A Washington Post piece points to how House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.). and other Congressional Republicans are using leaked FBI info to float out in fundraising efforts …
The leaked information has NOT been proven to be criminal or even in the right context sometimes….
But the effort is to use the Biden slights to juice up political points against the Democratic President and to RAISE MONEY for Republicans….
In fact?
Newly elected House Speaker Johnson is said to be hung-ho on going ahead with further ‘investigating’ President Biden ….
Working with Comer and others who are fundraising off all of this….
The point, instead, is that I received a pitch Monday evening encouraging me to contribute to House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.).
“40 FBI Informants. In the Biden Family. For 15 years,” the message read. “It’s Chairman Comer and you need to read this”: — followed by a link to a page exploring the theme.
A fundraising page, hosted by the site WinRed.
If you’ve visited one of these pages in the past, you are familiar with the aesthetic: a large photo of the candidate or beneficiary of the fundraising effort, with a thin column of text meant to engage you before you make your commitment.
In the case of the page from Comer, the text at left focused on this assertion about FBI informants.
“For 15 years, Credible Informants have been providing criminal information against the Biden’s to FBI Field Offices across the country,” it stated, typos included, “and for 15 years, everytime the information has been brought to FBI HQ, the leadership of the FBI shuts it down.”
And so on — Comer presents himself as a warrior for the truth, standing up to the media and the left-wing hordes, etc. Then the money ask appears….
…
In May, Comer and [Sen. Chuck] Grassley jointly alleged that President Biden had been involved in a bribery scheme involving an unidentified foreign actor. After weeks of haranguing the FBI to release documentation of an interview in which an informant described being told about that allegation (and the FBI explaining both that it was wary of exposing its informant and that the claim was unverified), the pair simply made it public. No evidence corroborating the claim has emerged; evidence undercutting it is generally ignored….
…
Comer, Grassley and their allies have showered unproved allegations onto Biden and (mostly) his family with the (probably intentional) effect of contributing to a miasma of wrongdoing. And those allegations then become jumping-off points for vacuuming up the essential currencies of the political right: credulous Fox News articles or appearances and fundraising pitches.
That Comer is raising money off Grassley’s claim — raising money by exaggerating the claim to assert that there were 40 informants for 50 years — is the point. This wasn’t his work; it was simply an allegation that those who would respond to an “I’m fighting Biden for you” appeal would find compelling. I once referred to Comer’s efforts as a fishing expedition, but he’s not simply throwing out bait to see what he gets, he’s throwing out as much bait as he can to vacuum up as many fish as there are in the sea….