House Oversight Committee ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin laid out why the House Republican investigation of President Biden has been an epic flop.
Rep. Raskin (D-MD) said in a statement provided to PoliticusUSA:
By August 2021, in the first six months of the 117th Congress, House Democrats had helped kickstart our nation’s economy with the American Rescue Plan and passed a budget with historic investments in working families. We went on to pass legislation to reduce drug and energy costs, address the climate crisis, bring jobs back to America, and rebuild our country’s infrastructure with groundbreaking laws like the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Even in the first six months of the 116th Congress, when Donald Trump was in the White House, the House Democratic Majority delivered meaningful reform for the American people by working across the aisle to pass more than 20 bills that were signed into law, including funding to end a 35-day government shutdown caused by Trump and congressional Republicans, legislation to help veterans and victims of natural disasters, and landmark enactments preserving public lands for future generations.
By contrast, the first MAGA-directed Congress is by far the most reckless and least productive in decades. After holding the American economy hostage by threatening to default on America’s financial obligations, House Republicans are now eagerly pushing the government to the brink of a shutdown. Instead of working on legislation to promote the common good or even just keep the government running, House Republicans are weaponizing their offices and exploiting congressional power and resources to promote debunked and outlandish conspiracy theories about President Biden. This is a transparent effort to boost Donald Trump’s campaign by establishing a false moral equivalency between Trump—the four time-indicted former president now facing 91 federal and state criminal charges, based on a mountain of damning evidence for a shocking range of felonies, including lying to the FBI, endangering national security by illegally keeping classified documents, and conspiring to subvert the U.S. Constitution—and President Biden, against whom there is precisely zero evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever. To the contrary, Chairman Comer’s investigation has conclusively disproven the Republican allegations against President Biden.
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House Republicans constantly insist that they are investigating President Biden and not his adult son. 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. Rather than admit this unavoidable truth about their failed investigation, House Republicans have mischaracterized, cherry-picked, and concealed evidence and recycled long debunked conspiracy theories originally peddled by Rudy Giuliani and Trump, all in humiliating subservience to Donald Trump’s petulant demand that they impeach President Biden.
In the face of Republicans’ shameful perversion of congressional power and misuse of taxpayer dollars for this hopeless wild goose chase, Committee Democrats will continue to defend the truth, the rule of law, and the integrity of our Constitution and democratic institutions.
House Republicans Have Come Up With No Evidence Against Biden
Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) has no evidence that President Biden did anything wrong. Comer has accused Biden of bribery but has no evidence that the President received any money. Comer has accused Biden of obstructing his investigation, but the evidence shows that entities like the National Archives have been cooperating with investigative requests.
Rep. Comer has spent months investigating the President’s son, who is not in government and doesn’t work for the administration in any way. Millions of dollars of taxpayer money have been spent on investigations that have turned up nothing.
Speaker McCarthy is going to move forward with Biden impeachment because that is what Trump and his MAGA followers in the House want, but the investigation has been an embarrassing failure and an exercise in the abuse of power that will likely do nothing to help Trump in 2024.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
