Corrupt Republicans Abusing Committee Powers To Pursue Rudy Giuliani’s Russian Disinformation Against Biden In Reprisal of ‘Benghazi!’ Playbook

Back in 2o20, the corrupt Rudy Giuliani and his business partner Lev Parnas were tasked with going to Ukraine to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden in hopes of tying something, anything, to Joe Biden to use against him in the 2020 election. Lev Parnas explains:

My connection to Trump came through Giuliani, with whom I had done business, and through the large campaign donations I had made to Trump’s campaign. Giuliani, who desperately wanted to be Secretary of State, recruited me to help him further Trump’s interests overseas. I had no official position, but my primary task was to be their go-between with Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs and government officials. In retrospect, I concluded that my real job was to help undermine and destabilize the Ukrainian government.

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Trump acted on his hatred of Ukraine as he tried to improve his re-election chances in 2020. The plan that Giuliani and Trump put into operation was simple. Giuliani sent me to collect compromising information that the Eastern European oligarchs had on Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine to use against Joe Biden. It was also my job to convince the new Ukrainian government to announce an official investigation into Hunter Biden. If they didn’t, the U.S. would not send Trump or Vice President Mike Pence to Zelensky’s inauguration, threatening Zelensky’s domestic stature and his ability to stand up to Putin. Trump also paused much needed military aid for Ukraine while he tried to get Zelensky to open the Biden investigation.

You will recall that this was the corrupt plot which led to the first impeachment of Donald Trump. Senate Republicans rejected the rule of law and engaged in jury nullification to not convict Donald Trump.

Republicans in Congress ran with the Russian disinformation provided to Rudy Giuliani, which Giuliani promoted as a Biden scandal, and he continues to do so to this day. Republican Inquiry Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by Biden:

An election-year investigation by Senate Republicans into corruption allegations against Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter, involving Ukraine found no evidence of improper influence or wrongdoing by the former vice president, closing out an inquiry its leaders had hoped would tarnish the Democratic presidential nominee.

The investigation found that Hunter Biden had “cashed in” on his father’s name to close lucrative business deals around the world. It also concluded that his work for Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company then mired in a corruption scandal, while the former vice president was directing American policy toward Kyiv had given the appearance of a conflict of interest and alarmed some State Department officials.

But an 87-page report summing up the findings, released jointly on Wednesday by the Senate Homeland Security and Finance Committees, contained no evidence that the elder Mr. Biden improperly manipulated American policy toward Ukraine or committed any other misdeed. In fact, investigators heard witness testimony that rebutted those charges.

The homeland security panel’s Republican chairman, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, had made little secret of his political ambitions for his report, boasting for weeks that his findings would demonstrate Mr. Biden’s “unfitness for office.” Instead, the result delivered on Wednesday appeared to be little more than a rehashing six weeks before Election Day of unproven allegations that echo an active Russian disinformation campaign and have been pushed by Mr. Trump.

[In] their own competing document challenging the report, Democrats accused Republicans of cherry-picking their findings. All 10 witnesses interviewed by investigators, they noted, had testified that neither Mr. Biden nor anyone else had altered American policy because of his son.

“Every witness stated that Hunter Biden and his associates had no role in the formulation of U.S. policy, that Hunter Biden’s role did not influence U.S. foreign policy decisions, and that Vice President Biden carried out U.S. foreign policy in the interest of the United States,” the Democrats wrote.

The lack of meaningful new information and the overlap with a Russian disinformation campaign that American intelligence officials have said is designed to denigrate Mr. Biden only fed charges by Democrats and Mr. Biden’s campaign that Mr. Johnson had abused his Senate powers to aid Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign — and in so doing, had aided Moscow.

Despite the intelligence agencies, the FBI, The DOJ, and even Republican-led committee investigations finding no evidence to support the Russian disinformation peddled by Rudy Giuliani, Republicans and their own disinformation propagandists in the right-wing media continue to amplify this Russian disinformation in an attempt to smear Joe Biden with baseless innuendo.

