‘Joe Biden has lied.’ With national stature rising, Kentucky’s Comer targets the ‘big dog’
James Comer is beginning to be recognized in airports.
Even before he took the gavel of the House Oversight Committee this month, the Tompkinsville, Ky., congressman was becoming synonymous with the incoming Republican opposition to the Biden administration.
In December alone, Comer appeared on Fox News programs 20 times. He’s hit Newsmax, NBC’s “Meet the Press,” CNN, CBS and CNBC too. Just this week, he was back on Sean Hannity’s program in prime-time alongside Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
“Yeah, I feel it,” the 50-year-old Comer told McClatchy in a recent interview. “I guess I’m in the middle of my five minutes of fame.”
Given the stack and breadth of the investigations he’s teeing up for 2023, the fame is likely to stretch on longer than the typical 15.
Comer once dreamed of being governor of Kentucky, a goal that could remain in reach down the road. But through his own tenacity and affability, along with the gift of fortuitous timing, he’s now embarking on one of the highest profile jobs in Washington: A committee chairmanship packing tremendous power and obvious rewards. It is not without risk.
“There’s a lot of pressure too – to deliver on some of these investigations that the Republican faithful have been wanting to happen for a long time,” Comer said. “What I’ve said to many people ... especially to more right-wing interviews I do: I don’t convict, I don’t indict, I don’t impeach. But we’re going to investigate.”
Even so, what he’s already asserted amounts to a staggering political indictment that could become the central point of contention in his investigatory quest: That the president lied.
Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability will probe the Biden administration’s handling of COVID-19, the overwhelmed southern border, the rushed departure from Afghanistan and even potentially the most recent revelation of classified documents discovered at the president’s private office.
But Comer has already made clear that a large chunk of the committee’s bandwidth will be devoted to getting to the bottom of whether President Joe Biden is compromised by foreign business dealings arranged by his son, Hunter and his brother, James, in hostile countries.
Comer can’t answer that quite yet.
“But what I do know is Joe Biden has lied about his knowledge and his involvement in what his family was doing with our adversaries across the globe,” Comer said in the interview.
He has sought to stress that his investigation is not aimed at Biden’s troubled son – whose sexual exploits and struggles with drugs are well-documented – but the president himself.
At a press conference in the U.S. Capitol following the election, Comer, flanked by members of the committee he’ll command, was emphatic about his target: “To be clear, Joe Biden is the big dog.”
Family ties in focus
When Donald Trump was in the White House, Democrats complained about the business dealings of the former president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. A $2 billion investment in Kushner’s company from a Saudi crown prince secured just months after Trump’s term had ended garnered particular attention.
Kushner was a top adviser to the president; Hunter Biden has no formal role in the Biden administration.
Still, Comer sees his investigation as an opportunity for a legislative fix that should hold broad appeal. In an ideal world, his process would highlight the trend of presidential family members leveraging their proximity to power overseas and then seek to redefine the legality and limitations of such actions.
The most obvious outcome would be a move to enhance transparency laws by forcing family members of the commander-in-chief to swiftly disclose who they’re doing business with, the precise terms of any loans or investments made and the foreign actors involved.
Comer said his hearings will show that Hunter’s deal to sell liquified natural gas to a Chinese energy company with ties to the Communist Party was not only blessed by his father while he was preparing to run for president, but at least partially, facilitated by him.
“Multiple whistleblowers have confirmed to Committee Republicans that from 2017 to 2021, the Biden family made promises to business associates that … those who worked with the Bidens in 2017 onward would reap the rewards in a future Biden administration,” Comer wrote in a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen this fall.
Though the letter shows Hunter providing his father’s personal cell phone, as his business partner, it does not directly implicate the future president promising anything to anyone.
More prescient is Comer’s request for the release of the suspicious activity reports – SARS – filed by banks, an action taken when there’s suspected money laundering or fraud.
Comer claims the Biden family has triggered 150 such reports and wants access to them for his investigation.
But he’s accused the Biden administration of changing the rules on how to access the reports, only serving to fuel distrust.
“Does anyone here doubt my suspicion that he changed the rules because his son and possibly himself had 150 suspicious activity reports?,” Comer asked at his U.S. Capitol presser. On Wednesday, Comer renewed his request to the Treasury Department for SARS, complaining of a “lack of a substantive response.”
The Biden administration claims it has simply erected a baseline threshold for how such sensitive law enforcement information can be accessed since there was never a formal process before.
“It is not a political process,” insists Michael Gwin, a spokesperson for the Treasury Department. “Since the beginning of this administration, Treasury has made SARs available in response to authorized committee requests and continues to engage on the process with any individual members seeking information.”
The tug-of-war over this trove of sensitive documents will likely be an ongoing feature of the investigation.
A shuffling and a quick ascent
When Comer arrived in Congress in 2017, he was the only member of his class to request a slot on Oversight, an astute decision that positioned his swift rise.
Then events took on a life of their own.
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, then the ranking member on Oversight, chose to move to the Judiciary Committee. Former Rep. Mark Meadows slid over to the White House to become Trump’s chief of staff. And suddenly, Oversight was populated with junior members.
