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Congressional Republicans began last week with high expectations. Members of the House Oversight Committee were poised to sit down with a man named Devon Archer, a former Hunter Biden business associate, which raised GOP hopes about explosive revelations.
Those hopes were quickly dashed. Archer testified under oath that President Joe Biden wasn’t involved with Burisma, didn’t talk business with his son’s associates, and didn’t take bribes, effectively shredding each of the Republicans’ core claims. We know this for certain because the GOP-led panel released a transcript of the Q&A.
That was last week. This week, the same Republican-led Oversight Committee tried to pretend the developments weren’t an embarrassing failure for the party. Here’s a message the panel’s majority published online: “Self-appointed Biden defender [Rep. Dan Goldman] came to the Devon Archer interview with an agenda. Unfortunately for Rep. Goldman, the interview didn’t quite go the way he tried to push it.”
Two hours later, the Democratic New York congressman responded with a simple plea: Goldman asked people to simply read the transcript.
In fact, historian Heather Cox Richardson soon after responded that she’d taken the congressman’s advice. “I did, in fact, read the transcript, and Goldman is right,” she wrote. “The Republicans on the Oversight Committee are expecting their loyalists won’t read it.”
Let's note that last sentence again for emphasis: “The Republicans on the Oversight Committee are expecting their loyalists won’t read it.”
Richardson’s point resonated with me because it’s a dynamic that comes up with remarkable frequency. Indeed, it came to the fore just last week, as the editorial page of The Kansas City Star practically begged people, especially Republicans, to read the latest indictment against Donald Trump.
Please read it. ... Even if you are among those who say yes, he committed serious crimes and you’ll happily vote for him anyway, you still owe it to your country to acquaint yourself with what crimes it is that you’re willing to overlook. ... If you don’t trust us to characterize what it says, read it for yourself.
The Star’s editors added, “If you are right that this is a political prosecution, or that if he did do something wrong it was nothing serious, or was in any case nothing others haven’t done, then this 45 pages will do nothing to challenge that view. If you’re not right, then don’t you want to know that?”
Reality-based observers also urged people to read Trump’s first indictment. And the Mueller report. And the Durham report. And the Senate Intelligence Committee’s findings on the Russia scandal. In each instance, Republicans made all sorts of claims about the documents, but they made very little effort to actually read them.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but when there’s a political dispute, and one side urges the public to read the original source materials, while the other side doesn’t, it tends to give away the game.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.