Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) seemed to admit on Wednesday that the GOP doesn’t have the “hard proof” linking President Joe Biden to any criminal scheme involving his family’s business affairs, adding that people will just have to “infer what’s happening” on this issue.
Johnson’s remarks came on the same morning that House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) unveiled new details supposedly supporting his panel’s allegations about the president. However, despite Comer’s claiming that this would make “Watergate look like jaywalking” and would be “judgment day” for Biden, his report didn’t match the hype.
While Comer previously said he’d identify multiple policy decisions made by the president that were tied to his family members’ foreign financial transactions, Comer provided no evidence on Wednesday to back those claims. In fact, the latest report didn’t show any payments made directly to Biden—either as president or vice president. Comer was unable to name any specific Biden policies influenced by foreign money at his Wednesday presser, instead pointing to the president placing “China first and America last” while saying his committee would “get into more of those later.”
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Along with Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Johnson has led the charge for several years on a probe of the Biden family—most especially the president’s son Hunter. During a Wednesday morning appearance on Fox Business Network’s Mornings With Maria, Johnson boasted of a “volume of evidence” the House Republicans had gathered on the Biden “crime” schemes.
“It makes clear the corruption within these agencies, but it also makes clear the corruption of the mainstream media who will largely ignore and minimize it,” Johnson told pro-Trump host Maria Bartiromo.
At the same time, the Wisconsin lawmaker acknowledged that it would be difficult for the committee to actually prove its case, suggesting they’d have to rely on insinuation, innuendo, and conservatives distrust of the media.
“People that commit criminal acts try not to leave a paper trail. So it's very difficult to piece this all together, particularly when you have the leftists, the progressives and the mainstream media doing everything they can to undermine your investigation,” he declared.
“On the bank records, you're not going to see [a] bribe to change this policy. You have to infer what's happening here. You have to take a look at the bulk of the evidence,” Johnson exclaimed, adding: “Again, you have to infer these things, you’re not necessarily going to get necessarily hard proof, but there is such a huge body of evidence.”
The senator went on to complain that “the media will do the exact same thing that they did” when he and Grassley first tried to link Biden to foreign financial entanglements before the 2020 election.
“They’ll just say, ‘Oh, there's no proof of a crime here.’ You can say it's circumstantial,” he grumbled. “You don't have these people writing on a piece of paper, ‘10 percent to Vice President Biden.’ They do it cryptically, '10 percent to the big guy.’ That’s how criminals operate. They do it cryptically.”
Johnson wasn’t the only Republican on Wednesday to admit there may not be any fire behind all the smoke. During a Fox News appearance on Wednesday afternoon, Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX)—who also sits on the oversight committee—was unable to say Republicans could connect any Biden policy to foreign money transactions.
“I think that could very well possibly happen,” was the best Fallon could muster.
Additionally, Republicans were hit with another setback on Wednesday afternoon when the FBI refused to hand over an informant file that Grassley and Comer claim outlines “an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions.”
Citing a “highly credible whistleblower,” Grassley and Comer have suggested the file would show Biden took bribes while he was vice president. Yet, in an interview with Newsmax last week, Grassley admitted their claims could be “untrue.”
The White House, meanwhile, has recently gone on offense. Prior to Comer’s press conference on Wednesday, White House spokesman Ian Sams issued a blistering statement to The Daily Beast.
“Congressman Comer has a history of playing fast and loose with the facts and spreading baseless innuendo while refusing to conduct his so-called ‘investigations’ with legitimacy,” Sams said. “He has hidden information from the public to selectively leak and promote his own hand-picked narratives as part of his overall effort to lob personal attacks at the President and his family.”
