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House Republicans looking to damage President Joe Biden politically with scandalous allegations have done a rather poor job of outlining what, exactly, they want the public to believe he did.
After promising investigations they claimed would take Biden down, or at least throw him off his legislative agenda, Republicans in control of the House have faced criticism from within their own party because of these probes’ ineffectiveness. But while these investigations have failed to do much damage to the president, the GOP has succeeded in using them to push bigoted conspiracy theories that align with the party’s political goals.
Those theories are the focus of a new memo from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.
In the memo, released Wednesday, the Democrats denounce Republicans on the committee — namely the chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky — for using a probe into Biden’s possession of classified documents to push conspiracy theories about Kathy Chung, who served as an executive assistant under Biden as vice president, and try to link her to China, a frequent right-wing boogeyman.
Specifically, the 16-page memo says Comer used interviews to mislead the public about findings he said arose from the Biden probe, and it claims he “promoted false, xenophobic, and racist conspiracy theories” about Chung, who was born in South Korea. She has said she helped Biden pack documents at the end of the Obama administration but has denied intentional wrongdoing.
The Democrats appear to be borrowing a strategy in pushing back against Republican disinformation: You may recall, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee recently released their own report showing that some of the witnesses called in to testify to the GOP’s “weaponization of government” House subcommittee were actually right-wing conspiracy theorists who embraced Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
The new memo alleges Comer has frequently spouted false claims about Chung and her recent testimony to the committee, including that she was hired at the recommendation of Hunter Biden, the president’s son, to move the documents, as well as suggestions she may be an operative. The memo also claims Comer has failed to publicly mention potentially exculpatory info about Chung’s testimony, such as her telling investigators that she didn’t sort through Biden’s files before packing them or that no one in the Biden family told her what to pack.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Republicans on the committee defended Comer’s claims, as well as the committee’s decision to not release the full transcript of Chung’s testimony.
Last year, I covered some of the ways outside groups planned to push back against right-wing disinfo spewing from House committees. Wednesday’s memo, which is well worth reading in full, shows Democrats again uniting around a scathing report as a way to correct the record.