As Donald Trump uses the National Prayer Breakfast for its traditional role—declaring vengeance on enemies—Republicans in Congress want to make sure they remain on the good side of the pharaoh. Two Republican senators have now announced that they will be laying their offerings on the altar in the form of a completely pointless investigation of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
Apparently cranking up the Senate impeachment trial into an assault on Trump’s perceived enemies was insufficient. The not-a-trial offered up posters featuring the name of the intelligence community whistleblower, repeated claims about everyone who so much as read the Mueller report, and continued smears of dedicated members of the State Department for expressing concern about actions that were both illegal and threatening to national security.
But Republicans know that if they want to save their own necks, they need to put some heads on those pikes.
The Washington Post reports that Republicans Charles Grassley and Ron Johnson have already begun digging through documents from the Secret Service to find some hint that Joe Biden’s trips to Ukraine might have overlapped with his son’s visits to the country. Or that the two of them might have met elsewhere … because what could be more suspicious than a father willingly spending time with his son for non-business purposes? It’s certainly not a problem that afflicts Trump. This report follows a letter issued last week in which Grassley and Johnson called on William Barr to get right onto investigating Joe Biden for carrying out the orders of the U.S. government.
Grassley, who voted to remove Bill Clinton after giving a lengthy speech about the importance of protecting the government from any whiff of wrongdoing, didn’t even consider asking for so much as a witness against Trump. But Johnson’s level of hypocrisy in this event may be record breaking.
Not only has Johnson been deeply involved in the Ukraine plot from the beginning, including spreading rumors against Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and urging that she be dismissed, but he was one of those who signed a bipartisan letter in 2016 calling for the removal of the same corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor who Republicans are now treating as champion unfairly removed.
Not only was the removal of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin a bipartisan request for senators looking at corruption in Ukraine, it was a request made by both the International Monetary Fund and prosecutors in the U.K. specifically because Shokin refused to go after companies whose actions appeared to be violating international law—including Burisma. Shokin was not investigating Burisma, the company where Hunter Biden worked. That fact has been confirmed both by Ukrainian records and statements from Shokin himself. By removing Shokin, Biden was actually raising the possibility that a new, less-corrupt prosecutor might actually follow through and do an investigation. Far from protecting his son’s job, Biden’s actions put that job at risk.
None of that matters. Because Grassley and Johnson aren’t interested in finding the truth. They’re not even interested in finding useful slander—Republicans just make that stuff up themselves these days. The “investigation” into Joe Biden exists only to show that Grassley and Johnson are good followers of Trump, with not a hint of dignity or character. In other words, perfect senators.
