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House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer just hasn’t had much luck this year. The Kentucky Republican has a rather specific goal — the congressman seems convinced he can uncover serious evidence against President Joe Biden — but for months, watching Comer has been like watching a hapless politician repeatedly slip on the same banana peel.
Things seemed to go from bad to worse in May, when the powerful committee chairman pointed to an “informant” he couldn’t find. Comer appeared on Fox News to explain that he had an important anti-Biden witness, but the congressman just wasn’t sure where he was.
“We’re hopeful that the informant is still there,” he said on the air. Asked if his anti-Biden informant “is now missing,” the Republican replied, “Well, we’re hopeful that we can find the informant.”
As it turns out, there’s some good news on this front — or at least news that might seem “good.” Comer boasted on Newsmax last night, in reference to his alleged witness, “He’s very credible and the people on MSNBC who made fun of me when I said we had an informant that was missing, they should feel like fools right now. And this is their worst nightmare.”
Well, I’m not in a position to speak on behalf of my network colleagues, but given what we now know about Comer’s “credible” source, I’m not feeling especially foolish. A Washington Post analysis summarized:
The Justice Department on Monday announced that it had unsealed an indictment against Gal Luft, a director at a D.C.-area think tank. According to federal prosecutors, he is also someone who violated Iranian sanctions, trafficked weapons and aided the Chinese government without registering as a foreign agent.
And how does Gal Luft relate to Comer’s crusade? Because Luft is the Republicans’ “missing” informant. In fact, when Comer couldn’t find him, it was because he’d allegedly skipped bail.
Yes, the man the House Oversight Committee chairman and his GOP colleagues are counting on for anti-Biden evidence is the same man who’s been charged with being an unregistered agent for China, trying to broker secret arms deals, violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, and lying to federal agents.
This is the guy Comer, as recently as last night, described as “very credible.”
No, seriously.
In fact, the unsealed indictment added that the suspect, while working as an alleged unregistered Chinese agent, “agreed to covertly recruit and pay, on behalf of principals based in China, a former high-ranking U.S. government official (Individual-1), including in 2016 while the former official was an adviser to the then-President-elect, to publicly support certain policies with respect to China.”
In other words, Comer’s witness actually stands accused of having done illegal work with Team Trump, not the Bidens.
But wait, the right says, maybe the fact that federal prosecutors have charged Luft is part of the conspiracy. Maybe, these conservative voices argue, this is itself evidence of the nefarious plot.
That’s a nice try, I suppose, but the timeline doesn’t work. The indictment was apparently handed down last fall — before the House GOP majority was even elected — and as the Post’s Aaron Blake explained last night, “To be clear, Gal Luft indictment didn’t come out of nowhere after claiming whistleblower status. His Chinese oil exec ally was arrested in 2017, after which indictment says Luft wasn’t on U.S. soil. False statements charge dates to March 2019.”
In other words, Luft appears to have committed alleged crimes, was charged, and then became a sought-after witness for congressional Republicans. If the latest GOP conspiracy theories made sense, that’s not the order of events we’d expect to see.
The Post’s Philip Bump concluded, “The pattern here is not that government investigators are seeking to throw roadblocks in Comer’s path. Instead, it’s that Comer and others on the right keep building paths into quicksand — and then have to pretend they’re not sinking.”
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics.”
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