The Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee this week released, among other things, apparent evidence of a senior Justice Department official interfering in the federal investigation of Hunter Biden in order to remove President Joe Biden's name from a search warrant application.
That evidence was reflexively dismissed by Democrats, including one who acknowledged that he hadn't actually seen the email in question but nonetheless confidently asserted that it "probably has nothing to do with Joe Biden," according to Breitbart.
Had that member of Congress -- Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA), who sits on the House Oversight Committee -- actually looked at the email and an accompanying snippet from the referenced search warrant application, he would have seen that it had everything to do with Joe Biden.
On Wednesday, the House Ways and Means Committee voted along party lines to publicly release a trove of more than 100 documents, including emails and memos, that were provided by IRS whistleblowers Joseph Ziegler and Gary Shapley, who had been involved in the years-long federal investigation of Hunter Biden until earlier this year, to help bolster their prior sworn testimony about political interference and favoritism for the president's son.
Included in that release was an Aug. 2020 email from then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf, a top deputy of then-U.S. Attorney David Weiss, that took issue with a particular section included in a draft application for a search warrant against Blue Star Strategies, a lobbying firm contracted to assist Ukrainian energy firm Burisma with public relations matters while Hunter Biden served on the Ukrainian company's board of directors, according to CNN.
"As a priority, someone needs to redraft attachment B," Wolf wrote. "I am not sure what this is cut and pasted from but other than the attribution, location and identity stuff at the end, none if it is appropriate and within the scope of this warrant. Please focus on FARA evidence only. There should be nothing about Political Figure 1 in here."
FARA, of course, is short for the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which prohibits U.S. citizens from unregistered lobbying on behalf of foreign nations and entities, and an accompanying release of a snippet of the otherwise redacted search warrant application revealed that "Political Figure 1" was identified as former Vice President Joe Biden, who was then the Democratic presidential nominee and the "father of SUBJECT 1" in the probe, Hunter Biden.
Breitbart noted that Rep. Gomez appeared Thursday on CNN and laughed off the apparent implications of that email when he was asked by a co-host, "What about the allegations in those 700 pages that were released yesterday that prosecutors put up roadblocks to try to protect President Biden -- I see you laughing -- but they’re alleging that, for example, that they took Joe Biden’s name off a warrant. What do you make of all of that?"
"First, I haven’t seen that, but I know that the information that was released by Ways and Means was refuted by one question of one particular reporter," Gomez replied without further elaboration. "The documents that they have, I believe that probably has nothing to do with Joe Biden. I don’t think it does."
"In the end, if there is clear evidence, let the DOJ investigate and let them follow the facts," he added, oblivious to the fact that this information was released precisely because the DOJ refused to fully investigate the facts as they became known. "But here’s the thing -- the facts don’t lead to Joe Biden. They lead to Hunter Biden, and Hunter Biden is not an elected official and he’s not the president of the United States."
The CNN report on the release of the trove of documents from the GOP-led Ways and Means Committee was scarcely better than Rep. Gomez's reply, as though the network's reporters apparently did actually read the emails and memos in question nonetheless offered up a litany of excuses to downplay the increasingly evident connections between Joe Biden and his son Hunter's foreign business dealings -- connections that Biden previously stridently denied.
For what it is worth, aside from Gomez and a few others, most Democrats and the White House are now no longer flatly denying the existence of any connections between the president and his son's business dealings but rather have shifted the narrative to dismiss the damning revelations as a mere "distraction" from the important work of Congress and the administration to meet the more pressing needs of the American people.
As for Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-MO), he said in a statement about the released documents, "The growing body of evidence further calls into question the Justice Department’s attempted sweetheart plea deal for Hunter Biden, and the reasons for appointing the architect of that plea deal as the special counsel for Hunter Biden’s case, in light of officials’ efforts to protect President Biden and his son."
"This evidence makes clear Hunter Biden’s business was selling the Biden 'brand' and that access to the White House was his family’s most valuable asset -- despite official claims otherwise," the chairman added. "The Committee continues to take the appropriate steps in this investigation and documents were shared with Committee Democrats before today’s executive session. We have promised to go where the facts lead us and that is exactly what we will do to get answers for the American people."