This is a reprisal of the GQP’s Benghazi! Committee playbook for Hillary Clinton before she ran for president. The true story of the Benghazi committee:

The findings of the Benghazi Select Committee released this week add virtually nothing to the existing official record of the tragedy that occurred on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya. Ten congressional committees have now participated in eight investigations into the Benghazi tragedy. Thirteen reports on the attacks in Benghazi have been published. Since 2013, witnesses have appeared before the committee 252 times. Investigators have reviewed thousands of pages of Secretary Clinton’s emails and spent millions of dollars.
None of these investigations have found any evidence of an intelligence failure leading to the Benghazi tragedy or a “stand-down order” that supposedly prevented military personnel from saving the Americans in Benghazi. And, perhaps most telling, not a single investigation has found any wrongdoing by Obama Administration officials.

It’s not surprising that the Benghazi Committee found no new significant information about the Benghazi attacks. From the beginning, the Committee was a taxpayer-funded witch hunt against Hillary Clinton. Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy admitted as much when he said last fall that the committee was formed to drive down Clinton’s poll numbers and make her appear “untrustable.”

[At] Correct The Record, we’ve spent more than a year closely monitoring the Committee’s activities. When it became clear last year that Republicans would try to manipulate this tragedy to hurt Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, we mobilized to defend her. We launched the Benghazi Research Center; published The Complete Guide to the Benghazi Select Committee; and responded in real time to the Committee’s 11-hour hearing with Secretary Clinton, fact-checking Chairman Gowdy and his colleagues. This week, we published Committee No. 10: The True Story of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, a new book examining how Gowdy and his House Republican goons turned the Benghazi Committee into a taxpayer-funded cesspool of blind ambition, bald-faced lies and blatant government waste.

In this latest iteration of the Benghazi! Committee playbook, Coup Plotter Rep. “Gym” Jordan and his conspiracy theory-driven sidekick, Rep. James Comer, have been trying to discredit the Department of Justice and the FBI ahead of the anticipated indictments of former president Donald Trump and his Coup Plotter associates (which should include”Gym” Jordan).

They are doing this through the vehicle of “beating a dead horse” of the so-called Burisma scandal, i.e., the Russian disinformation fed to the corrupt Rudy Giuliani (who also is a Coup Plotter and likely to be indicted soon for his starring role in the January 6 coup plot).

The latest scandal mongering stunt by the GQP is to threaten to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray – appointed by Donald Trump – in contempt of Congress for not producing a document to their conspiracy theory committee,  a document which the FBI has made available to the committee chair and ranking member to review, and which they did review.

The New York Times reports, Comer Cancels Wray Contempt Vote as F.B.I. Agrees to Share Document:

House Republicans late Wednesday canceled plans to begin contempt of Congress proceedings against Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, after the agency agreed to make available to all members of the Oversight Committee a document containing a years-old unsubstantiated allegation of bribery against President Biden.

The decision was a rare dialing back of a concerted effort by House Republicans to target the federal law enforcement agency as they seek to push accusations of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden.

If there was any lingering doubt that Trump’s lapdog, Jim Jordan, was conducting his sham congressional investigation to give Trump a talking point, here’s confirmation. Hey DOJ, I sure hope you intend to hold accountable the insurrectionists in Congress. Because #JusticeMatters pic.twitter.com/NQW8txophe

— Glenn Kirschner (@glennkirschner2) June 8, 2023

Mr. Wray’s team allowed Representative James Comer, Republican of Kentucky and chairman of the Oversight Committee, and Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat, to view a redacted copy of the document in a secure area of the Capitol on Monday and briefed them on it for more than an hour.

But the F.B.I. declined to allow lawmakers to take copies of the document out of the secure facility or to show them an unredacted version that reveals the name of a longtime bureau informant, arguing such an action could compromise its source and scare other informants from cooperating with the bureau’s investigations.

That angered Mr. Comer, who had scheduled a vote on Thursday in his committee on a resolution to hold Mr. Wray in contempt of Congress.

“The F.B.I. has caved,” Mr. Comer said in a statement on Wednesday night, “and is now allowing all members of the Oversight and Accountability Committee to review this unclassified record that memorializes a confidential human source’s conversations with a foreign national who claimed to have bribed then-Vice President Joe Biden.”

