She added that this stability is one of the reasons why Biden “has been able to be effective.”

“Up to now, he’s not spending political capital or time on having to get new candidates appointed or finding replacements. It frees up mental space and bandwidth and political capital to get things done,” she said.

Trump promised to bring “the best and the brightest” to his administration. He also said he would run his administration like his business. Unfortunately, as shown in a New York civil lawsuit in which Trump faces up to $370 million in penalties, there was persistent fraud in his business dealings.

And, as The New York Times noted, Trump “created a  cabinet of mostly wealthy, white men with limited experience in government, mirroring himself.”

Vox wrote in May 2017:

CEOs don’t persuade people; they dictate. And they fire those who refuse to carry out their demands. Even more importantly, a CEO of a privately held company (like the Trump organization) operates like a king over his personal fiefdom. His employees work for him; they have no higher obligation to shareholders.

And three years later, during the 2020 campaign, The Hill wrote about just how tumultuous the Trump administration had been:

Trump operates like the federal government is just a backdrop for a never-ending episode of “The Apprentice,” except that he dominates every scene. And, just like “The Apprentice,” Trump is constantly trying to make every scene more outrageous than the one before. After all, dull is death in the TV business.

Trump fired some Cabinet members he considered disloyal or incompetent by his standards. Others resigned because of differences over policy issues.

The turnover in the Trump administration began less than a month after his inauguration when national security adviser Michael Flynn was forced to resign following claims he misled the administration over his communications with Russia’s ambassador. In December 2020, Trump pardoned Flynn, who had twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

Trump then ran through three more national security advisers—H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, and Robert O’ Brien. Bolton, who was fired over policy differences, has warned that Trump could do  “irreparable” damage to the country if elected president again.

There were four White House chiefs of staff under Trump: Reince Priebus, John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney, and Mark Meadows.    

Meadows was among the 19 people indicted with Trump in the criminal racketeering case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis for allegedly conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. 

Kelly became an outspoken critic of Trump. CNN reported that Kelly told friends this about Trump:

“The depths of his (Trump’s) dishonesty is just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it’s more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life,” the retired Marine general has told friends, CNN has learned.

Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon CEO, after he called the president “a moron.” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin called Trump “an idiot,” while Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the president had “the understanding of a fifth or six grader,” according to Bob Woodward’s book “Fear: Trump in the White House.” Mnuchin was one of the few Cabinet members to survive four years in the Trump administration.  

Three of Trump’s Cabinet members left after being linked to scandals involving misuse of government funds for personal purposes: Health and Human Services Secretary Tom PriceSecretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, and Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin. Zinke, of Montana, is now a member of the House GOP caucus.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions was forced out in November 2018, because he recused himself and appointed a special counsel, Robert  Mueller, to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. His successor, William Barr, resigned in December 2020 after debunking Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud in the presidential  election.

And then, with just weeks left in Trump’s term, two more Cabinet members—Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos—were among the administration officials who resigned after the mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. Trump has since derisively referred to Chao, the wife of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, in social media posts as “Coco Chow,” which she criticized as an anti-Asian slur.

In July 2023, NBC News reached out to 44 of the dozens of people who served in Cabinet-level positions during Trump’s term, not all of whom responded. A total of four publicly said they support his reelection bid. Several were coy about where they stood. And there were some who “outright oppose his bid for the GOP nomination or are adamant that they don’t want him back in power.”

“I have made clear that I strongly oppose Trump for the nomination and will not endorse Trump,” former Attorney General Bill Barr told NBC News. Asked how he would vote if the general election pits Trump against President Joe Biden, a Democrat, Barr said: “I’ll jump off that bridge when I get to it.”

At the time, some former Cabinet members told NBC that they were supporting other candidates in the Republican primary. Former Vice President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, challenged Trump for the nomination. Haley is hanging on in the primary race by a thread.

It’s not clear how many of these former Cabinet members will join the stampede within the GOP to endorse Trump now that he’s won the first two nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, especially since he’s been acting like a Mafia don in threatening Republicans who oppose him.

But on the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who was fired by Trump on Nov. 9, 2020, issued this warning about the former president in an interview on CNN.

“I do regard him as a threat to democracy, democracy as we know it, our institutions, our political culture, all those things that make America great and have defined us as, you know, the oldest democracy on this planet,” Esper said.

RELATED STORY: Loyal, angry, and ready to break the law: How Trump plans to staff his Cabinet

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Watch Fox gush over Biden’s economy

News that the U.S. economy grew at a brisk 3.3% annual pace since October wasn't just good: It was great in a lot of ways.

