It was about a month ago when Republican complaints about their own party’s impeachment crusade against President Joe Biden reached a new level. One GOP official, for example, described the effort as a “parade of embarrassments.”
The assessment was more than fair, though it’s worth appreciating just how long that parade is.
Over the course of a year, Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, and their cohorts have brought in an extraordinary number of witnesses with the hopes that at least one of them would tell GOP investigators what they wanted to hear. Those hopes have been dashed: The witnesses left little doubt that the party’s crusade is without a factual foundation.
Last week, the Republicans’ fiasco reached new depths when the GOP’s star witness — the man at the heart of the party’s case — was arrested for lying to the FBI about the Bidens. Soon after, the public learned that the same witness, Alexander Smirnov, according to a Trump-appointed prosecutor, peddled false claims he received from foreign intelligence officials, including lies from Russia.
This led to a new round of calls for Republicans to simply bring their debacle to a close, which GOP officials ignored. In fact, instead of moving on to actual work, congressional Republicans shifted their focus to an entirely new witness. The headline from the conservative Washington Times read, “Jason Galanis places Joe Biden at center of Hunter Biden’s China, Russia business deals.”
New jailhouse testimony from a former Biden family business associate details at least two calls between Hunter Biden and his father, then the vice president, about lucrative business deals with China and Russia. One of the calls puts Mr. Biden in contact with a Russian oligarch and former mayor of Moscow.
Yes, we’re apparently supposed to believe that GOP officials have finally found a witness who claimed that Hunter Biden connected his father to Russian officials in 2014.
The word that stood out in the Times’ report that stood out, however, was “jailhouse.”
As it turns out, Jason Galanis, the witness that House Republicans are apparently excited about, is a convicted felon currently serving a lengthy prison sentence for having perpetrated frauds.
He’s the guy Jordan is suddenly excited about.
In fact, as it turns out, the GOP officials hoping to impeach the incumbent president keep turning to people with unfortunate run-ins with the criminal justice system. Last summer, for example, we learned that House Republicans relied on dubious claims from someone named Gal Luft, who’s been charged with being an unregistered agent for China, trying to broker secret arms deals, violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, and lying to federal agents.
That, of course, was before the party hyped discredited claims from Smirnov, who’s currently behind bars, charged with lying to the FBI about the Bidens, and then also hyped claims from Galanis, who’s already a convicted felon, after having been caught perpetrating frauds.
In other words, broadly speaking, the Republicans who are desperate to impeach Biden — without a shred of evidence of wrongdoing — have turned to two groups of witnesses. One group is filled with people who told them the president didn’t do anything wrong. The other group is filled with suspected or convicted criminals with credibility problems.
The editorial board of The Washington Post published a piece last week with a message for Comer and Jordan: “Giving up is the right answer. … Congress’s attempt to punish President Biden for Hunter Biden’s poor decisions was always weak. Now, it has utterly collapsed.”
A week later, it’s a message that continues to resonate.
