Another Shady Impeachment Witness Exposes The GOP's Twisted Game
And it's not just the impeachment that's designed to win votes through mass deception
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Most credible news coverage of the House GOP’s retaliatory impeachment of Joe Biden will emphasize the baselessness of the proceedings.
“Lacking support and evidence, the GOP-led impeachment inquiry against President Biden continued to sputter out, even as House Republicans on Wednesday held a hearing that featured witnesses who reiterated thin allegations that members of the Biden family capitalized financially on their father’s name,” wrote Washington Post reporter Jacqueline Alemany after last week’s entry.
These kinds of reports capture the conundrum national political reporters face all too often in the Trump era: spectacles that must be covered, because they invoke official powers or involve powerful leaders, but are at bottom baseless or deceptive.
For my part, though, the most revelatory moment on Wednesday didn’t have anything to do with questions of evidence or the lack thereof. It came several hours in, when Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) dared oversight committee Republicans to hold a vote on Biden’s impeachment right then and there.
Moskowitz’s purpose was to prove that Republicans know they don’t have the goods on Biden, and I’d say he accomplished it, but the revealing part was this interruption from Tony Bobulinski—a GOP witness and operative who was once business partners with Hunter Biden, but has been thick as thieves with Donald Trump and the Trump campaign for many years now.
“I think you haven’t read recent data that shows the American people are well aware of the Bidens’ corruption.”
Republicans have presented Bobulinski as a fact witness, but here he is interjecting with a giddy observation not about Biden’s conduct but about public perception of it. A bunch of Americans now wrongly think President Biden is corrupt, and Bobulinski is proud of that fact. Imagine if during Donald Trump’s first impeachment, Democrats took testimony from a Biden campaign lackey who crowed about damaging Trump’s approval ratings.
This, more than any substantive disclosure or debunking, reveals the entire purpose of the impeachment inquiry and really the main strategic purpose of the modern GOP: to engage in acts of manipulation and abuse to deceive the public for political gain.
WHAT ABOUT BOB?
Bobulinski’s gaffe has gone largely unnoticed, but it resembles the line that cost Kevin McCarthy the speakership when he first sought the job almost a decade ago. “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable,” he said. “But we put together a Benghazi Special Committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”
What mainstream media has a difficult time conveying is the extent to which, in the Trump era, the party operates this way almost exclusively.
Or worse.
As near as we can tell, Bobulinski hasn’t committed any crimes yet, but Republicans built the impeachment around a witness statement to the FBI which was fabricated, and which Republicans seemingly knew to be fabricated. That witness, Alexander Smirnov, is now in jail awaiting trial for lying to the FBI, and has suggested his efforts to frame the Bidens stemmed from his ties to Russian intelligence.
The rest of Republican work in exactly the same way: deceive to move polls, cite polls to shape election thematics, repeat.
Their “substantive” campaign against Biden, where there is at least a nexus to public policy, centers around the production of grainy, xenophobic images of chaos along the sudden border. In its darkest form, it involves the libel that Biden and allied progressive leaders (the Jewish ones, usually) have masterminded a migrant invasion to change the character and politics of the United States for their own purposes
They say it, and their top propagandists spread it to the masses. Elon Musk, who transformed Twitter into a Republican agitprop and hate machine, competes with Donald Trump to be the country’s most influential exponent of the Great Replacement lies.
And yet, if Republican politicians were genuinely sincere about any of their supposed concerns—the asylum adjudication process or the racial composition of America—they would have passed the bill they helped negotiate to reduce border crossing dramatically. Instead, they killed that bill on Donald Trump’s orders, because he thinks the persistence of disorder is helpful to him. As Greg Sargent of the New Republic noted last week, “Trump-GOP inaction is closer to a political conspiracy involving immigration than anything Democrats have done.”
And even if the logjam at the border were to resolve itself, Republicans would endeavor to mislead Americans (most of whom live nowhere near the border) into believing the “invasion” was as fierce as ever.
The New York Times published an infuriating exposé on Wednesday detailing how Laura Loomer and other, lesser Trump propagandists have set up shop near a camp in Panama’s Darién Gap to video-ambush migrants thousands of miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, then publish clips on social media meant to foster the misimpression that these foreign nationals intend to embed themselves in the United States for partisan reasons.
“Do you guys like Ilhan Omar?” one person asked. “What do you think about Joe Biden?”
Mr. Ibrahim, 20, answered the questions. He said he liked and admired Ms. Omar, the first Somali-American to serve in Congress. He doesn’t follow American politics, he added, but thinks Mr. Biden is a good president. When asked if Mr. Biden or former President Donald J. Trump would be better for immigrants, he chose Mr. Biden.
Later, Mr. Ibrahim would say he had felt ambushed and confused by the questions. He hadn’t intended to make a political statement.
But by then, it was too late.
One of his questioners, Laura Loomer, a right-wing activist and former Republican candidate for Congress, had already posted an edited video of the conversation online. It had rocketed around the internet, amassing nearly two million views on X.
The caption read: “Somali illegal aliens proclaim support for Ilhan Omar and Joe Biden inside Panama migrant camp!”
If you close your eyes, you can hear Tony Bobulinski crowing, “I think you haven’t read recent data that shows the American people are well aware of Biden’s migrant invasion.”
APRES ‘LINSKI
If Tony Bobulinski & co. can convince half of Americans that Joe Biden is corrupt when he’s not, and Musk, Loomer, Trump, and Fox News can convince yet more that migrants are “invading” the United States, what does it say about the electorate’s ability to make informed decisions at the ballot box?
In every past modern election, we’d expect someone with Biden’s economic record to be quite popular right now. There has, until the past couple years, been a tight correlation between economic fundamentals, economic sentiment, and incumbent performance. Preside over economic growth, and you win re-election; preside over a slowing or shrinking economy and you’re toast.
Biden’s abysmal approval ratings, and the related phenomenon of economic sentiment lagging way behind macroeconomic data, have revealed this model of politics to be broken, or incomplete at least.
There may have once been a correlation between economic growth and incumbent performance, but if that relationship was causal, why isn’t it working today? Most political junkies will try to look for some more obscure metric to explain why public sentiment is right where it should be. But another explanation is simpler: Back when the correlation was established, there were fewer Tony Bobulinskis in GOP politics.
In prior eras, when the economy was strong, there was a much more universal media consensus that the economy was strong, and so all arrows pointed in the same direction. Voters knew they were doing well, their TVs and radios told them everyone else was doing well, too, and they grew optimistic about the near future, satisfied with their political leaders.
Now right-wing and social media is inundated with lies—about corruption, and immigration, but also about the economy. Today, even prospering Americans have come to believe that their good fortune is the exception, not the rule.
And once again, it’s easy to imagine Republicans relishing the confusion they’ve helped create just as Tony Bobulinski would. “I think you haven’t read recent data that shows the American people are well aware of Biden’s failed economy.” Well, where might they have gotten that idea?