On average, the economy grew a robust 2.5% in 2023—a year in which analysts practically tried to speak a recession into reality. No such luck. In fact, from the fourth quarter of 2022 to the fourth quarter of 2023, the economy grew 3.1%.

The combination of increasing consumption, low unemployment, and falling inflation even had a Fox Business reporter gushing over President Joe Biden's economy.

"It's a sweet spot," remarked Fox Business' Lauren Simonetti, calling consumption "formidable" over the holidays. "We're seeing an economy that is proving resilient—growing as inflation is moderating. That's why I'm calling this the sweet spot, right? Enough growth to cool inflation."

Thank you Dark Brandon! pic.twitter.com/yyE0k4ntWn

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 25, 2024

The New York Times' Paul Krugman likewise dubbed it the "Goldilocks economy," neither too hot nor too cold. And Krugman predicts the country's inflationary woes are now over.

In other words, it continues to look as though the Biden administration is overseeing a "soft landing" for the economy—one that supposedly couldn't be achieved.

Indeed, the University of Michigan's survey of consumer sentiment surged to a reading of 78.8 in January, its highest level since July 2021 and a 21.4% increase from a year ago, according to CNBC. A big driver of that increase stems from consumers’ agreement with Krugman that inflation "has turned the corner," as survey director Joanne Hsu put it.

All of this good news is going to drive an already seething Donald Trump absolutely mad—particularly Fox Business analysts swooning over Biden's economy. The same Fox analyst also promised to scour the report "to see if there are signs that maybe the economy doesn't feel as, or isn't as resilient as it might seem."

Shorter Fox-speak: Stay tuned, Trump. We'll invent bad news one way or another!

For anyone who hasn't noticed, Trump is already getting increasingly erratic on his quest to fabricate bad news for Biden:

  • He's livid over his Republican rival Nikki Haley refusing to drop out of the GOP primary after New Hampshire.

  • He’s strong-arming the Republican National Committee into declaring him the nominee after a grand total of two state contests.

  • He's asking Senate Republicans to torpedo a potential border deal with the White House so he can spend the rest of year fear-mongering over a supposed "invasion" of immigrants spearheaded by Biden.

  • He's pushing House Republicans to impeach Biden so he can rail about Biden's supposed corruption.

  • He's rooting for an economic "crash," hopefully sometime very soon.

  • He's promising "bedlam" in the streets of America if he loses the election (a chaos candidate promising chaos if The People vote against chaos).

  • And he's agitating for full immunity from absolutely any action—including murder—he takes as president.

It's January, folks, and Trump is already coming off the rails despite the fact that he's basically cruising to the Republican nomination.

It's a palpable show of desperation sprung from a place of weakness. Trump knows New Hampshire and Iowa both exposed serious cracks in his general election voting coalition. The turnout and makeup of the electorate in both states suggests he isn't expanding the universe of Republican voters. He's simply culling the party down to a smaller, harder-right faction of the electorate.

In short, Trump's not adding, he's subtracting. And if he's going to ride that smaller slice of the electorate to victory, he's going to need to trash the country in every way possible in order to depress turnout for Biden.

That’s all fine by Trump because the main impetus of his every move is the sheer terror of spending his last living years in a jail cell. If he has to single-handedly unravel the country on his quest for freedom, so be it.

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Democrats are blowing up House GOP efforts to take down Biden

By now, anyone tuning into a House Oversight Committee or House Judiciary Committee hearing knows what to expect. With frequent slams of the gavel by their respective chairs, Republicans plod through repetitive attacks on President Joe Biden or waggle their fingers about some salacious claim including the phrase “Hunter Biden’s laptop.” Democrats try to object and occasionally insert a fact. But the next Republican is at the mic five minutes later, once again hammering the same lies.

At least that’s how it used to be. But anyone who has tuned in recently may have noticed a big change.

Democrats aren’t just tearing Republican arguments apart: They’re derailing hearings and getting their opponents genuinely flustered. The recent hearing in which Republicans intended to charge Hunter Biden with contempt for declining to testify behind closed doors is a good example. Not only did Hunter make a brief personal appearance and offer to testify right then and there in public, but Democrats were able to consistently throw Republicans off their game, blow away false evidence, expose their hypocrisy, and even hammer Donald Trump.

If all that seemed like it took a lot of behind-the-scenes planning, it did. But it won’t be the last time. Because as The Daily Beast reports, Democrats have a plan to make these hearings just as silly as the claims Republicans are making about Biden.

