'Paranoia and distortion': Chef's recipe of House GOP inquiries

23 January 2023

With Republicans now in control of the U.S. House of Representatives, the public can expect a lot of partisan investigations of President Joe Biden and his allies — investigations that will be covered extensively and given top priority by right-wing media outlets. A deluge of “whataboutism” from those outlets will conflate apples and oranges by equating probes from House committees with the type of investigations that President Donald Trump is facing from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis and others.

In an article published in The Bulwark on January 23, journalist Jill Lawrence lays out some major flaws of a new House subcommittee that will be led by the “performative” Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. Jordan will be probing what he calls the “weaponization” of the federal government, including investigations of Trump.

“The House Oversight Committee’s crammed investigations menu is perilous for President Joe Biden, from the Afghanistan withdrawal, the Southern border, and Hunter Biden’s activities to the recently discovered classified documents at Biden’s residences and a think tank once associated with him,” Lawrence explains. “But beyond the political risk for Biden and his legacy, there is a larger danger for the country — specifically the Judiciary Committee’s new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. Jordan has long complained about the supposed persecution of conservatives by the FBI and other agencies. Now, he’s claimed broad powers to do something about it — including mucking around in open investigations…. The tragedy is that, when it comes to Jim Jordan’s investigations, facts may not matter. What will matter, painfully so, is how shoveling paranoia and distortion into the news stream will further undermine trust in the U.S. government, its integrity, its motives, and its elections.”

Former Rep. David Jolly of Florida – a conservative ex-Republican-turned-Independent and frequent guest on MSNBC – is a proud Never Trumper and highly critical of the “weaponization” probe that Jordan will be leading.

Jolly told The Bulwark that "coming off Donald Trump’s stolen election fake narrative and the violent insurrection of January 6th, this subcommittee will stoke a toxic mix of insurrection themes. It will provide justification for Americans to feel they are under threat from their government.”

Lawrence emphasizes the disparity between the investigations of Trump’s role in the January 6th, 2021 insurrection and those which Jordan and other House Republicans have in mind in 2023.

“Another reason for alarm is the weaponization panel’s charge to dig into ‘ongoing criminal investigations,’” Lawrence writes. “This last-minute addition to its portfolio covers, for example, federal probes of the Capitol insurrection, Trump’s role in it, his many attempts to nullify the 2020 election, the hundreds of sensitive and top-secret documents he took to Mar-a-Lago in apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act, and the August 2021 FBI search that came after 14 months of requests and a subpoena for the documents.”

Lawrence adds that "it’s galling that conservatives complain about all this as if the conduct were normal and the investigations abusive. As if Trump had done nothing wrong. As if the GOP itself had never ‘weaponized’ the government with its endless Benghazi investigation that (Speaker Kevin) McCarthy gloated had lowered Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers, for instance, or Trump-era Attorney General William Barr’s preemptive whitewash of the deeply damaging Mueller Report. As if the new panel itself — approved 222-211 on straight party lines—were not, as Amanda Carpenter writes, itself weaponizing the House.”

Read the full story at The Bulwark.

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