Republican Senators open new inquiry into Hunter Biden the day after Trump acquittal
Within hours of the GOP Senate’s sham trial wrapping up, a pair of prominent Republicans decided to use that chamber’s powers to keep doing Donald Trump’s bidding and continue the efforts to gin up a scandal around the Biden family.
Since the spectacle of an impeachment trial without witnesses, the first in American history, wasn’t enough for Trump’s cronies in the Senate, Republican Senators Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) have now queried the United States Secret Service for years-old records about Hunter Biden over an issue that they were both about at the time.
In 2015, Vice President Joe Biden was asked by America’s foreign policy establishment, including GOP Senators Rob Portman and Ron Johnson, to ask Ukraine to fire its former prosecutor-general because he refused to investigate the Burisma energy company. Later, his Yale-educated lawyer and son Hunter Biden took a $50,000 a month job on Burisma’s board.
Republican Senators Johnson and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) signed a letter looking for new information about Ukraine under the pretext of investigating conflicts of interest. The Post reports:
Specifically, they are seeking from the Secret Service any instances when Hunter Biden traveled with protective security detail during the time his father, Joe Biden, was vice president, as well as when he flew on government planes.
Ironically, these Republicans are unlikely to be successful, because as Reuters reports, Hunter Biden did the entire job from America.
It’s obvious that Hunter Biden’s lavishly compensated job doesn’t look good, but there’s nothing unlawful about someone getting a fancy law degree, working for leading firm Boies, Flexner, Schiller and then getting hired away by one of its clients to continue his work advising the company on legitimate legal matters.
Because of his father’s former position, it was not a good idea to work for the particular company that Hunter Biden chose. But his deeds pale in comparison to the Trump family’s incessant grifting, which Republicans like Grassley and Johnson participate in through the RNC’s purchases at Trump hotels that exceeded $1.5 million in the last election cycle alone.
In fact, one of three Republican witnesses called at Trump’s House impeachment hearings, Ambassador Kurt Volker of the “Three Amigos,” said that the allegations against the Bidens by the President were “self-serving and not credible.”
But there has never been a Republican in modern times who let a pesky fact or two get in the way of a partisan investigation.
Leading Trump toady Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is also using his position as Chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate Joe Biden.
The latest salvo by Republican Senators against the truth serves formal notice that Trump and his GOP allies see their transgression of impartial justice by holding a sham trial as merely the first steps in an all-out propaganda war against facts.
Original reporting by Colby Itkowitz at the Washington Post.
