Heather Cox Richardson

Leaving today’s classified briefing on the Chinese spy balloon, Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) told CNN’s Manu Raju that he thinks the U.S. “made the right decision to wait and shoot down the suspected spy balloon.” “I believe that the administration, the president, our military and intelligence agencies, acted skillfully and with care. At the same time, their capabilities are extraordinarily impressive,” Romney said.

House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and House majority leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) both continued to maintain that the administration should have shot the balloon down earlier.

Meanwhile, the House Republican majority has begun its oversight hearings, and so far, they are not yielding the results the House Republicans intended. From the “voter fraud” investigations of the 1990s to the 2016 investigations into Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, Republicans have used “investigations” to spread the idea of Democratic wrongdoing.

In 2015, McCarthy made it clear how he saw such investigations. He told Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity that “everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi Special Committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”

But a number of things might have drawn the fangs of such propaganda. Trump’s heavy-handed attempts to force Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing—but not actually performing—an investigation into Hunter Biden’s work on the board of the Ukrainian company Burisma in 2019 and the repeated “investigations” into the 2020 election, all of which have come up empty handed, have heightened awareness that such investigations are not honest. Meanwhile, the congressional investigation into the events of January 6 have illustrated what it actually looks like to engage in an investigation that produces real evidence.

At the same time, the reality that Trump himself committed many of the misdeeds Republicans are now trying to pin on Democrats, and that witnesses will say so, means that the Republican narrative will have a significant check on it. Journalists and Democratic lawmakers are already calling out Republican hypocrisy and putting on the record that Republicans are wasting time and taxpayers’ money to grandstand.

Finally, McCarthy has put on the committees a number of extremist representatives who are not well versed in the law or arguments, meaning they are reinforcing the impression that they are simply political hacks rather than serious investigators of a real problem.

Yesterday the Oversight and Accountability Committee investigated Twitter for allegations that the company hid the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop before the election of 2020. They insist that evidence will show that the government suppressed right-wing voices on Twitter. Right off the bat, there were issues with this argument. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution establishes that the government cannot abridge free speech or the freedom of the press. It does not demand that private entities must allow all speech.

Neither Hunter Biden nor Joe Biden was in government in 2020, and Twitter is not a government entity.

But Donald Trump was in office, and witnesses testified that the Trump White House routinely demanded that tweets be taken down. The hearing devoted time to a discussion of Trump’s attempt to get Twitter to take down a tweet by model Chrissy Teigen who, after Trump insulted her on Twitter, referred to him as a “pssy ss b*tch” (a description that is now in the Congressional Record). The White House contacted Twitter immediately to ask it to take down this “derogatory statement directed toward the president.” (Twitter left it up.)

Since Biden became president, according to Twitter’s former head of safety and integrity Yoel Roth and former chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, the Biden White House has never made such requests. Twitter’s former deputy general counsel James Baker testified: “I’m aware of no unlawful collusion with or direction from any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation.”

The executives said Twitter initially slowed the spread of articles about Biden’s laptop from the New York Post for 24 hours because the story “at first glance bore a lot of similarities to the 2016 Russian hack and leak operation targeting the DNC.” Roth said, “[W]e made a mistake.”

Anika Collier Navaroli, a former member of Twitter’s content moderation team, told Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) that Twitter had taken down a tweet in which Trump had called for Ocasio-Cortez and three other Democratic congresswomen to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came,” because “go back…to where you came from” was in violation of Twitter’s policies against abuse of immigrants. Two days later, Twitter changed the policy. Navroli agreed that “Twitter changed their own policy after the president violated it in order to essentially accommodate his tweet.”

The Republicans’ questioning was less pointed. Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) spent their time complaining loudly to the Twitter executives about their own bans for violating the company’s policies. Greene insisted, “You violated my First Amendment rights,” and Boebert yelled, “Who the hell do you think you are?”

Bloomberg Law said the Republican probe began “with a thud.” “House Republicans failed in the opening salvo of their investigation into the finances of Joe Biden’s family to produce evidence substantiating their claims that US intelligence officials worked with Twitter Inc. to suppress an unflattering 2020 news story on the president’s son.”

Today the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held its first meeting under chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), who promised to look at “the politicization of the FBI and DOJ and attacks on American civil liberties.” There are twelve Republicans and nine Democrats on the committee.

Today’s hearing began with testimony from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee colluded with the Russians in 2016. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), who has complained that the government impeded his investigation of Hunter Biden’s laptop; former Democratic representative from Hawaii and now Fox News Channel personality Tulsi Gabbard; and conservative lawyer Jonathan Turley also testified. They rehashed old complaints, but no one produced any new evidence.

The top Democrat on the committee, Stacey Plaskett, from the U.S. Virgin Islands, said: “I’m deeply concerned about the use of this select subcommittee as a place to settle scores, showcase conspiracy theories, and advance an extreme agenda that risks undermining Americans’ faith in our democracy.” Constitutional law professor Jamie Raskin (D-MD), sporting a purple bandana from his cancer treatments, pointed out the many times Trump abused his power to reward friends and punish enemies and said, “If weaponization of the Department of Justice has any meaning, this is it.”

Raskin also recalled that in August, Jordan said an investigation would “help frame up the 2024 race, when I hope and I think President Trump is going to run again. And we need to make sure that he wins.” Raskin said the committee was “all about restoring Donald Trump, the twice-impeached former president, to the office he lost by seven million votes in 2020 and tried to steal back in a political coup and violent insurrection against our constitutional order on January 6, 2021.”

Early in the proceedings, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice mused: “It is a bit odd to me that Fox News isn’t carrying the ‘weaponization’ hearing live, since it is basically Fox porn.” After Raskin testified, he wrote: “I’m beginning to understand why Fox News thought it might be a bad idea to carry this live.”

And on the topic of January 6, after months of negotiations between Pence’s lawyers and federal prosecutors, special counsel Jack Smith has issued a subpoena to former vice president Mike Pence for documents and testimony. Observers suggest this move is a sign that the investigation into former president Trump for his behavior over the attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election is moving into a new phase.

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