Dem
51
GOP
49
Well, we feel like damn fools. In the last couple of weeks, we have written three items (see here, here, and here) about the claims that Rep. James Comer (R-KY) has made against Joe Biden. In short, Comer claims to have a whistleblower and an informant who have shared very troubling things about the President. Troubling things that... Comer just can't quite give any evidence for, at the moment.
When we wrote those items, we thought there really was an informant, though we presumed one of questionable character and relevance. Silly us! This weekend, Comer appeared on Fox to share the "news" that the informant is "missing." How unfortunate! Initially, Comer suggested that the reason he or she is missing is because they are "in the spy business." However, he eventually moved on to implying that the White House had the informant rubbed out:
Nine of the ten people that we've identified that have very good knowledge with respect to the Bidens, they are one of three things, Maria. They are either currently in court, they're currently in jail, or they're currently missing. So, it's of the utmost importance that the FBI work with us to be able to try to identify what research they've done, what investigations they've done, because we have people that wanna come forward but honestly, Maria, they fear for their lives.
The Bulwark's headline was pretty on point: "Here Comes the 'Biden Kill List.'"
This playbook is getting so old it's started receiving AARP mailers. There were, of course, countless claims that Bill Clinton had Vince Foster and dozens of other "enemies" murdered. Then, during Hillary Clinton's campaign, she was accused of complicity in the deaths of Chandra Levy, unspecified members of the military, one of her aides, and some indeterminate number of sex-trafficked children as part of Pizzagate. More recently, the conspiracists have speculated that Hillary was behind the death of former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe. Now Biden is getting the treatment.
It's no surprise that Comer, et al., go to this place. Their base is already primed to believe the worst of Democrats and, conveniently, dead people never speak up and push back at these tall tales. Especially if those dead people never existed in the first place. In the first of the three items above, we specifically noted that we were going to (partly) reserve judgment, because the claims that led to the Watergate scandal also seemed pretty outlandish at the outset. That was clearly a grave error, and from here on out, we will assume that any claim Comer and his ilk (ahem, Jim Jordan, R-OH) make about Joe Biden and his family is a flat-out lie, until we see hard evidence to the contrary. (Z)