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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Late Night Open Thread: Jim Comer Is Cornered

Late Night Open Thread: Jim Comer Is Cornered

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Some people say Abbe Lowell is maybe a little *too* good at defending dubious clients, but if the Repubs had the sense to pay and/or listen to their own lawyers, maybe they’d get better advice:

Hunter Biden is open to testifying publicly before the Republican-led House Oversight Committee on Dec. 13, his lawyer said in a letter sent to the panel Tuesday.

House Republicans subpoenaed the president’s son early this month and summoned him to appear for a closed-door transcribed interview as part of an escalation of Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into the president.

“We have seen you use closed-door sessions to manipulate, even distort the facts and misinform the public. We therefore propose opening the door,” his lawyer Abbe Lowell said in a letter Tuesday to Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky.

Comer pushed back at Lowell’s letter in a statement Tuesday morning on X: “Hunter Biden is trying to play by his own rules instead of following the rules required of everyone else. That won’t stand with House Republicans.”…

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the ranking member of the Oversight Committee, issued a scathing statement in response, saying Comer’s statement shows that “what the Republicans fear most is sunlight and truth.”

“Let me get this straight. After wailing and moaning for ten months about Hunter Biden and alluding to some vast unproven family conspiracy, after sending Hunter Biden a subpoena to appear and testify, Chairman Comer and the Oversight Republicans now reject his offer to appear before the full Committee and the eyes of the world and to answer any questions that they pose?” Raskin said.


Good for Rep. Raskin:

Raskin decried the panel’s first hearing in the GOP’s impeachment inquiry in September as a “miserable failure” and criticized Comer for dismissing Hunter Biden’s offer to testify publicly.

“Chairman Comer has now apparently decided to avoid all Committee hearings where the public can actually see for itself the logical, rhetorical and factual contortions they have tied themselves up in,” he said. “The evidence has shown time and again President Biden has committed no wrongdoing, much less an impeachable offense. Chairman Comer’s insistence that Hunter Biden’s interview should happen behind closed doors proves it once again.”

Comer is leading the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden in conjunction with House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo.

In his letter, Lowell rebuked Republicans for their subpoenas focusing on the Biden family’s business dealings, which were issued after Comer requested thousands of bank records connected to Hunter Biden and the president’s brother James Biden, as well as other members of their family and several business associates.

“Your Committee has been working for almost a year—without success—to tie our client’s business activities to his father. You state that one of your purposes is to review how a President’s family’s business activities raise ethics and disclosure concerns to inform the basis for a legislative solution,” Lowell wrote. “But all your focus has been on this President’s family while turning a blind eye toward former President Trump and his family’s businesses, some of which the family maintained while serving in office—an area ripe to inform your purported legislative pursuits.”…

Late Night Open Thread: Jim Comer Is Cornered

Late Night Open Thread: Jim Comer Is Cornered 1

Per Rolling Stone, we are now entering the second half of the FA / FO cycle:

… While the investigations into Biden have been ongoing for years, the president’s son and his legal team have recently switched tactics towards a more offensive approach in his defense. Earlier this year, Biden leveled a series of lawsuits against entities involved in Republicans’ efforts to prosecute him. These include former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the CEO of Overstock.com, and even the IRS, which Biden alleges improperly handled his tax records.

Biden is now pushing to testify publicly before the Oversight Committee, and one would think Republicans would relish the opportunity to grill him in front of a national audience…


 

Excellent read from earlier this month:


Philip Bump, at the Washington Post, on “The political perils of taking James Comer’s word for it” [gift link]:

One can think of the claims presented by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) as though they are the experiments of a ninth-grade physics class.

The assignment is simple: Build a contraption that will ensure an egg survives a fall from the roof of the school. So Comer and his friends get together and sketch out little parachutes and agree that the parachutes will work great and talk about how cool the different little parachutes are.

They build the parachutes and take them over to Fox News’s desk and Fox News takes the eggs and puts them in the parachute and holds it one hand over the other and lets go: the egg survived! What a parachute! Going to hype this parachute for a few days until you come up with a new one.

Sometimes, though, Comer or one of his buddies has to take the egg to the actual roof. Maybe Comer thinks some of the parachutes will actually work; probably he knows that a lot of them won’t. But either way, the teacher holds them over the edge of the building and subjects them to reality.

Ssssssssssplat. Over and over and over again. Different eggs and different parachutes but the same result.

Thanks to his incessant chatter about his parachutes and how cool they are, Comer has — despite this pattern — built a reputation with his peers as a really great parachute-maker. A lot of them have only heard Comer talk about his parachutes or have only seen the Fox News tests of the parachutes, so they really think he’s got it, he’s a master of Newtonian physics. Asked to head to the roof for their own tests, they simply grab the parachutes that Comer’s made. Bad move…

One of the advantages that Comer enjoys as he goes about his work trying to denigrate the president is that everyone in his party wants very much for him to succeed. They want to think that their guy has cracked the code of gravity. They want to believe that he’s got the goods on the president. Maybe someday he will. He doesn’t now. But he keeps telling everyone he does and to trust him, if they just use his parachutes, they’ll ace the class.