“They were all no-name people like me,” Comer recalled.
While seniority means everything in the Senate, it means next to nothing in the House. In the summer of 2020, with the race to become the top Republican on the committee wide open, Comer made his move. He triumphed in a three-way race during a private vote of his colleagues.
“He’s such a nice guy, people kind of forget just how savvy he is,” said Rep. Drew Ferguson, a Georgia Republican. “He’s thinking three, four, five steps down the road.”
“Sometimes shuffling happens and you’ve got to be ready,” said Rep. Brett Guthrie of Kentucky. “He’s relatively new for being a chairman of this committee. It’s all kind of worked well for Jamie.”
Meadows, Jordan, Trey Gowdy, Jason Chaffetz, Darrell Issa. The list of Republicans who have sat atop Oversight in recent time have been high-voltage personalities who are known more for fiery combativeness than cool-headed deliberation.
Comer’s more evenly measured demeanor might offer a break from that hot streak, or the pressures of the job could gradually turn him into one of Capitol Hill’s more combustible personalities.
“He’s different and he’s different in a thoughtful, positive way,” said Rep. Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana. “Not to condemn others in the role, but many have sought fame through that position, notoriety through that position, cult of personality through that position, and I don’t think Comer seeks those things at all. I haven’t seen him as a political stair-climber and I haven’t seen him as one that cares about the number of Twitter followers he has. I see him as an individual that will bring a more low key, but very needed oversight to agency heads and checks and balances to the federal government branches.”
Democrats, naturally, are more skeptical.
Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat from Virginia who sits on the committee, said he’s observed Comer “in two dimensions.”
“He and I collaborated on some IT legislation together and we got it done, he collaborated with us on postal reform and we got it done. On the other hand, he can be a shrill partisan who reads from very partisan Republican talking points ... I’ve seen both sides of him,” Connolly said.
In watching Comer present his version of the Hunter Biden story, Connolly said that the Kentuckian “is reverting to the old Republican playbook of slander and innuendo, a loose affiliation with the facts and in some cases, downright fabricated breathless crises that of course amount to nothing.”
When pressed whether any issues merited probing of the Biden administration, Connolly demurred entirely, reverting to the litany of investigations surrounding Trump. The exchange is a vignette of the hard partisan history of the committee that no chairman is likely to break.
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Investigations come with political risk
Comer has pledged he will exert shrewd discipline with his gavel, limiting the number of subpoenas he issues and keeping his investigations concentrated on a handful of key overarching questions.
“When you send subpoenas out like junk mail, then you’re not going to have a real good end result. And I think the Democrats have over-subpoenaed,” Comer said of the more than 100 subpoenas the Jan. 6th Committee issued during its investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
There’s some indication that the public does want to know more about the business dealings of the president’s son. An Impact Research poll commissioned by the Wall Street Journal found that 57% of Americans favor a probe of Hunter Biden’s dealings, compared to just 47% who want Comer to investigate Dr. Anthony Fauci and the government’s handling of COVID-19.
But those numbers can change as quickly as the weather in Washington, especially once cable news turns its cameras on Comer’s hearing room.
Democrats still believe the Oversight Committee’s hearings on the Benghazi, Libya attacks severely damaged Hillary Clinton’s favorability in the run-up to her 2016 campaign. They’ve learned that highlighting potential Republican overreach will be crucial to their goal of protecting President Biden from a similar fate as he tiptoes towards a 2024 re-election.
“Our goal is to go on offense against the new House majority,” said Zac Petkanas, a Democratic strategist running the House Accountability War Room effort. “We are going to be pointing out the things that those investigations are distracting from.”
Even Karl Rove, the longtime Republican operative who counseled President George W. Bush, has warned that the onslaught of GOP investigations risks swamping Republicans’ legislative agenda.
“Republicans must resist the temptation to focus only on generating coverage and whipping up the base with oversight hearings. Theatrics alone won’t advance the conservative cause. In the coming months, it will fall to Republican committee chairmen and key members to balance oversight and legislating. The party’s success depends on getting this right,” Rove warned in a November op-ed.
Part of this will fall at the feet of Comer, who won’t be able to control the 221 other Republicans in the GOP majority, let alone other members of his committee who may see the limelight on Oversight as a straight line to guest requests from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.
“We’ve got to be focused. We can’t just blow with the wind. And every time somebody on Fox News gets offended by someone, that doesn’t mean someone needs to go in and subpoena them,” he said.
Comer appears to be cognizant of the political tension and the delicate balancing act he needs to achieve in order to satisfy the GOP’s base hunger to take down the Biden administration along with his own obligation to preserve the credibility of the committee.
The ultimate test will come if once an investigation is complete, he’ll have the ability to walk away from it if it doesn’t show what many members of his party desire.
“I do think if the facts lead to a place where there is no there, there, to quote a very famous saying, I think he will be able to say that,” said Hollingsworth. “Whether others will accept that or whether others will manufacture ‘a there’ when there is no there, that’s not for me to say.”
This story was originally published January 12, 2023 at 10:07 AM.