Mr. Raskin described the allegations after the briefing this week as “hearsay.”

“In the spirit of good faith, the F.B.I. has offered Chairman Comer yet further accommodations in response to his subpoena, including to allow all Oversight Committee members to review in camera the secondhand allegations by Ukrainian individuals reported in the tip sheet,” Mr. Raskin said, adding: “Holding someone in contempt of Congress is among the most serious actions our Committee can take and it should not be weaponized to undermine the F.B.I.”

A person familiar with the agency’s inner workings said on Wednesday that the F.B.I. had offered to provide a similar briefing to the full Oversight Committee as a way of satisfying a demand from Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who said Wednesday he was hopeful an arrangement could be worked out.

“He needs to show it to every Republican and every Democrat on the committee,” Mr. McCarthy said of Mr. Wray. “If he is willing to do that, then there’s not a need to have contempt.”

Since taking over the House, Republicans have vowed to use their subpoena power to investigate Mr. Biden’s son Hunter and brother James in hopes of tying their international business dealings to the president. To date, they have failed to prove that the elder Mr. Biden took payments from foreign business or that he took any corrupt action.

Their efforts to target the F.B.I. and the Justice Department have come after those agencies launched inquires into the conduct of former President Donald J. Trump, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination and has been informed that he is a target of a federal investigation into his handling of classified documents after he left office.

Republicans have long alleged that Hunter Biden used his seat on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma — for which he was paid substantial sums — to influence his father. A career State Department official raised concerns with a senior White House official in 2015 about the situation.

The attention on Hunter Biden from the right reached a high point in 2020, after Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani began circulating materials about the younger Mr. Biden, including photos and documents detailing drug use and prostitution from a laptop he had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop.

In 2020, Attorney General William P. Barr asked the top federal prosecutor in Pittsburgh, Scott W. Brady, to examine any information Mr. Giuliani had on the Biden family and send anything that might be useful for other prosecutors to them.

One person familiar with the material who insisted on anonymity to discuss it said some of the materials Mr. Brady reviewed were junk and plainly not credible. The bribery allegation against Mr. Biden, which dates to 2020, was never elevated to a preliminary investigation, according to people familiar with the inquiry, but Mr. Brady did forward some information from his work to other prosecutors.

Source: Document does not say Joe Biden received any payments | Fox News Video https://t.co/hNLuOITwUy

— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) June 8, 2023

The U.S. attorney in Delaware has conducted a wide-ranging investigation into Hunter Biden and his business dealings, but that inquiry has narrowed significantly and is now focused on potential tax and gun violations.

Mr. Comer has argued his committee, which has hired James Mandolfo, a former federal prosecutor who has experience investigating foreign corruption, needs the document on the elder Biden so congressional investigators “may be able to subpoena relevant bank accounts, interview pertinent witnesses, and corroborate” the informant’s claims.

Mr. Comer said that as part of the agreement the F.B.I. is making two additional documents related to the allegations available to Mr. Comer and Mr. Raskin for review.

Rep. Comer and Sen. Grassley are engaged in a naked abuse of power for the partisan purpose of smearing President Joe Biden with unfounded innuendo of corruption. It is the new era of McCarthyism.  Even worse, they are doing this to defend the most corrupt and criminal president in U.S. history, Donald Trump, and to discredit the Department of Justice and FBI/

I will reiterate what I have said many times before. The Party of Trump is a criminal enterprise led by a third-rate mafia “Don” Trump. They are all accomplices, coconspirators and accessories who aid and abet his criminality and corruption. There is not a patriot among them. They put fealty to their “Dear Leader” above all else, including loyalty to their country and our national security, and their oaths of office to defend the Constitution. They reject the rule of law and are amoral. It is a betrayal of the faith of the American people in our constitutional government. They must all be held accountable.

I would love to see Special Counsel Jack Smith bring a RICO charge against the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC), which operated as one and the same during his time in office, and treat them as a criminal enterprise. Roll up all the top leadership of this criminal enterprise, send them all to prison, and seize all of the assets of the criminal enterprise as the DOJ would do for any mafia organization or drug cartel.