Amid the Republican clamor to impeach Joe Biden this week, some in the rightwing media have been more skeptical about the process moving ahead despite no evidence of wrongdoing by the president.
Several figures at Fox News, a usually reliable mouthpiece for most Republican party initiatives in Washington DC, have shown signs of “impeachment fatigue”, appearing to question the motivation of the vote to authorize an impeachment inquiry that Biden himself has condemned as “a baseless political stunt that even Republicans in Congress admit is not supported by facts”.
Peter Doocy, Fox’s White House correspondent, was among the most vocal, telling viewers that “Republicans are still trying to connect” money that the president’s son, Hunter Biden, earned overseas to accounts controlled by Joe Biden.
“The House oversight committee has been at this for years, and they have so far not been able to provide any concrete evidence that Joe Biden personally profited from his son Hunter’s overseas business,” Doocy said.
“But they are going to try again with this impeachment inquiry.”
The same segment, on Fox Business Network’s Varney & Co, also aired a lengthy clip of a CNN interview with Eric Holder, attorney general during the Obama administration in which Biden was vice-president, reinforcing the message.
“I have seen no indication that there’s any kind of connection between the president and the actions for which his son has been charged,” Holder said, referring to last week’s criminal indictment against Hunter Biden in California on tax evasion charges.
“That doesn’t mean Donald Trump or Republicans are not going to try to draw those connections. They’ve tried to weaponize the justice department in ways inconsistent with the best traditions of the department.”
Fox Business giving so much time to views challenging the Republican impeachment action is at best unusual, given there is plenty of cheerleading for it elsewhere on the network. The segment was enhanced by Doocy’s emphasis that “in this latest 56-page indictment, the only Biden accused of wrongdoing is Hunter”.
Doocy is the son of Steve Doocy, a veteran Fox News host whose anti-impeachment views aired on Monday caused the Kentucky Republican James Comer, the oversight committee chair, to announce he would boycott the network for his criticism of the impeachment effort.
Comer’s committee, Doocy said, had “a lot of ledgers and spreadsheets but they have not connected the dots”.
Republicans “have not shown where Joe Biden did anything illegally”, he said.
The elder Doocy has a history with Comer, a combative figure whose honesty over the reasons for pressing ahead with the impeachment was called into question this week, along with his ethics.
As far back as May of this year, Doocy was facing down Comer over a bank memo the politician published, purporting to link the Bidens’ finances.
“You don’t actually have any facts to that point. You’ve got some circumstantial evidence,” Doocy told him. “And the other thing is, of all those names, the one person who didn’t profit … there’s no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegally.”
A third Fox on-air personality, Bret Baier, on Tuesday called the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, to account for the contradiction in comments he made during the Democrats’ 2019 impeachment of Trump, and in supporting steps towards a Biden impeachment now.
Airing a four-year-old clip of Johnson stating: “I hope and pray future Congresses can and will exercise greater restraint [on impeachment],” Baier wanted to know: “Why not exercise greater restraint now?”
Johnson, who in 2019 insisted a one-party impeachment would “bitterly and perhaps irreparably divide the nation”, claimed Republicans had “shown great restraint”, and that Trump was the victim of “rushed, sham impeachments”.
Johnson’s hypocrisy over the impeachments was further exposed this week by CNN, a more conventional home for contrary views.
Other right-leaning media outlets, if not condemning the impeachment inquiry vote, gave it less, or at least more balanced coverage. The online Drudge Report lost interest in the story by lunchtime on Thursday, dropping both a link to a Reuters news report on the inquiry vote, and an article from the Hill highlighting the lack of evidence against Biden.
Far-right outlets also had little, or no mention of the impeachment proceedings. The website of One America News was focused on Trump’s campaign appearances in Iowa as he pursues the Republican presidential nomination, while Newsmax sandwiched its downpage coverage between an advertisement for single people seeking companionship and a story about toxins in weight-loss drugs.