And then they keep failing.

Reader Interactions

46Comments

  3. 3.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @NotMax: “Masticated butt-cheeks” versus “lead poisoning in the nethers” is a choice I’m glad I don’t have to make.

  4. 4.

    Geminid

    @SiubhanDuinne: I respect Rep. Raskin especially for his decision to forgo a run for Senate. Raskin would have had the inside track had he chosen to run for Senator Cardin’s seat next year. He values his work in the House though, and that is where he intends to stay.

    In an era where status often counts more than work product, Raskin is setting a good example. Maryland will still get a good Senator, most likely Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks. She’s not a national “star” like Raskin, but I think Alsobrooks brings a lot to the table.

  6. 6.

    JWR

    One of the interviews on Tuesday afternoon’s Background Briefing was about just this subject, stupid as it is, by which I mean Jim Comer is an idiot.

    Hunter Biden Calls the Bluff of the Barking Fool Congressman James Comer
    With Jacob Heilbrunn

    Then we will examine how Hunter Biden is calling the bluff of the absurd House Republican kangaroo court led by the barking fool James Comer by agreeing to testify in public which Comer can’t and won’t agree to. …

    It’s the second of three interviews.

  7. 7.

    Martin

    I have a proposal. Every year we have a professional performance evaluator – independent, part of the  office of congressional ethics – do a performance evaluation of each member of congress – communication, honestly, effectiveness, etc. and for the next year, every employee in that congress members district that exceed those evaluation standards in their job cannot be fired, because say what you will they’re a better employee than the person you sent to congress.

    My sense is that voters won’t be biased toward incompetent representatives, but the people that fund them are going to start really caring a lot.

    For instance, nobody in Bakersfield could be fired for the next year. Sorry employers, you have to keep them all on staff – they are all stellar employees.

  9. 9.

    WereBear

    @Martin: I love it! Because it makes too much sense. Which will DOOM any attempts in that direction.

    The GOP runs on unearned privilege. We’d have to dismantle a whole…

    Well, worth a try.

  10. 10.

    Tony Jay

    *** JACKAL NEWS – WHERE NEWS GOES BROKE ***

    BRATT STEPHENS

    Comer Affirms Congressional Power Amidst Hunter Biden’s Clownshow Antics

    It’s taken so long getting here that people may be forgiven for forgetting the sheer scale and extent of financial corruption the House of Biden stands accused of. No doubt this is a deliberate tactic of the syndicate of expensive lawyers President Biden’s ex-junkie son has surrounded himself with since whistleblowers both here and abroad first exposed his father’s alleged wrongdoing. Experts in ferreting out minor technicalities to shield major crimes from justice they appear to have decided that the best way to confuse the issues at hand is to loudly reject the House Oversight Committee’s recent subpoena, which would have finally seen Hunter forensically grilled on his Family’s links to Ukrainian black-money networks by a panel of the House’s premier legal minds, and instead launch a PR offensive through social-media and a friendly Press, one designed to turn the Committee’s important work into a vaudeville act and – more sinisterly – prevent the Committee Chair, Rep James Comer, from asking any questions which might put the diplomatic and national security interests of the United States at serious risk of exposure.

    Fortunately for America, and for Justice, Rep Comer (R-Ky) is nobody’s fool.

    ***JACKAL NEWS – WHERE NEWS GOES BROKE

  11. 11.

    NotMax

    @Martin

    Like cold fusion, looks good on paper. In practice, not so much. Rife with open chance for manipulation and favoritism, not to mention closure of opportunity to promising newcomers.

    Also remember staffers are not free agents, they operate under whatever limitations or boundaries which may be set by the officeholder.

  15. 15.

    Frankensteinbeck

    What a perfect display of who has drunk how much of the Kool Aid.  Any Republican who thinks Comer should go for the open door hearing must either A) believe Hunter Biden is guilty, or B) believe they can make it look like he is.  You can excuse a Fox-watching GOP voter for not knowing what flops these hearings have been so far, but these folks are Congressmen or work on Capitol Hill.

    Comer, it seems, has at least figured out he doesn’t have the skill to run a kangaroo court.  Man, what a pathetic level of incompetence that sentence describes.

  16. 16.

    Jay C

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    Comer, it seems, has at least figured out he doesn’t have the skill to run a kangaroo court.  Man, what a pathetic level of incompetence that sentence describes

    Doesn’t require a sentence: the words “Congressional Republican” will suffice.

  17. 17.

    gene108

    Kind of curious where in the queue Hunter’s lawsuit against Rudy is versus all the other lawsuits against Rudy?