As soon as they gained control of the House in 2023, Republicans launched a series of supposed investigations into President Biden. And his children. And his brother. And anyone else they can lump in to the “Biden Family Investigation.”

For months, Rep. James Comer, who is heading up investigations in the House Oversight Committee, and Rep. Jim Jordan, who has the same role for the House Judiciary Committee, have been releasing false claims and mischaracterizing innocuous issues like a father loaning his son money for a car payment. But Republicans didn’t let having zero evidence stop them from announcing an impeachment inquiry in December.

The investigations have a clear goal: to reduce Biden’s chances of reelection and to signal to Trump that they’re trying to get revenge for his two impeachments. Republicans likely feel like these endless investigations worked well for them before the 2016 elections, when they spent two full years hectoring former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about Benghazi.

But this time around, the whole thing, whether it’s Republicans badgering an art dealer who sold some of Hunter’s paintings, a disappearing informant, or flashing revenge porn on the floor of the House, has been ridiculous from start to finish. The House GOP has been on a year-long fishing expedition featuring a level of obsession that would embarrass Captain Ahab, and they haven’t even found a minnow.

As Republicans ramped up the Biden attacks, Democrats responded. Rep. Jamie Raskin put together a “Truth Squad” that includes Reps. Greg Casar, Jasmine Crockett, Maxwell Frost, Daniel Goldman, and Jared Moskowitz. If some of those names sound familiar, it’s because they’ve been front and center in disrupting Republican plans.

It was Crockett who forcefully kicked off a confrontation with Rep. Nancy Mace who, on a committee where every Republican member is white, accused Hunter Biden and Democrats of engaging in “white privilege.” Crockett forced Mace to try and defend her indefensible remarks, and then Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slammed the gate closed by pointing out how Mace voted to eliminate the House Subcommittee on Civil Rights.

As The Daily Beast article highlights, Moskowitz was on hand with a poster showing a chummy photo of Trump and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein when it seemed that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was going to once again show nude pictures of Hunter Biden. “You come up here and talk about Hunter Biden’s behavior and you’re so disgusted,” said Moskowitz, “but the guy that you all kneel to associates himself with a pedophile.”

Those quick responses, along with Hunter Biden staring down Republicans from the visitor section, became the most viral moments from the hearing. Put together with sharp responses from other Democrats who refused to play Comer’s game, Republicans were left looking like this:

MAGAt House hearing. A picture is worth 1 MILLION words. EVERY hearing Comer has had, has been a disaster. Hunter Biden showed up at the hearing and spooked the MAGAts. Then they got a tongue lashing from @RepRaskin @RepJaredMoskowitz @RepJasmine Comer knew it was a disaster! pic.twitter.com/mRSCu5am0j

— Charm | DEMOCRATS deliver & NO CHAOS! 🇯🇲 💙🌊 (@CharmRobinson3) January 10, 2024

The best thing to come from all this is that Raskin and the Democrats have been joined by a new set of critics attacking Comer and his pointless investigation. As Kerry Eleveld reported earlier, Republicans are none too happy that this absurd “investigation” has gone on so long and come up so dry.

“James Comer continues to embarrass himself and House Republicans. He screws up over and over and over," said a source identified as "close" to House GOP leadership, who appeared to be playing CYA for the leadership team. The source's big fear was that Comer would ultimately fail to provide the foundation necessary (i.e. evidence) to follow through with impeaching Biden.

These anonymous Republicans don’t seem to be seriously considering that maybe Comer is failing not because he’s incompetent (or at least, not only because he’s incompetent) but because Joe Biden did nothing wrong. But then, they are Republicans. They’re used to having leaders whose closets are jam-packed with skeletons.

Republicans are trying to repeat their perceived success with Benghazi, but this time Democrats know the game and they have a plan to disrupt it. That plan isn’t necessarily convincing Republicans that Biden did nothing wrong, but it sure is making these hearings more fun to watch.

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Trump allies ridicule GOP impeachment inquiry for failing to find dirt on Biden

As he closes in on the Republican nomination, Donald Trump needs House Republicans to deliver an equalizer for him in the general election: an impeachment of President Joe Biden.

But after a yearlong investigation led by the House oversight committee chair, Rep. James Comer, Republicans seem no closer to digging up any actionable dirt on Biden. That leads to two conclusions:

  1. If the pro-Trump House GOP conference hasn't found anything on Biden, it's unlikely anything legally actionable exists.

