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Were I a Republican staffer assisting the House GOP’s conspiratorial Biden probes, my mission from day one of orientation would have been to provide lawmakers with some semblance of an answer to a fundamental, inevitable question:
How is what we’re alleging the Biden family did any different from what the Trump family did?
It’s an obvious question, really. Yet, remarkably, GOP lawmakers still can’t answer it. Meanwhile, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington claims Donald Trump made up to $160 million from international business dealings while he was president, according to tax filings. Republicans didn’t just turn a blind eye to this self-dealing — some actively participated in it.
Yet Republicans apparently want the American public to ignore those years of malfeasance while accepting — with very little evidence — the allegations lobbed at President Joe Biden and his family.
Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee provided an example of this in a Fox News appearance over the weekend. Burchett, a member of the House Oversight Committee, struggled to answer how claims made against Biden and his family differ from reports of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s self-dealing during Trump's administration. (“Since joining the administration, Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump have complied with the rules and restrictions as set out by the Office of Government Ethics,” Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for the couple’s ethics lawyer, Abbe Lowell, told NBC News in 2018.)
“I do want to mention this,” Fox host Arthel Neville said. "According to the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, on record, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump made up to $640 million while her father was in office, and they were official advisers to the president,” Neville noted. “If you would explain to our viewers why the Hunter Biden scenario is different.”
Here’s the CREW report Neville referred to. And it's also fair to note, as Neville did, that Ivanka and Jared were actually working for government when they and their family reportedly benefited from some of these foreign deals.
Stammering through his response, Burchett said that Ivanka and Jared’s transactions “were not hidden” (though they were certainly shrouded in secrecy) and that “they are businesspeople.” And while Burchett ultimately claimed the couple’s transactions should be looked at “as well,” don’t hold your breath waiting on House Republicans. Burchett’s GOP peers on the Oversight Committee quietly scuttled the committee’s previous investigative work on Trump and his family's finances this year.
Given the obvious hypocrisy here — and the lack of evidence Republicans have provided showing Biden family impropriety — it seems clear what Republicans are really after. They know Trump and his family were tarnished by credible allegations of corruption. So they’re trying to dirty up the Biden family the same way, no matter what the facts say.