New Year, New Targets

Obama, Joe and Hunter Biden -- Vanity Fair

The targets of congressional investigations and possible prosecutions in this New Year will be, since Republicans have recovered the US House of Representatives, much different than they were in the now discarded Old Year.

The Associated Press (AP) tells us that “The House Jan. 6 committee is shutting down, having completed a whirlwind 18-month investigation of the 2021 Capitol insurrection and having sent its work to the Justice Department along with a recommendation for prosecuting former President Donald Trump.”

It’s doubtful that a widely covered 18-month investigation of Trump can credibly be called a “whirlwind investigation.” Eighteen months is not a blink of the eye by anyone’s reckoning. The legacy media produced almost daily reports on the doings of the semi-bipartisan 18 month investigation.

The AP report mentions that the investigation panel “formally or informally interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, collected more than 1 million documents and held 10 well-watched hearings.” The real danger in such prolonged investigations is that those who sow the wind may reap the whirlwind (see Hosea 8:7). Swords are double edged, as are congressional investigation committees.

However, “Some of the committee’s work — such as videotape of hundreds of witness interviews — will not be made public immediately. The committee is sending those videos and some other committee records to the National Archives,” which by law would make them available in 50 years [emphasis mine].

Members of the committee said they didn’t release the sequestered documentation, though they had sufficient time to do so, because “it would have been too difficult to edit it and redact sensitive information” in a mere 18 months.

There is not a single reputable reporter in all the land who does not know that items send to the National Archives are buried unexamined in a mausoleum for half a century, therefore rendered unavailable  to reputable reporters and history writers. The National Archives are the “whitened sepultures” of Congress, a repository of intentionally secreted information where the truth – unexamined for 50 years – reposes and dies from benign neglect.

This stratagem may be foiled, the AP reports: “Incoming Republican leaders may try to get those materials much sooner, though. A provision in a package of proposed House rules released Sunday calls for the National Archives to transfer ‘any records related to the committee’ back to the House no later than Jan. 17.”

There should be no serious objections to the effort to apprise the public of necessary information from the two political stars of the January 6 investigation, “Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney, R-Wyo.,” who wrote in a departing message on Monday, “Accountability is now critical to thwart any other future scheme to overturn an election.”

Accountability in politics is often the log in the eyes of partisans who accuse their political foes of tearing up on account of the speck in their eyes (see Matthew 7:3-5).

Now that the January 6 deck has been cleared, next up on deck in a U.S. House controlled by Republicans – if the Republicans bestir themselves and choose a Speaker – will be multiple hearings, none of which, one hopes will last 18 months, examining the indiscretions of President Joe Biden and his wayward son Hunter, who made a fortune through his associations with Communists in China, Russia, Ukraine under a Russia friendly regime, and Uzbekistan, a Russian pilot fish.

One that has piqued the interest of some nonpartisan political writers is the extent to which the Biden administration used the various means at its disposal to kill what has become known as the Hunter Biden “laptop story” prior to the 2020 presidential elections. The Republican Party’s interest in Hunter’s orphaned laptop is not merely prurient, though Hunter appears to have envisioned his laptop production as an updated 1980’s sexploitation film.

We know the Biden administration used intelligence resources available to it such as the FBI to snuff an early, prescient, pre-election New York Post story on Hunter’s laptop as possible Russian disinformation designed to shift votes in a 2016 presidential election from Republican Donald Trump to Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, a misdirection now recognized by nearly everyone as an amusing but successful fiction.

Neither leading Republicans in Connecticut or Connecticut’s vigilant main stream media seem interested in querying any members of Connecticut’s recently re-elected U.S. Congressional Delegation, all fierce Trump-hunters, on the subject. Why embarrass Democrat office holders from whom you expect to receive news copy for the next few years? U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, who tends to turn prickly when confronted by sharp reportorial queries, has been unusually successful in fending off news pests during his long three decade run in Connecticut politics.