  2. It becomes even more imperative for House Republicans to scrape together something Trump can work with.

After all, when pundits call him the twice-impeached, four-time indictee, Trump has to be able to point at Biden and say he's the one who's really corrupt. Just look at what Congress found on him. It's very reminiscent of Trump attempting to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into opening a bogus investigation into Biden. Only now, Trump has so many legal liabilities, he needs more than just the specter of wrongdoing—he needs the goods. And according to some fascinating reporting from The Messenger's Stephen Neukam, Trump has taken note of the fact that he's currently got nothing on which to spin a corruption narrative.

“Comer has cast a wide net and caught very little fish. That is a big problem for him,” one ally of Trump told The Messenger.

The reporting is informed by more than a dozen anonymous interviews, including a House Republican colleague who calls Comer's inquiry a "parade of embarrassments."

“One would be hard pressed to find the best moment for James Comer in the Oversight Committee,” the GOP lawmaker said.

But in many ways, the leaks seem specifically designed to put Comer on notice that he not only needs to produce, but he'll be singularly on the hook if he doesn't.

“James Comer continues to embarrass himself and House Republicans. He screws up over and over and over," said a source identified as "close" to House GOP leadership, who appeared to be playing CYA for the leadership team. The source's big fear was that Comer would ultimately fail to provide the foundation necessary (i.e. evidence) to follow through with impeaching Biden.

“I don’t know how Republicans actually impeach the president based on [Comer's] clueless investigation and lack of leadership,” said the source.

The quotes had the feel of a failed campaign staff pointing fingers at each other as the ship goes down, only the campaign in this case is the Republican effort to impeach Biden.

Publicly, of course, House leaders are expressing full confidence in Comer.

"I am grateful for the superb efforts of Chairman Comer," Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement, while House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Comer had "worked tirelessly" on the investigation.

But Comer's misfires have become legendary: providing nothing substantive, just a series of accusations and innuendo that don't amount to a hill of beans. In fact, Comer's investigation has become a punch line in the media. As Daily Kos' Mark Sumner wrote in November, Comer had uncovered another "smoking water pistol."

In fact, just last month, CNN's Jake Tapper mocked Comer during a live interview.

Watch only Jake Tapper for the entire 45 seconds of this ridiculous interview with James Comer Pyle. The facial expressions are classic. The GOP deemed THIS guy as their best person to get Joe and Hunter Biden. Republicans embarrass the U.S. daily.pic.twitter.com/eR0jN5odc5

— BigBlueWaveUSA® 🇺🇸🌊🇺🇦 (@BigBlueWaveUSA) December 8, 2023

And when the oversight committee met earlier this month to debate holding Hunter Biden in contempt for refusing to give closed-door testimony, the younger Biden made a laughingstock of House Republicans by staging a surprise press conference in which he volunteered to provide public testimony.

“It seems like they got played by Hunter Biden,” a senior House GOP aide told The Messenger. “It was a disaster. They looked like buffoons.”

To sum up, the boss needs production, Comer has become a national joke, and the House leadership is happily hanging him out to dry.

In response, Comer issued a statement through a spokesperson saying that oversight, along with the Judiciary and Ways and Means committees, are coordinating to "determine whether President Biden's conduct warrants articles of impeachment."

Yeah, that's not gonna cut it.

"You have to start producing," one Trump ally said. "The base is starting to get more and more frustrated with him because they see all this smoke but they don’t see the movement.”

If that sounds like a mob-boss threat, that’s because it is.

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Despite Trump’s current laughable lawyers, his DOJ could be staffed with skilled radicals

Attorney Alina Habba has been widely mocked for her courtroom blunders and behavior as she defends Donald Trump in the business fraud lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James and in E. Jean Carroll’s second defamation trial against the accused rapist.

Former federal prosecutor Ron Filipkowski, who is now editor in chief of the liberal Meidas Touch, had this post on X, formerly known as Twitter:

I’m gonna say you can watch My Cousin Vinny and Legally Blonde back-to-back and you’d be ready to do a better trial than Habba.

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 18, 2024

And “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert said in a monologue earlier this month, “Habba is, to use a bit of legalese, a bad lawyer,” HuffPost reported. He then played a clip from a podcast interview in which Habba, a former fashion executive, said she’d “rather be pretty than smart.” She then added she “can fake being smart.” 

But as Trump has become the first candidate to run a presidential campaign out of a courtroom, Habba has taken on a prominent role in MAGA world by playing the Trump victimization card in numerous interviews on courthouse steps, on Fox News, and other conservative news outlets.

