'Disaster': Fox News accused of goading GOP into impeachment then throwing party under bus

Fox News did more than practically any other organization to goad House Republicans into launching an impeachment investigation into President Joe Biden — and now that the project is falling apart, it's throwing the same lawmakers under the bus, argued Media Matters' Matt Gertz for MSNBC.

The investigation centered on theories that Biden laundered international bribes through the foreign business dealings of his son Hunter but, despite a long series of hearings held by the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, no hard evidence has been found. The most recent hearing, featuring Hunter Biden's former business partner Tony Bobulinski as the GOP's star witness, went completely off the rails.

Even Fox News anchors now understand this, Gertz wrote. Sean Hannity initially promised to reveal the most damning "highlights" from the Bobulinski hearing on Wednesday, but when no such highlights were good for the GOP he immediately switched gears and talked about Biden's poll numbers.

"Hannity did more than perhaps any other single figure to will the impeachment probe into existence," wrote Gertz. "Since 2018, he has led a Fox propaganda campaign aimed at using lies about the younger Biden’s foreign business interests to damage his father’s political standing.

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"The resulting House Republican impeachment effort has both followed Fox’s lead and played out in large part on its airwaves. But it has utterly failed to produce evidence of wrongdoing by the president that would convince anyone other than the network’s most fervent fans."

As the impeachment inquiry has become an "unmitigated debacle" for the GOP, Gertz continued, Fox anchors are now beginning to attack the very Republican lawmakers who are doing what they demanded in the first place, with Dana Perino complaining they, “Just keep doing the same hearing over and over again, and people are starting to wonder, at some point do you fish or cut bait?”

Ultimately, he concluded, "The big tell that the case is collapsing came from Hannity. He gave the hearing only a couple of minutes of airtime in the middle of his opening monologue ... He didn’t bring on any of the committee chairs to expound on what they had proven, or his typical legal analysts to accuse Biden of crimes. Instead, he just moved on to other topics."

House Republicans, he added, would do well to follow Hannity's lead.