Representative Jamie Raskin absolutely destroyed the Republican effort to impeach Joe Biden on Wednesday, describing the somehow still ongoing inquiry as “the most spectacular failure in the history of congressional investigations.”
The House Oversight Committee is hearing testimony Wednesday from Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s onetime work partner with a history of shady business dealings, and Jason Galanis, who is testifying via video call from a federal prison where he is serving a 14-year prison sentence for financial fraud. Republicans claim both men can prove the Biden family is guilty of corruption, despite the fact that Hunter says he and Galanis only met once.
“With any luck, today marks the end of perhaps the most spectacular failure in the history of congressional investigations: the effort to find a high crime or misdemeanor committed by Joe Biden and then to impeach him for it,” Raskin, the ranking Oversight member, said in his opening statement. As he spoke, one of his aides held up a poster with quotes from the right-wing outlets Fox News and the Washington Examiner acknowledging that the impeachment investigation has turned up no proof.
Raskin described some of the “hilarious episodes” in Republicans’ “long-running madcap series,” including almost all of the GOP’s supposed “star” witnesses stating that the president had not been involved in his family’s business dealings. Lawmakers also combed through tens of thousands of pages of financial documents but were unable to find proof of Biden’s wrongdoing.
Over the course of the investigation, Raskin noted, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene waved Hunter Biden’s nude photos around during a hearing (and may have emailed them to minors). One of the GOP’s primary witnesses, Gal Luft, has been charged with acting as a foreign agent for China and as an arms dealer. And Alexander Smirnov, the former FBI informant who accused the Biden’s of accepting bribes, jumpstarting the entire investigation, is currently imprisoned in California for fabricating the entire allegation. Smirnov has even admitted that he was fed the story by a Russian intelligence officer.
“The comedy of errors comes crashing to an end, as House Republicans in more than a dozen Biden districts beg for mercy and the Committee throws a flabby Hail Mary pass three weeks after the Super Bowl is over,” Raskin said.
Raskin absolutely demolishes the entire Republican impeachment push in just over 2 minutes pic.twitter.com/zTkD5JmmHU
Although Oversight Chair James Comer and Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, who have spearheaded the charge against Biden, remain gung-ho about the investigation, other Republicans have begun to sour on it. In fact, Representative Ken Buck, the one Republican willing to openly oppose the impeachment inquiry, will leave Congress at the end of this week in large part because of the investigation.
“We’ve taken impeachment and we’ve made it a social media issue as opposed to a constitutional concept,” Buck said last week when he announced his retirement. “This place just keeps going downhill, and I don’t need to spend my time here.”
Once again, Donald Trump wants everyone to know he is totally not worried about money—especially not the $454 million judgment stemming from his New York bank fraud trial that the self-purported billionaire can’t seem to muster the money for.
“These baseless innuendos are pure bullshit,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement on Tuesday, referring to a CNN segment that reported the GOP presidential nominee was looking to sell his New York properties—and fast.
“President Trump has filed a motion to stay the unjust, unconstitutional, un-American judgment from New York Judge Arthur Engoron in a political Witch Hunt brought by a corrupt Attorney General,” Cheung continued. “A bond of this size would be an abuse of the law, contradict bedrock principals [sic] of our Republic, and fundamentally undermine the rule of law in New York.”
But Cheung’s insistence that Trump isn’t trying to get rid of his properties just doesn’t seem to jive with what Trump himself is saying, and what seems to be keeping him up at night. On Tuesday, the former president was online in the early morning hours, complaining that he’d have to sell his properties at “fire sale prices” to cover the disgorgement.
“I would be forced to mortgage or sell Great Assets, perhaps at Fire Sale prices, and if and when I win the Appeal, they would be gone. Does that make sense? WITCH HUNT. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” he wrote on TruthSocial.
So far, Trump has tried and failed to pause the rapidly growing interest, counter-offering the court a $100 million bond in lieu of the full amount. He has also approached several brokers and several dozen suretors for help securing a bond. That, however, didn’t work out for him, according to a filing by Trump’s attorneys, who admitted that suretors refused to accept Trump’s real estate as collateral. Instead, they would only accept cash to the tune of $1 billion, which Trump said he and his businesses just don’t have. All in all, a curious turn of events for a man who claimed during a deposition last year that he had “substantially in excess of 400 million in cash” which was “going up very substantially every month.”
Earlier this month, Trump bragged to Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade that he has “a lot of money” and that he doesn’t “worry about money.” But for all his posturing, Trump is quickly running out of time. The former president has until Monday to come up with nearly half a billion dollars before he’s legally allowed to appeal the case.
From Stormy Daniels’s perspective, there was one obvious reason to accept the hush-money payment from Donald Trump: take it, or be killed.
The danger posed by Trump and his associates in the aftermath of their affair was clear for the adult film star, whose problems with Trump began in 2006 when he slept with her after dangling a potential spot on The Celebrity Apprentice. Soon after, Trump sent his former fixer, Michael Cohen, to pay her $130,000........