Shameless harassment of Hunter Biden

Created
Wed, 15/03/2023 - 03:30
Updated
Wed, 15/03/2023 - 03:30
Jennifer Rubin on the latest Hunter Biden harassment: Right-wing House Republicans have left little doubt that they want to spend the bulk of their time and energy investigating phony conspiracies and made-up scandals. Their main obsession appears to be Hunter Biden, whose very name has become a buzzword in right-wing media. The contents of one of his laptops, revealed in 2020, have inspired a fantastical conspiracy theory that has been comprehensively debunked by, among others, Asha Rangappa, a senior lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs and former FBI agent. She persuasively applies a “a basic three-part formula” employed by psychologists who study conspiracy theories “for disentangling truth from fiction, one that activates the rational, analytical side, rather than the lizard, fight-or-flight side, of the brain.” Her takeaway: The conspiracy theorists have reached the “temper tantrum” stage of the Hunter Biden “scandal.” […] Obviously, there is no legitimate basis for congressional “oversight” of the matter. And that brings us to the current faceoff between the Republican chairmen of the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, on one side, and 50 or so former intelligence officials, on the other. In October 2020, these officials crafted a statement that appeared in Politico alleging that appearance of the laptop and emails purporting to relate to Hunter Biden’s time on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” As my Post colleague Glenn Kessler has explained, the statement’s claims — in contrast to news reports and Democrats’ description of the claims —…