Here’s how dishonest James Comer’s Biden allegations are

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Over the past 24 hours, with a vote to formalize the impeachment investigation into President Biden looming in the House, Republican lawmakers have been pressed to identify what, exactly, they think Biden did. After all, a lot of Republicans — including Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) — have publicly rejected the idea that evidence implicating Biden in wrongdoing exists.

So what is their much-hyped evidence pointing at? Asked that question, lawmakers’ answers varied dramatically, which is what happens when you ask a novice fisherman what he hopes to catch.

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), for example, told CNN that “there’s plenty of proof” of Biden wrongdoing, presumably involving the crimes Donalds identified during a speech from the House floor: “bribery, co-conspirator to [Foreign Agents Registration Act] violations — and we can go on and on.” He did not go on and on.

Asked by Fox News’s Sean Hannity whether Republicans were looking at the investigation as “a bribery scandal, a money laundering scandal and an influence-peddling scandal” involving the president, the three Republicans running the impeachment inquiry offered different answers. House Ways and Means Chairman Jason T. Smith (R-Mo.) said it could be “a multitude of numerous items.” House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said “bribery,” “abuse of power” and “obstruction of justice” were what they were looking at.

Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio), and Oversight Committee’s Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) discuss the Biden impeachment inquiry. (Video: Ross Godwin/The Washington Post)

House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) offered Hannity a briefer answer: Yes, that’s what they were investigating. All of that. At once. In obvious hopes that something incriminating might shake loose.

On Tuesday morning, he appeared on Fox Business to speak with Maria Bartiromo, one of the primary boosters of this Republican effort.

“We’ve talked about the potential of money laundering and bribery,” Bartiromo said. “What can you tell us about the evidence?”

Comer’s response was a very useful distillation of the purported evidence — and a good demonstration of why he and his allies are scrambling to figure out how to summarize their argument.

Here’s what he said — and how it is misleading or dishonest.

“We’ve got over $24 million that we know of — we think there’s more — $24 million that the Bidens have taken in.” This is untrue. In August, The Washington Post looked at the payments on which Comer’s committee has focused. (There has been no significant new revelation from Oversight since that point.) We found that, yes, millions of dollars were paid to Joe Biden’s son Hunter and his business partners — but that most of that money went to people other than Hunter Biden, James Biden (the president’s brother) or any other member of the Biden family.

Our assessment “works out to be about $23 million in total payments from foreign sources,” we wrote at the time. “Of that, nearly $7.5 million can be fairly attributed as going to ‘Bidens,’ but virtually all of it went to Hunter Biden.” None of it, we added, had been traced to Joe Biden. Since that point, the Oversight Committee has invested a great deal of energy highlighting payments from James Biden to his brother and from Hunter Biden’s law firm to his father — in both cases, demonstrably in repayment of loans.

Notice, though, how this all nonetheless becomes “the Bidens,” shoving Joe Biden up against his son and brother in hopes that he’ll be stained by implication.

“They’ve run them through a series of LLCs that even the banks said serve no purposes. We call that a shell company. [A] shell company is a company that doesn’t produce a good or service or has any assets or anything like that.” In that August assessment, we also considered this issue of “shell companies,” noting that the term has a gauzy definition. But most of the corporate entities formed by Hunter Biden and his partners did have stated purposes. One, for example, was the aforementioned Biden law firm.

On Thursday morning, the Associated Press reported that Comer himself used a “shell company” for real estate purposes — something that some of the “shell companies” involved in his investigation also did. (Bartiromo asked him about it; Comer claimed that it was an example of the reporter’s “financial illiteracy.”)

“And then they laundered the money down to the Biden family members — 10 Biden family members — and we say ‘launder’ through the Suspicious Activity Reports that were filed with Treasury. Six different banks accused the Bidens of money laundering. That’s a serious crime, Maria.” It is true that money laundering is a serious crime. It is not demonstrably true that six banks accused “the Bidens” of money laundering.

Comer has for months pointed to Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR) centered on “the Biden family,” which here again primarily means Hunter Biden. House Democrats note that many of the SARs include “erroneous or unfounded claims” and none focus on the president.

The Republican uses the word “launder” specifically because it sounds nefarious. “Shell companies laundering money” sounds worse than “Hunter Biden’s law firm paid one of his kids a couple hundred bucks.” Which describes one of those “10 family members”: A source with direct access to the bank records provided to Oversight tells The Post that one of the president’s grandchildren, then under 18, received $200 and $500 (several months apart) from Owasco PC, the LLC that was Hunter Biden’s law firm. In total, Hunter’s child received $9,000 in 10 payments from the firm over two years, according to the available records — most $500 or less. Why isn’t clear, but this does not seem like the traditional understanding of “money laundering.”

Other payments to family members include those loan repayments to Joe Biden and payments to Hallie Biden, Hunter’s former sister-in-law with whom he was “sharing expenses,” according to a statement made to NBC News earlier this year. That is not evidence of a serious crime.

“So we know they got tens of millions of dollars from bad people in bad countries. We don’t know what exactly they did.” Comer uses this argument a lot, too, in part because it differentiates Biden’s work (legal and consulting) from the more tangible work of the Trump family, which involved a lot more LLCs and a lot more foreign money. Devon Archer, once Hunter Biden’s business partner, offered testimony explaining that this is what Hunter Biden provided to clients. But it’s more useful for Comer to imply that it’s vaguer than it is — and that the people with whom Biden worked were uniformly “bad people.”

“We fear Joe Biden is compromised. We fear this is one reason that he’s soft on China. We fear this is one reason that he obviously fired the prosecutor who was investigating Hunter’s corrupt energy company in Ukraine when he was vice president.” We can set aside the “soft on China” thing as subjective. But Comer also makes two objective claims about Biden’s actions, the first of which is the one about Hunter Biden’s work for that energy company, Burisma.

Comer’s presentation is a mixture of falsehood and exaggeration. Joe Biden didn’t fire anybody: He was the face of the Obama administration’s effort to get Ukraine’s prosecutor general fired in 2015, an effort joined by other international actors. There’s no evidence that the prosecutor general was investigating the energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat and plenty of evidence that the prosecutor was, in fact, corrupt.

Archer, whose testimony is so often cited by Comer and his allies because he mentioned that Hunter Biden would at times put incoming calls from his father on speakerphone, testified that he was told that the prosecutor’s firing was bad for Burisma.

“We fear this is why he didn’t put sanctions on the Russian oligarch after she had given his family $3.5 million.” Archer had something to say about this, too.

Comer is referring to the former wife of the mayor of Moscow. In April, The Post looked at the assertion that Hunter Biden had been paid this money (“his family,” in Comer’s presentation) and found no evidence for it. Instead, we reported, it appeared that the money had gone to Archer.

In his testimony, that’s what Archer said.

The payment from Elena Baturina was “a total Rosemont Realty” venture, he said, referring to his own real estate corporation. He said that Hunter Biden met Baturina once, and that he was “on the advisory board for a minute” but that Hunter Biden “was not involved” in the deal. He was asked later whether Hunter Biden had raised any capital from Baturina and replied, “No.”

But here’s James Comer, four months later, suggesting not only that Hunter Biden did receive this money, but that it somehow influenced his father’s policy decisions. Because, at the end of the day, that’s what he and his colleagues want to convey. No evidence about Joe Biden’s unacceptable actions but, instead, that Joe Biden is somehow linked to a seedy universe of criminality — a link and a universe they’re still struggling to manifest.