House Republicans face challenge of arguing Hunter Biden and DOJ corruption cases to public
Sarah Bedford
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After six months of casting a wide investigative net into the weaponization of government, GOP lawmakers conducting oversight find themselves armed with more answers, and still more questions, than they can fully lay out for the public to assess.
It’s created an embarrassment of riches, so to speak, for Republicans looking to back up claims about the federal government that they’ve been making for years.
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From hundreds of pages of new evidence in former special counsel John Durham’s report to hourslong transcribed interviews with IRS whistleblowers to testimony from a former top FBI official on the Trump documents investigation, Republicans on key committees have faced a deluge of information over the past several weeks that has at times come so quickly as to bump the previous revelation out of the spotlight.
With a hearing featuring FBI Director Chris Wray on the horizon, GOP lawmakers have a unique challenge: making their complex web of investigations comprehensible and compelling to an average voter who might not yet know the full story.
House Republicans have amassed significant evidence that the Department of Justice handled the Hunter Biden investigation improperly, and they’ve opened up lines of inquiry into an array of other alleged instances of misconduct involving the DOJ.
Those include the FBI’s designation of parents protesting at school board meetings as potential threats, the FBI’s push to infiltrate Catholic parishes in search of suspicious activity, and the Justice Department’s aggressive approach to prosecuting former President Donald Trump relative to other figures accused of similar offenses.
The result is a narrative about Justice Department corruption with too many twists, each supported by varying levels of evidence, spanning several years, and involving too many characters to be told succinctly.
“I think what they need to do is just focus on the substance of the investigation, narrow it, and then make sure every investigation goes back to Joe Biden,” said one former senior congressional aide involved in oversight, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.
“They’ve got a lot of different angles,” the former aide said. “And if I’m them, the most potent angle right now that I would focus on is the stuff that [House Oversight Committee Chair James] Comer and [Sen. Chuck] Grassley [R-IA] uncovered.”
After hearing from an anonymous FBI whistleblower, Comer and Grassley together pressured the FBI to share a document that laid out an alleged bribery scheme involving Hunter Biden, his father, and the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat while his father was vice president.
They have spent weeks demanding to know how seriously, if at all, the Justice Department investigated the bribery allegation, as well as other alleged attempts by Hunter Biden to earn money overseas by illegal forms of influence peddling.
Three GOP committee chairs sent a letter to the Biden administration on Thursday requesting testimony from nearly a dozen officials across the IRS, Justice Department, and Secret Service.
The requests seemingly focused on just one alleged episode in the Hunter Biden saga: the allegations that the U.S. attorney in Delaware, appointed by Trump and held over by Attorney General Merrick Garland for the sake of appearing unbiased, had been denied permission to charge the president’s son in two districts overseen by Biden appointees.
But overall, the number of officials, witnesses, and Biden associates involved in the story creates additional challenges in terms of storytelling.
There’s Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who Republicans want to interview because he denied facing hurdles to bringing charges against Hunter Biden, contrary to what at least two whistleblowers claimed.
There’s Leslie Wolf, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Delaware office who whistleblowers said obstructed elements of the investigation at times, including by tipping off Hunter Biden’s team to investigators’ upcoming moves.
There are FBI agents Tom Socinski and Ryeshia Holley, who were said to have attended a meeting in which Weiss laid out how Biden appointees had blocked his ability to charge Hunter Biden for more serious crimes.
There’s California U.S. Attorney E. Martin Estrada and Washington, D.C., U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves, who whistleblowers said blocked Weiss’s ability to charge Hunter Biden.
Gary Shapley is an IRS agent who came to Congress with allegations of political interference in the investigation. Steven D’Antuono was a former FBI agent who told the House Judiciary Committee about the Justice Department’s decision to overrule the concerns of FBI agents in the Trump documents case and pursue a raid far more aggressive than any executed against a Biden.
Mykola Zlochevsky is the Ukrainian energy executive accused of paying millions of dollars to the Biden family in exchange for favorable treatment. Henry Zhao is the Chinese businessman who Hunter Biden threatened, in a message revealed by Shapley, with retaliation from his father in 2017.
And the list of people of interest goes on.
Other blockbuster congressional investigations have had the benefit of being relatively simple, allowing lawmakers to make a more clear-cut case to the public.
In the IRS targeting investigation of 2013 and 2014, for example, the allegations were straightforward: Tax agency officials discriminated against conservative groups applying for nonprofit status. The story had a clear villain, former IRS official Lois Lerner, and multiple committees surfaced evidence to support the allegations.
The Jan. 6 committee used television producers, slick multimedia presentations, and carefully-orchestrated hearings set in prime time to sell its narrative.
GOP-controlled House committees, namely the Oversight Committee and Judiciary Committee, face the daunting task of boiling down the complicated issues of Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, the Justice Department’s alleged refusal to investigate those dealings, the DOJ’s aggressive treatment of Trump relative to Biden on classified documents, the question of whether U.S. attorneys appointed by Joe Biden refused to allow Hunter Biden to be charged on the evidence that investigators did manage to collect, and a host of other threads into a narrative the average viewer can digest.
Without the face of a singular antagonist and without the privilege of a simple storyline, House Republicans have at times struggled to message their investigations effectively.
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That has begun to change in recent weeks; more and more GOP lawmakers have focused on decrying the “two-tiered system of justice” they say began during the Trump administration and has continued under Joe Biden.
But polls suggest the cases have had little impact on how voters view the president, and in the absence of a coordinated partywide message, much of the corporate media have found ways thus far to dismiss or ignore the individual threads of evidence uncovered by congressional Republicans.