A government shutdown is just days away, a bipartisan solution is ready in the Senate, and Republicans in the House aren’t even close to coming up with an answer as Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy gives in over and over to the most extreme elements of his extreme party. It’s clear that with time running out and McCarthy utterly unable to deliver anything even close to a solution, urgent steps need to be taken.
Like making up a new Hunter Biden scandal.
That’s where things are on Wednesday morning. Because surely Americans won’t notice hundreds of thousands of furloughed workers, closed national parks, a military going without pay, and critical government services being shut down when they can understand that Hunter Biden once got a loan. And that in getting that loan he listed his actual legal address.
No, seriously. That’s the scandal.
Last night, McCarthy took a break from demonstrating his origami-like ability to fold to any demand from the people who never wanted him as speaker in the first place to bring America breaking news from one of three ongoing Republican investigations into President Joe Biden’s son.
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That big “discovery” by Rep. James Comer concerned two transfers that have been known about from the outset because they were in bank records. The only thing that changed was that someone bothered to look at the routing information and discovered that the official address listed on the wire transfers was the Wilmington, Delaware, home of Joe Biden. Republicans are treating this as if it’s smoking-gun evidence that Biden took money from China. With Comer’s House Oversight Committee handily providing a breakdown that repeatedly says things like “wired $250,000 with Joe Biden’s home listed on the wire.”
However, according to a statement from Hunter Biden’s attorney to CNN, the whole big revelation “evaporates in thin air the moment facts come out.”
First, the money that Hunter Biden received was a documented loan secured through equity from an investment he had made two years earlier. Second, it went to the Wilmington address because that was Hunter Biden’s legal address. Hunter Biden’s attorney made clear that this was “the address on his driver’s license, his parents’ address, because it was his only permanent address at the time.”
As Republicans have made clear, these wires have been confirmed by banks. Confirmed as in they went to Hunter Biden’s account, not to Joe Biden’s. Just because the Wilmington address was on the transfers, that doesn’t even mean Joe Biden was aware they had occurred. It’s not as if a truck full of cash backed up to his home—no matter how Republicans want it to seem. These were wire transfers that moved numbers between accounts. That Hunter Biden used his legal address on these transfers is completely reasonable and doesn’t in any way tie them to the president.
As Hunter Biden’s attorney stated to CNN, “We expect more occasions where the Republican chairs twist the truth to mislead people to promote their fantasy political agenda.”
But it’s hard to blame McCarthy for retreating so far into fantasy when the reality of how badly he is managing his job is so hard to face.
