As the GOP has desperately tried to tie Biden to his version of Hillary Clinton's Benghazi hearings, it's proved unsuccessful. But worse, according to Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, it only highlights questions about Donald Trump's administration.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) admitted that there might not be a "there" there in the GOP's probe. Speaking to Fox Business on Wednesday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) confessed there will never be any proof of their claims.
"You're not gonna get necessarily hard proof," Johnson told Maria Bartiromo.
“The family’s getting money from various countries and foreign businesses through various shell companies and this web of LLCs?” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) said, along with his colleagues, searching to find something to hang on Biden. “I mean, guys, you in the press, this is easy pickings. I’m giving you Pulitzer stuff here!”
As Bump explained, however, what is being found is Donald Trump-related and not Biden related.
"That line about LLCs — limited-liability corporations — stuck out for me because three years ago, I tried to document the cascade of companies that made up Trump’s personal web of pass-throughs and tax-avoidance structures," he explained. "There are scores of them, loosely clustered as ways of splitting corporate ownership that only a tax accountant could love."
It's so extensive that Bump made his own chart showing how they are linked and how they all track back to Trump. None of it is illegal.
Phillip Bump's extensive pathway of LLCs crafted by Trump's team
The Republicans have used the first five months of Congress to chase down allegations that foreign governments are operating under a kind of pay-to-play influence program through Biden's corporations. The biggest problem Republicans have is that President Biden doesn't have a corporation. In fact, Biden's personal financial disclosure reports for decades showed Biden hasn't been among the wealthy members of the Senate. It was only after Biden was out of V.P. office that he began charging for speaking engagements and published a bestsellers book, the LA Times reported.
While his $15 million gained from that is a hefty sum, it's a far cry from the $1.5 billion cash that Trump alleged Hunter Biden "walked out of China" with.
Republicans held a big news conference on Wednesday that was supposed to reveal everything. But Bump explained it didn't.
"Comer presented allegations about money being paid from a Romanian who was later convicted of corruption to 'the Bidens' for a purported business relationship, including during the period when Joe Biden was vice president. But this use of 'the Bidens,' like his repeated use of 'the Biden family,' was simply an effort to use the involvement in these deals of Joe Biden’s son Hunter and his brother James as a way of implying that the president himself benefited."
So, when reporters asked if President Biden directly received any cash, Comer was forced to hedge.
“We’re pretty confident that the president was very knowledgeable of what his family was doing,” Comer claimed.
Bump said it's a far cry from Biden "being a beneficiary of foreign contributions himself. If it’s even true, which Comer didn’t assert."
"That they have found evidence of payments flowing from foreign nationals to Hunter Biden-linked LLCs and then (allegedly) to a number of members of Biden’s extended family is used by the Republicans as rhetorical evidence that Joe Biden must somehow be involved," he continued. "But the opposite argument seems more valid: After all this searching, no concrete link showing money going to the president has turned up. This seems exculpatory more than incriminating."
Meanwhile, the Trump side of things is very different.
He cited CREA (the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) reports that estimate Trump's businesses drew as much as $160 million while he was in office for four years. While a lot of the cash was coming through the overseas properties, Bump explained there was also foreign money directly linked to Trump's domestic hotels.
One report said guests that stayed at the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C., on or around the time that major decisions were being made at the White House that would impact their countries. At one point that Trump was working on a deal with Qatar when his top adviser Jared Kushner got a room in the hotel the same night as the Qatari officials. Kushner lived less than two miles from the White House at the time. It was then revealed that Qatar paid Kushner's company $1.2 billion for the 666 Fifth Avenue property when he was searching for a bailout.
Bump also cited "foreign money coming in domestically, as when Saudi interests repeatedly booked large blocks of rooms at his hotels. The House Oversight Committee itself found that foreign interests spent $750,000 at Trump’s D.C. hotel during his presidency — a report produced when Democrats still held the majority."
In Nov. 2022, that same Oversight and Reform Committee asked the National Archives for documents that would help link the Trump presidential schedules to the Trump hotel payments from officials. Just a few months later, Republicans took over and shifted the committee's focus to Biden. Kushner was given billions for his hedge fund from the Saudi funds immediately after leaving the White House.
A reporter asked Comer about it, he admitted there was a broad problem of presidential family members seeking to make iffy foreign business deals." He claimed it stretched all the way back to Democratic President Jimmy Carter, who sold all of his interests so as not to appear unethical. Comer swore the Republicans would be searching "everything."
Bump recalled that earlier this year Comer told the press he was shutting down the investigation.
The main argument, Bump said, came from Donalds who told the press, “The Biden family doesn’t really have a business.”
“What are the Biden businesses?” Comer said. “ … What business are they in?”
Bump said that the lightbulb came on, and the distinction being made is "between family members of a president seeking to expand existing businesses with foreign investment and family members of a president creating new businesses with foreign investment. A huge web of LLCs is not nefarious, apparently, if it predates the president’s time in office. As did the LLCs linked to Hunter Biden highlighted by House Republicans, but let’s not fuss over details."
He closed by mocking the ordeal: "Now if they could only tie Biden to the 'Biden family' business."
Read the full column at the Washington Post.
