The Impeachment That Never Was

For over a year, we heard almost weekly claims of a new “bombshell” finding that would be the definitive evidence conclusively showing that President Biden had participated in some nefarious scheme.

Initially, it was financial records. Then, there was all the fuss over an FD-1023 form. We heard about numerous witnesses, all of whom Republicans wanted to testify only behind closed doors. And there was a key informant at the center of the case who was going to blow it wide open.

Today we hear nothing.

The case Republicans worked on for so long has been suddenly and quietly abandoned in the hope that Americans will remember the headlines but not the result.

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Republicans were looking for retribution. To see this in action you don’t need to look any further than Marjorie Taylor Greene introducing articles of impeachment against Biden on his very first day in office. Biden hadn’t done anything wrong. He hadn’t even had time to.

Those articles were only designed to gain Greene attention. It fit her “fighting the deep state” identity and allowed her to show how she was against the administration from day one. Other Republicans remained on the hunt for anything they could actually use against Biden. After finding nothing new, they decided to resurface a conspiracy theory that had already been debunked by Senate Republicans years earlier.

This conspiracy, manufactured by Rudy Giuliani at Donald Trump's behest, was the source of Trump’s quid pro quo impeachment. During the Mueller investigation, Trump became nervous about what would be exposed and how it would hurt his reelection chances. Looking for a way to distract from talk of Russia helping him get elected, Trump decided to create dirt on Biden to counter the narrative. 

That was when Trump paused military aid to Ukraine and barred Ukraine from visiting the White House until the nation agreed to create a story of corruption surrounding Biden. In the infamous phone call, Trump talked to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, explaining how he wanted Ukraine to work with Giuliani on this task. 

As it turns out, that story did make a great distraction. Republicans ran with it for years, evolving the false narrative over time. Eventually, it morphed into a claim that then Vice President Biden strong-armed Ukraine to get a prosecutor fired for investigating his son, Hunter Biden, who was working to gain kickbacks for the Biden family. That is why the first big “bombshell” was the Oversight Committee getting Biden’s financial records. They had the news media broadcasting to the world that they would find all of the corrupt payments in those records. But they never did. They found nothing.

None of the narratives held true to even the most basic review. The Ukrainian prosecutor was investigating a company before Hunter ever worked there, and Biden, other nations, and even Republican members of Congress worked to get that prosecutor fired because he was corrupt.

After the financial records were a dud, Republicans looked for their next move. Word broke of an FBI FD-1023 form that had come up in a previous investigation and which was said to have whistleblower information accusing the Bidens of shaking down Ukraine for millions of dollars.

Drama ensued around how, when, where, and who would get to see the form. While the FBI said they would show members of Congress the form if they came down to FBI headquarters, that wasn’t a big enough spectacle. So, the Oversight Committee demanded that the form be brought to Congress and publicly threatened the FBI if they refused to acquiesce. The FBI finally brought it to Capitol Hill and let the FD-1023 be seen in a SCIF, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or in other words, a secure room.

Having to view the file in a SCIF fed right into the Republican theater, and they played it up for all it was worth. After leaving the viewing room, they also insisted that this was the actual bombshell that would take down Biden. Democrats who had also seen the file immediately and vehemently denounced Republicans' claims and insisted the form showed no proof of anything. This was the beginning of the Republican approach of skewing every piece of information they received behind closed doors.

That is why when Republicans had “key” witnesses come to Congress to testify, it was always in private. Before the transcripts were released to the public, James Comer, the head of the Oversight Committee, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others would all claim that each of these witnesses had confirmed Biden’s corruption. Yet every time the transcripts were released, these witnesses were shown to say they knew of no wrongdoing by Joe Biden, that Joe was never involved in Hunter’s businesses nor did he discuss them with anyone, and that the witnesses knew of no crimes of any kind committed by Joe Biden.

That is why Hunter Biden fought against a closed-door hearing with Congress. He wanted a public hearing so that his words couldn’t be twisted and used by Republicans to intentionally misrepresent what was said. After many back-and-forths between Hunter and Congress, Hunter finally testified behind closed doors, and the transcripts later revealed nothing incriminating about his father, Joe Biden.

All of that should have been enough to end the impeachment inquiry, but it continued on until the real major bombshell, not for Republicans, but against them. That crucial informant who was central to the entire case turned out to be a Russian asset who had lied about everything. This was also why the FBI repeatedly warned that the FD-1023 was for unconfirmed reports, but Republicans hadn’t cared. They needed Biden to look like he was involved in something shady. Having an informant and the form had made their case seem far more legitimate than it ever actually was.

That was what it was always really about.

Several Congressional Republicans admitted at different points during the inquiry that it was never about impeaching Biden. Some even said they knew an impeachment would never happen. The goal was headlines. It was about sowing doubt in the public’s mind ahead of the 2024 election. Republicans were determined to commit the equivalent of a newspaper announcing a sensational false story as the major front page headline, only to publish a retraction weeks later buried on page 27.

Comer has since admitted multiple times that the inquiry is over and that there will not be an impeachment. But that wasn’t major news because the inquiry dragged on for so long that America eventually tuned out. Unfortunately, that means Republicans achieved exactly what they had hoped to achieve. They sowed doubt in some voters' minds as to whether Biden is corrupt, even when there was never any evidence of any wrongdoing of any kind.

Another win for Republicans is that no one is reminding voters how Trump faced two very real impeachments during his Presidency. Democrats are unlikely to bring them up because doing so would simply reignite the false Ukraine narrative against Biden. The news won’t bring them up because that wouldn’t be exciting enough to drive ratings.

Republicans succeeded in making Trump’s impeachments go away. And all it took was years of wasted taxpayer money combined with a Republican House majority that was willing to drag out a charade as long as they possibly could instead of accomplishing anything of substance for the American people.