Dr. Grady Stumbo, the Hindman populist who twice unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for governor of Kentucky, became embroiled in some long-forgotten controversy during one of those campaigns in the 1980s and sought to deflect inquiries about the incident from nosy reporters by admonishing, “You’re diggin’ where there ain’t no taters.”
Enter Rep. Jamie Comer, R-Whereverhehangshishatishishome, the chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, who has brazenly emerged as the diggingest and most taterless dolt on the planet, whose ongoing excavations into President Biden and his family have uncovered less than a pittance while
thoroughly managing to bury his own self in humiliation.
Comer, looking quite prosperous these days as he leaps like a jackrabbit from one rightwing television network to the next, is earnestly trying to convince one-and-all that Biden, as vice president, accepted a $5 million bribe for agreeing to something-or-other – the details remain as murky as the wildfire haze engulfing New York City.
It appears that an informant, described by Comer as “trusted and highly credible,” told the Federal Bureau of Investigation about a conversation he conducted with an unidentified foreign national, apparently from Ukraine, who claimed to have offered such a pay-off to Biden, who served as VP from 2009 to 2017. That resulted in the bureau developing what is called an FD-1023 form, a document used to memorialize information gathered from a confidential source. Such documents generally contain allegations provided by the source, including claims that were unverified by the Bureau.
There has been a lot of sound and fury over this document, with Comer’s committee issuing a subpoena demanding its delivery and FBI Director Christopher Wray refusing to comply, maintaining that doing so could result in revealing the identity of a confidential informant. That led Comer to assume the role he was born to play – Eric Cartman of South Park fame, essentially telling Wray “You must respect mah authoritah” or face a contempt of Congress citation.
Now, just why Jamie found it necessary to get his grimy meathooks on the FD-1023 is unclear since he claims to have already read a copy and attended a Bureau briefing on the document with Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-MD, the committee’s ranking member, whose job, it seems, is to make our boy Comer look like a moron, a task he manages with aplomb, although it should be noted it doesn’t appear all that difficult.
Cooler heads finally prevailed with Wray permitting all of the panel’s members to take a gander, leading Comer to declare “the allegations contained within this record are not closed” and that the information revealed therein “track closely with the Oversight Committee’s investigation of the Biden family’s influence peddling schemes. The Oversight Committee will continue to follow the facts and ensure accountability for the American people.”
Well, bully for you, Jamie. The problem is the claim is, unsurprisingly, hogwash despite his breathless assertions to the contrary. It all appears to harken back to events that took place in pre-war Ukraine, with Republicans attempting to damage Biden with politically motivated allegations that have no basis in fact.
Various reports indicate the entire mishigas can be traced back to well publicized events in 2016, a gordian knot involving a Ukraine prosecutor, a future president, that president’s woebegone son and an energy company. Back in 2014, Hunter Biden, whose soiled background is world renowned, joined the board of Burisma, a scandal-plagued Ukrainian natural gas company, despite his failing to hold the sort of credentials that might generally lead to such a well-paid position, resulting in early speculation that the company, and maybe the Kyiv government, might be seeking to enhance their standing with the United States, seeing as how Hunter was the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden.
Two years after Hunter Biden joined the board, the administration of then-President Barack Obama and several Western European leaders grew disenthralled with Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, for failing, or, perhaps, refusing, to ferret out well-entrenched corruption. Biden, representing the administration, was dispatched to Kyiv to deliver a message — either Shokin goes or pending loan guarantees would be jeopardized.
Shokin went, but not quietly, issuing claims that he was really axed for going after Burisma and that Joe Biden was only issuing threats to protect his son. The claim was easily disproved – government leaders aplenty wanted Shokin removed, including Republican members of Congress — but it provided a fellow name Donald J. Trump, who succeeded Obama as president, an opening to claim that Biden, his opponent in the 2020 presidential election, handled the Ukraine matter in a corrupt manner in deference to his boy Hunter.
In fact, it was this situation that led Trump to prevail upon Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in a phone conversation to produce dirt on Biden in return for a stalled military aid package, leading to Trump’s first of two impeachments.
Undeterred, Trump dispatched his lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to Ukraine to, hopefully, get some lowdown on Biden and upend his campaign. In January 2020, Giuliani returned stateside and announced he had obtained “smoking gun evidence” confirming Biden corruption, which he passed on to the FBI leading to the creation of an FD-1023 document.
The precise nature of that corruption has not been released. But a team of prosecutors and FBI agents opened an inquiry to assess Giuliani’s claim. In August 2020, the FBI Department of Justice closed the assessment.
“These facts lead us to an obvious conclusion: that after months of investigating Mr. Giuliani’s allegations, the Trump Justice Department concluded that the evidence failed to justify further inquiry,” Raskin said.
There is a dispute percolating over the true status of the bribery assessment.
Comer, as is his wont, is keeping hope alive, insisting that Democrats are issuing “lies” when they say it’s closed. He cited a statement by former Attorney General William Barr, who was in office during most of the controversy, noting that he turned the assessment over to David C. Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware, who has spent literally years investigating Hunter Biden’s business practices and tax returns without returning charges.
Raskin is having none of it, especially given the source is a nut job named Giuliani.
“…in August 2020, that assessment was closed after a determination was made that there were no more investigative steps to be taken and the evidence collected did not meet FBI’s standard for opening a preliminary or full-scale investigation — namely that the assessment had not developed an articulable factual basis to reasonably indicate a crime may have occurred,” Raskin said.
During his meeting with the FBI over the FD-1023 form, Raskin said the Bureau cited a memorandum closing the assessment, signed by high-ranking officials in the Trump Justice Department.
“We now know what I had long suspected: that Chairman Comer’s subpoena is about recycling stale and debunked Burisma conspiracy theories long peddled by Rudy Giuliani and a Russian agent, sanctioned by former President Trump’s own Treasury Department, as part of the effort to smear President Biden and help Mr.
Trump’s reelection campaign,” Raskin said in a statement.
Exactly what game does Jamie Comer of Tompkinsville think he’s playing here? He’s fallen on his face so many times it would take the entire team of surgeons at the Albert B. Chandler Hospital in Lexington to reconstruct his nose. He keeps making grandiose claims about Biden profiting and basing his presidential
decisions on his son’s business endeavors and then produces nothing even approaching evidence of same. Now he’s indicating Biden grabbed a $5 million bribe based on the word of Giuliani, who is in no way “trusted and highly credible” and is facing a big-time lawsuit for sexual assault.
No, despite his lame claims of oversight and accountability, Comer is just producing horse manure for his right-wing masters in an effort to cripple Biden’s governmental agenda and his re-election campaign, truth be damned. He is a walking, talking embarrassment bringing shame on the First Congressional District that sent him to Washington.
There’s a word for people like Comer, and it goes beyond defining a heavily made up woman in a short skirt standing on a street corner reeking of cheap perfume asking passers-by if they want a date.
Their “ smoking gun” still shooting blanks.. all smoke, no bang..