Pack it in, folks: Tomi Lahren has declared the Republican-led impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden officially dead in the water.
In a Sunday appearance on Fox News’ Media Buzz, Lahren told host Howard Kurtz that the GOP would do better to focus on attacking Biden’s policies in the hopes of defeating him in November’s general election.
“I gotta say, as somebody who does believe there’s plenty of evidence here, I think that this has failed optically for Republicans,” Lahren said. “And they’ve done good work—obviously Jim Jordan, Comer have done great work on this.”
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Despite that, “optically, it does make it seem as though they’re beating up on someone with addiction issues,” she continued, referencing Hunter Biden, a central figure in the probe. “That’s exactly what the media wanted it to look like. That’s how they framed it. And unfortunately, that’s what’s coming to fruition.”
Lahren, who hosts Tomi Lahren Is Fearless on the conservative sports network OutKick, concluded that the inquiry was “falling flat” with both viewers and voters.
“So I would encourage Republicans—I know you want to get to the bottom of this—but let’s focus on the election,” she said. “Let’s focus on the failed policies of Joe Biden.”
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) retweeted a clip of the segment on Sunday afternoon, adding, “That’s all she wrote folks. Even crazy Tomi Lahren thinks this thing is over.”
The investigation is now staggering into its 14th month, with Republicans yet to produce any compelling evidence of the president’s alleged wrongdoing out of dozens of hours of interviews and more than 100,000 pages of documents, a statistic given by a House Oversight Committee source to CBS News last week.
On Wednesday, Hunter Biden testified for more than six hours before two Republican-led House committees, vehemently maintaining that Joe Biden was never involved in nor profited from his business ventures. The first son’s closed-door deposition came days after a key witness to the investigation, a former FBI informant named Alexander Smirnov, was criminally indicted for offering federal agents fake claims about the Bidens’ supposed corruption. Smirnov claimed to investigators shortly after that he had contacts within Russian intelligence.
A day later, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said Smirnov’s arrest had ended the inquiry “in substance if not in form.” But Republicans have indicated that they intend to continue hunting for a smoking gun, continuing to insist that their investigation remains alive even as, as Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) recently put it to Time, it’s clear that it was over long ago.