RELATED STORY: How the next Trump-inspired insurrection could unfold and how the administration could respond

And while Trump’s immunity claims may seem a joke, there’s nothing funny regarding the attorney who handled Trump’s appeal seeking immunity from charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith that he conspired to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. The three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is widely expected to reject Trump’s immunity claim.

As Trump sat watching in the courtroom, his attorney, D. John Sauer, in response to questioning from the judges, suggested that even a president directing SEAL Team 6 to kill a political rival would be an action barred from criminal prosecution unless the president was first impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate.

Mother Jones wrote that “it’s hard to overstate the terrifying absurdity of the argument.” But in  social media posts, candidate Trump has argued that presidents deserve complete immunity from prosecution even for acts that “cross the line.” The Atlantic wrote that “Today’s legal argument could very well be next year’s exercise of presidential power.”

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich went even further, stating that “Sauer was arguing for the equivalent of the 1933 Enabling Law in Germany,” which facilitated Adolf Hitler’s success in moving the country from democracy to fascism. That law—approved by the German Parliament in March 1933—gave the new chancellor, Hitler, the power to enact new laws without interference from the president or the parliament for four years.

What’s scary is that unlike Habba, Sauer has a blue-chip legal background. He was a Rhodes scholar and a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School. He served as a law clerk to federal appellate court Judge J. Michael Luttig and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

In 2017, then-Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley appointed Sauer to serve as the state’s solicitor general and he continued to serve in that post under Hawley’s successor, Eric Schmitt, who also was elected to the U.S. Senate. The New York Times wrote:

As Missouri’s solicitor general, Mr. Sauer took part in a last-ditch effort to keep Mr. Trump in power after his defeat in the 2020 election, filing a motion on behalf of his state and five others in support of an attempt by Texas to have the Supreme Court toss out the results of the vote count in several key swing states.

He also joined in an unsuccessful bid with Texas in asking the Supreme Court to stop the Biden administration from rescinding a Trump-era immigration program that forces certain asylum seekers arriving at the southwestern border to await approval in Mexico.

Sauer left the solicitor general’s post in January 2023. He served as a special assistant attorney general for Louisiana’s Department of Justice in a First Amendment lawsuit against Biden administration officials over their contacts with social media platforms about “misinformation.” 

So could Sauer be another politically ambitious conservative lawyer with an Ivy League law degree looking to make an impression on Trump in hopes of securing a top position at the Department of Justice in a second Trump administration? It’s hard to know for sure, as Sauer keeps a low public profile outside the courtroom and shuns media interviews. But it sounds like he would fit right in, according to a November New York Times article on the subject:

Close allies of Donald J. Trump are preparing to populate a new administration with a more aggressive breed of right-wing lawyer, dispensing with traditional conservatives who they believe stymied his agenda in his first term.

The allies have been drawing up lists of lawyers they view as ideologically and temperamentally suited to serve in a second Trump administration. Their aim is to reduce the chances that politically appointed lawyers would frustrate a more radical White House agenda — as they sometimes did when Mr. Trump was in office, by raising objections to his desires for certain harsher immigration policies or for greater personal control over the Justice Department, among others.

The Times said Trump has even become disenchanted with the Federalist Society, the conservative legal network whose members filled key executive branch legal positions when he was last in office. Trump was particularly enraged at White House and Justice Department legal officials who blocked his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

John Mitnick, who was fired by Trump as general counsel of the Homeland Security Department in 2019, told the Times that “no qualified attorneys with integrity will have any desire to serve as political appointees” in a second Trump term.

The Guardian reported that Trump’s former senior adviser Stephen Miller, known for his draconian immigration policy, “is playing a key role in seeking lawyers fully in sync with Trump’s radical agenda to expand his power and curb some major agencies.” The Guardian wrote:

His search is for those with unswerving loyalty to Trump, who could back Trump’s increasingly authoritarian talk about plans to “weaponize” the DoJ against critics, including some he has labeled as “vermin.”

Miller, who is not a lawyer, is president of the MAGA-allied group America First Legal, which has been filing lawsuits against the Biden administration. Miller also sits on the board of Project 2025, an effort led by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups to map authoritarian policy plans for a second Trump administration.

And that brings us to who Trump might choose for attorney general if he makes his way back to the Oval Office. Back in November, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a member of the House Jan. 6 Select Committee, warned in an episode of The Bulwark podcast:

“If he does get through and he wins this time, he's going to interview 100 candidates for attorney general and only take the one that says, 'Mr. President, in essence, I don't care what the Constitution is. I'm going to do whatever you want as your servant at the Department of Justice.'"

