Here Comes the “Biden Kill List”
House Oversight Chair James Comer implies his “informant” might have been killed by the Bidens.
JAMES COMER, THE REPUBLICAN WHO CHAIRS the House Oversight Committee, has been widely mocked for claiming during a Sunday interview with not-yet-fired Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo that the “informant” in his committee’s investigation of the Biden family’s business dealings went “missing,” hampering Republicans’ ability to drop the long-promised “bombshell” evidence.
While this dung-faced performance merited all the mockery it has received, those of us whose sonar is more closely calibrated to the fainter sound waves of the conservative media world caught something more sinister in the congressman’s subtext.
Here’s the transcript, see if you can catch it:
Nine of the ten people that we’ve identified that have very good knowledge with respect to the Bidens, they are one of three things, Maria. They are either currently in court, they’re currently in jail, or they’re currently missing. So, it’s of the utmost importance that the FBI work with us to be able to try to identify what research they’ve done, what investigations they’ve done, because we have people that wanna come forward but honestly, Maria, they fear for their lives.
People mysteriously missing. Others fearing for their lives.
Why exactly? What evidence is there that anyone needs to be worried or that foul play is afoot? It’s not clear.
And yet here we have a GOP committee chairman strongly implying that the Biden family’s intimidation tactics might even go so far as to result in death.
After the Comer interview, Bartiromo asked another guest, the national conservative writer Josh Hammer, to react to these claims, which she described as “chilling.” Hammer says ominously, “Maria, what is actually going on here? You and I both know exactly what is going on here” before laying into a diatribe about how the “Biden Crime Family” and “everyone at the top” of the intelligence community are “pulling out all the stops imaginable” to protect the president. The Washington Examiner followed with a credulous report on Comer accusing the White House of “intimidation.”
For conservative media consumers what Bartiromo et al. are trying to get across is unmistakable. It is part of a long history of vague and not-so-vague accusations that Democratic political elites and the Deep State are willing to go so far as murder in order to silence whistleblowers who might harm the Democratic Party. This tactic was employed most notably against the Clintons with the “Kill List” rumormongering in the 1990s. In the last decade, it was most prominent in the slander surrounding the Seth Rich murder in 2016.
That this was not missed by its intended audience is clear by the response you can see in certain corners of the MAGA internet.
Charlie Kirk, misunderstanding Comer, tweeted about how 9 of the 10 informants are missing, which Kirk also calls “chilling.”1
Patriot News Network headlines it “Huge: Biden Family Crime Informant Has Gone Missing!”
On Truth Social the notion that the informant was “Epsteined” and that he or she might be dead was spread by various accounts.
I asked Rep. Comer’s office if they intended to imply that Biden allies or the Deep State might be resorting to physical violence to silence whistleblowers. I haven’t yet heard back as of this writing, but will update here if I do.
THIS COMES IN THE WAKE of another story last week that you would have seen only in the MAGA media bubble: Tara Reade, who during the 2020 campaign accused Biden of having sexually harassed her years earlier, suggesting that Biden might try to have her killed. “If something happens to me, all roads lead to Joe Biden,” she tweeted. “I am not suicidal.”
Reade’s bizarre tweet garnered over 20,000 retweets and widespread coverage in conservative media.
“If something happens to me…Biden accuser posts bone-chilling message” was the headline in Conservative Brief, which was shared on Twitter by Chuck Woolery, the conservative crank and former Love Connection host. “Tara Reade fears assassination attempt? All roads lead to Joe Biden” screamed American Action News. Bongino, Rebel News, Breitbart—they all sang from the same hymn book.
Fox News went even further, leading with “Biden accuser Tara Reade posts cryptic message about death” and tying her hallucinatory ravings to the arrest of another supposed whistleblower in Cyprus.
The cryptic message was posted after Dr. Gal Luft, a co-director of a Washington D.C.-based think tank, claimed he was arrested in an effort to stop him from revealing information about the Biden family.
"I’ve been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated extradition request by the U.S. The U.S., claiming I’m an arms dealer. It would be funny if it weren’t tragic. I’ve never been an arms dealer," Luft tweeted on Feb. 18.
He added: "DOJ is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim, and Hunter Biden. Shall I name names?"
The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone reported on Luft’s case earlier this year; he has since skipped out on his court hearing. We reached out to Luft’s lawyer, who declined to comment on his client’s whereabouts or confirm or deny whether Luft is the missing informant Comer referenced.
But the bigger question is: Why was Luft’s case included in this story about Reade’s tweet, exactly?
The only connection between Reade’s paranoid delusions and this fugitive alleged arms dealer seems to be the desire to advance a conspiracy that the Biden family might possibly be on a killing spree.
Fox pairs them without evincing a scintilla of skepticism, knowing that their audience, trained on decades of Vince Foster nonsense, will be able to pick up what they are putting down.
I suspect the closer we get to 2024 the more blatant these baseless insinuations will become.
You might notice the word “chilling” comes up a lot in this piece. It seems to be the go-to jargon for the Just Asking Questions crowd. They aren’t saying anyone got murdered. They are just saying that they are getting a Big Chill from the possibility.