    Rudy’s destroyed whatever reputation he’s had harder than any public figure I can remember.

    I also wonder how effective Comer’s narrative of “Joe Biden is corrupt” will stick with low info voters. Republicans milked the “Clintons are corrupt” very successfully without proving any wrongdoing. Seems to me our fragmented media market can make these types of accusations harder to penetrate the national narrative than 30 years ago.

  18. 18.

    lowtechcyclist

    There should be a title specifically for someone running a kangaroo court.

    How does “Captain Kangaroo” sound? ;-)

  20. 20.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    What a perfect display of who has drunk how much of the Kool Aid.

    Good point. Probably some of it is performative on the part of staff, both those who are true believers and those who’d just as soon see it all burn down so that they can work for someone else (Congressional elections are sort of a revolving door for many senior staffers, or so I’m told).

    All that aside, man, Comer really does appear to dumb as a fuckin’ box o’ rocks. Sure hope the good people of Kentucky retire him soon.

  22. 22.

    Princess

    Every time I think of Rudy and the person he is and the things he’s done, I recall how the media fluffed him endlessly in 2008, desperate to make him the GOP nominee. For that alone I will never trust them, because Rudy was then what he is now and they tried to make him president.

  28. 28.

    Geminid

    This morning’s Political Playbook tells me that a vote on Rep. George Santos’s expulsion will come today or tomorrow. Governor Hochul would then order a special election to be held within 70 days. I’m not sure, but there might not be primaries; instead the local party leaders may be the ones selecting the candidates.

    And President Biden will travel to Pueblo, Colorado today for an event at a factory producing wind generator pylons. Local 3rd CD Congrsswoman Lauren Boebert is not invited.

  31. 31.

    Kay

    More great work from Propublica (and the Biden Administration):

    The Biden administration this fall is quietly moving to overhaul welfare, aiming to end multiple abuses of the nation’s cash assistance program for the poor that a 2021 ProPublica investigation found states have been engaging in for years.
    Through a package of proposed reforms to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF, the administration plans to shore up the U.S. social safety net. The regulations are intended to ensure that more federal and state welfare dollars make it to low-income families, rather than being spent on other things or not spent at all.

    Since the 1990s, the federal government has been loosening regulations on states as far as federal funding. Southern and southwestern states run by Republicans have taken advantage of this loosened regulatory environment to spend federal funds that were intended for poor families on everything from basketball stadiums to the fake “clinics” anti abortion activists run. There’s now loads of research that shows all the 1990’s Right wing “reforms” were misguided and the best and most cost effective way to help poor families is to just give them cash assistance – we’re going back to that and cutting out all the grifting middlemen who have been skimming aid intended for poor people.

  32. 32.

    artem1s

    Biden is now pushing to testify publicly before the Oversight Committee, and one would think Republicans would relish the opportunity to grill him in front of a national audience…

    Please FSM let Hunter hire Killary as his outside counsel and advisor on hearing prep.

    obligatory

  34. 34.

    Geminid

    @Geminid: I have not been able to verify the method by which 3rd CD special election candidates will be selected: primary or selection by party district committee.

    The Democratic field for next year’s primary was growing until Tom Suozzi, the former Representative, announced he wanted his old seat back. Then several Dems dropped out.

    Rep. Suozzi won his 2020 reelection race by 12 points. Last year, he passed on reelection in order to run for Governor, and incumbent Kathy Hochul beat him easily.

    Suozzi’s opponent in 2020 was George Santos. That 12 point losing margin supports an unproven theory: that Long Island Republicans did not expect Santos to win last year, and nominated him again because he brought the party a lot of of funny money.

    Long Island Republicans sure would have been better off if he’d lost. Santos’s campaign treasurer has already pleaded guilty to federal crimes. She is a veteran Republican operative and might not be the only New York Republican caught up in the Santos affair.

  38. 38.

    Ruckus

    @Chief Oshkosh:

    Less sense than a box of rocks.

    A box of rocks has to be gathered and picked to be included. Are slightly more likely to be better rocks. A pile of rocks or rocks just laying there likely don’t have the personalities to exist with other rocks in close proximity, which is why they are just laying around……

  39. 39.

    evodevo

    @Chief Oshkosh: Sorry..not happenin’…KY MAGAts are perfectly content to send such crappy reps to Congress…as long as they check all the reich winger boxes – i.e. NRA A+ rating, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, pro-Putin (though, that is getting a little shaky), balanced budget hand-wringing, Jeezus showboating, etc. – they can get elected forever…

  41. 41.

    rayb

    I read Philip Bump’s article cited in this thread “The political perils of taking James Comer’s word for it” and expected a takedown of Comer.  I did not see the interview on CNN.   If there were any persuadable low-information voter watchers, though, it seemed to me the bad guys made out better.  Murphy was able to spread lies and bs with barely any pushback or follow-up.   I hope the actual interview was different.

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