House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer should be celebrating. After all, he got what he wanted for Christmas on Wednesday when the House, in a party-line vote, handed him a no-evidence-required impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. Considering that all Comer has done since he took control of the committee is sift through the bank accounts of Biden family members, their friends, families of their friends, and friends of those friends, the House bill might as well have been stuffed straight into his … stocking.
But in an interview with Fox News on Thursday morning, Comer seemed more than a bit depressed. First, when asked about his best evidence that Biden might have done something wrong, Comer didn’t mention anything that he had come up with in his months of scanning bank accounts and going through over 100,000 documents. Instead, he repeated false claims that Rudy Giuliani brought back from Ukraine in 2019. Lies that were almost immediately debunked and that were thoroughly discredited again during Donald Trump’s first impeachment.
Fox News host Maria Bartiromo first asked Comer about an Associated Press story concerning his shell company, a piece of property that’s kept in his wife’s name, and some extremely shady connections. Comer insisted that the Associated Press is financially illiterate because this isn’t a shell company at all. It’s a land speculation LLC. Totally different thing.
Daily Kos has covered Comer’s not-a-shell-company before, including a series of land swaps among his family that definitely seem less than above board.
Much of Comer’s business activity seems to follow inheriting land in Kentucky following his father’s death in 2019. But exactly what happened with that land is the opposite of transparent. In one case, Comer reportedly sold his interest in a piece of land to his brother, then bought it back five months later, slipping his brother $18,000 in the process. That purchase ran through a shell company owned by Comer, the value of which doubled in two years. That company appears to have dealt exclusively with agricultural land deals at a time when Comer was on the House Agriculture Committee.
Of course, we did use the term “shell company.” Comer wants to pretend it’s not a shell company, because it controls all of six acres, so it has assets. But those six acres (now five, since one acre has since been sold off) are only a small fraction of the value that runs through this shell company.
But Comer’s ridiculous claims and finger-pointing at Biden seems to satisfy Bartiromo, who then turned to an even more critical question.
“Do you think that this is the media trying to begin to muddy up Republicans,” asked the Fox host, “or continue to muddy up Republicans because you are getting so close to your target that you have actually been able to release all this evidence on the Biden family? That now the White House is maybe calling media to try and plant these stories?”
Comer was quick to not just agree but to elaborate on this conspiracy theory. “It comes from the White House. They have their own war room. They have two dozen people we’re paying tax dollars in there so they can attack the investigators.”
Comer went on to complain about the media attacking him and Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. “This is the biggest public corruption scandal of my lifetime,” Comer said.
Things are so bad that Comer is even afraid to go on “Fox & Friends.” According to The Hill, Comer declared that he wouldn’t return to the show after co-anchor Steve Doocy said that Comer’s investigation had “got a lot of ledgers and spreadsheets, but they have not connected the dots.” Which is the truth. But then, Comer’s relationship with the truth is like the connection between vampires and sunlight.
And after all, it’s not as if Comer has ever done anything wrong. Such as sending this note to a legitimate whistleblower seeking to report sexual abuse when Comer was in the Kentucky legislature.
