As House Republicans gear up to impeach President Joe Biden, Rep. Jamie Raskin has released a thorough statement debunking the supposed basis for an impeachment.

“House Republicans constantly insist that they are investigating President Biden, and not his adult son,” Raskin said in the statement. He continued:

In that case, we can form an obvious judgment on their investigation:  it has been a complete and total bust—an epic flop in the history of congressional investigations.  The voluminous evidence they have gathered, including thousands of pages of bank records and suspicious activity reports and hours of testimony from witnesses, overwhelmingly demonstrates no wrongdoing by President Biden and further debunks Republicans’ conspiracy theories.

Fear not: Raskin has the receipts. Among the 12,000 pages of subpoenaed bank records, more than 2,000 pages of suspicious activity reports, and multiple witnesses interviewed, including two former business associates of Hunter Biden, Republicans have found:

• No bank records showing payments to the president.

• No suspicious activity reports alleging potential misconduct by the president or that he is involved in his son’s business dealings.

• No witnesses testifying to misconduct by the president.

But none of that has stopped Republicans like House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer from claiming that the opposite is true. “We’ve got a President of the United States who’s taken millions and millions of dollars from bad people and bad countries around the world,” Comer has claimed, according to Raskin’s statement, even though Comer has no actual evidence of that.

In fact, as Raskin shows, lots of Republicans know Comer hasn’t found anything meaningful. Here are just a few examples:

• Breitbart editor Emma Jo-Morris criticized Chairman Comer for promoting bribery allegations against President Biden even though he has “not shown [proof] to the public,” while Steve Bannon also lambasted Chairman Comer for failing to provide evidence to support his bribery allegations, saying of Chairman Comer, “You’re not serious.  It’s all performative.” [...]

• Rep. Don Bacon acknowledged that Republicans have failed to prove any wrongdoing by President Biden, “If you wanna get any progress in the Senate, you’re gonna have to show not potential wrongdoing, but wrongdoing.  I don’t think we’re there yet.”  Rep. Bacon also said that he thinks “we need to have more concrete evidence to go down” the impeachment inquiry path.

• Sen. Ron Johnson conceded that Republicans have not found any “direct evidence” or “hard proof” of wrongdoing by President Biden.  [...]

• Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said, “I don’t know what the basis of this call for impeachment is. It just sounds like a lot of noise to me.”  Sen. Capito also responded "I do not" when asked if she thinks there is evidence to support an impeachment.

• Sen. Mitt Romney acknowledged, “I haven’t seen any evidence” that meets the “constitutional test for impeachment.” [...]

• An anonymous GOP lawmaker offered the following assessment to CNN:  “There’s no evidence that Joe Biden got money, or that Joe Biden, you know, agreed to do something so that Hunter could get money.  There’s just no evidence of that.  And they can’t impeach without that evidence.  And I don’t I don’t think the evidence exists.”

It goes on. Those are six of the 19 bullet points Raskin assembles to show that even many prominent Republicans don’t think Comer has assembled enough evidence to impeach Biden.

The problem is, Fox News will always give Comer a platform to lie about what his own investigations have found. That’s the plan to impeach Biden: Yell again and again that he has taken millions of dollars in illicit payoffs, and rely on those claims to make headlines while the truth is reported as an afterthought. This is a challenge for the media (or the non-right-wing media, anyway): Report on House Republican claims with the truth first and foremost, and make clear the fact that their lies are lies from the start. So far, it’s not doing so hot. When House Republicans move forward with impeachment, the traditional media is going to need to raise its game.

Sign the petition: No more wasted taxpayer money on frivolous GOP hearings.

Why does it seem like Republicans have such a hard time recruiting Senate candidates who actually live in the states they want to run in? We're discussing this strange but persistent phenomenon on this week's edition of "The Downballot." The latest example is former Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, who's been spending his time in Florida since leaving the House in 2015, but he's not the only one. Republican Senate hopefuls in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Montana, and Wisconsin all have questionable ties to their home states—a problem that Democrats have gleefully exploited in recent years. (Remember Dr. Oz? Of course you do.)