Everyone Is Praying for the End (of the Biden Impeachment Inquiry)
Plus: What Mike Pence’s brother thinks of his refusal to back Trump.
One of the major agenda items for Republicans once they secured the majority in the 118th Congress was the task of finding something—anything—to formally impeach President Joe Biden for. (His real “high crime or misdemeanor” was beating Donald Trump in an election.) Their impeachment effort began as a rushed process and turned into a long and haphazard slog. Now almost everyone on Capitol Hill and beyond is wondering just when and how the hell this thing is going to end.
When House Republicans launched their formal impeachment inquiry, their first public hearing on Hunter Biden’s activities completely and embarrassingly flopped, landing Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) in the doghouse and forcing him to shift the committee’s work underground through closed-door depositions and testimony. But while this move provided some cover from public scrutiny and allowed Comer & co. to selectively and misleadingly leak dribbles from these depositions, even this strategy failed to give the inquiry more force or authority: The leaks were either relatively trivial or they were debunked soon after release, leading to even more embarrassment for Comer. Eventually, the GOP-led inquiry’s content-creation strategy began serving as a real-time self-debunking operation. It turns out that fishing expeditions are quite hard when there’s nothing in the lake.
The most recent public hearing, the first the committee has held in quite some time, produced results that any reader of this newsletter will have expected: multiple claims of wrongdoing against Biden proved baseless amid shouting between mutually antagonistic committee members.
One entertaining surprise, though, came when Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) called his GOP colleagues’ bluff: