This is why they want to fold the FBI Director in contempt?

Created
Wed, 07/06/2023 - 02:00
Updated
Wed, 07/06/2023 - 02:00
You’ve got to be joking. Philip Bump unravels the looney tunes James Comer and Chuck Grassley jihad against Chris Wray for failing to “turn over” a document they’ve already seen. It’s a complicated story and it’s very, very stupid so take a deep breath: Over the course of 2019, President Donald Trump and his allies were focused on the electoral threat posed by former vice president Joe Biden, the candidate leading in polling for the 2020 Democratic nomination. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani thought he had a useful angle to that end: an allegation from a former Ukrainian official that Biden had leveraged American funding to benefit a company for which Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, worked. That official, Viktor Shokin, met with Giuliani, then Trump’s attorney, to allege that the vice president had pressured Ukraine to fire him to block a probe into the energy company Burisma. The claim didn’t withstand scrutiny. Shokin’s ouster was a multinational effort predicated on the prosecutor’s failure to address corruption. Biden’s insistence that the United States would withhold loan guarantees if Shokin retained his position was not because Biden wanted to end a probe into Burisma; there was no such probe by any independent account. If anything, his ouster was a function of his not investigating companies such as Burisma. Giuliani was undeterred. Even after House Democrats had begun an impeachment inquiry into the Trump-Giuliani effort to force the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation into Biden, Giuliani continued to try to gin up allegations. He traveled to Ukraine…