And the scary thing is that there is one lawyer who is media savvy, has a blue-chip legal resume, and is a total right-wing monster. His name is Mike Davis.

Tim Miller, a former Republican National Committee spokesperson and Never Trumper, wrote about an interview Davis gave to conservative political commentator Benny Johnson in which Davis discussed what he would do if he were “acting attorney general” for a few weeks in a new Trump term:

But during my three week reign of terror as Trump acting attorney general, before I get chased out of town with my Trump pardon, I will rain hell on Washington, D.C. ... I have five lists, ready to go and they’re growing.

List number one, we’re gonna fire. We’re gonna fire a lot of people in the executive branch, in the deep state.

Number two, we’re gonna indict. We’re gonna indict Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and James Biden and every other scumball, sleazeball, Biden, except for the five year old granddaughter who they refused to acknowledge for five years until the political pressure got to Joe Biden.

Number three, we’re gonna deport. We’re gonna deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing—anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents. We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.

And list number five, I’m gonna recommend a lot of pardons. Every January 6th defendant is gonna get a pardon, especially my hero horn man. He is definitely at the top of the pardon list.

“This is almost comically pathetic chest-beating of a creepy dork,” says Hayes on far-right lawyer Mike Davis. “But again the history of fascism is full of creepy dorks who…used the power of the state to execute their most despicable, violent fantasies.”pic.twitter.com/dRRVhsRKCw

— IT’S TIME FOR JUSTICE (@LiddleSavages) November 22, 2023

In an article for The Bulwark, Miller wrote:

Davis has become an influential voice in MAGA media and activist circles—understandably so, given his crossover appeal as someone who combines legitimate bona fides as a GOP staffer with the incendiary, burn-it-all-down rhetoric that the MAGA base laps up.

And should, God forbid, Trump win a second term, Davis will be emblematic of the type of person who will staff the government. …

Davis’s current gig is spearheading activist groups that fight for right-wing judicial appointments and oppose “Big Tech.” In this role he makes frequent appearances on right-wing media outlets, including primetime Fox and its MAGA competitors (think Real America’s Voice, Newsmax, Bannon’s War Room), where he preaches the Gospel of Trump on issues ranging from the former president’s many indictments to the Biden impeachment.

Davis has an extensive biography on the Federalist Society website. But Miller also exposed Davis’ dark side, including a rant on X about the “violent black underclass” who are “monsters” and should be subjected to “mass incarceration.” He wrote:

Racist demagoguery. Conspiratorial thinking. Promises for retribution against enemies. This is Trump’s stated agenda for 2024. And people like Mike Davis stand ready and willing to execute it.

Davis now heads the Article III Project, which has run ads defending Trump against his four criminal indictments with messages mirroring Trump’s comments that he is a victim of politically motivated prosecutions.

One 60-second digital ad says, “Activist prosecutors and judges have destroyed the rule of law, the scales of justice forever broken and imbalanced. The worst offenders? Those who have weaponized the legal system for political gain against President Trump. Even now they’re resorting to insane legal theories to take him off the ballot,” the ad continues. “They’ve gone after a president of the United States. Do you think they’ll stop there?”

In November, Mehdi Hasan presented an in-depth report on the dangers posed by Davis on MSNBC.

Davis responded to the report and Miller’s Bulwark article with this tasteless post on X that included a homophobic slur. 

😂 Trump’s Dream Team.@mehdirhasan is now on my Lists 2 (indict), 4 (detain), 6 (denaturalize), and 3 (deport). I already have his spot picked out in the DC gulag. But I’ll put him in the women’s cell block, with @Timodc. So these whiny leftists don’t get beat up as often. https://t.co/Ylhb33KVv2

— 🇺🇸 Mike Davis 🇺🇸 (@mrddmia) November 20, 2023

And here’s the kicker: Donald Trump Jr. actually said on his online show “Triggered” in November that he’d actually like to see Davis as attorney general, even on an interim basis, “just to send that shot across the bow of the swamp.”

Donald Trump Jr. says he wants Laura Loomer as White House press secretary and Mike Davis as attorney general; Loomer has described herself as “pro-white nationalism,” Davis says that he wants to enact a “reign of terror” targeting Trump’s enemies. pic.twitter.com/oy3osluVC4

— Media Matters (@mmfa) November 10, 2023

RELATED STORY: Republicans actually published a blueprint for dismantling our democracy. It's called Project 2025

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