It was a bad day for Republicans at the Comer Committee to Lie About Hunter Biden, AKA the House Oversight Committee.
And while the Fox News Chyron said 'HUNTER CRASHES HEARING AFTER DEFYING SUBPOENA' and 'REPUBLICANS SLAM HUNTER BIDEN CONTEMPT VOTE STUNT,' what actually happened was the witness showed up to testify on camera, which was the last thing Comer and his fellow Trump servants wanted. Their goal is to have Hunter Biden testify in secret so they can lie about what he said on Newsmax.
And Fox Legal Analyst Andy McCarthy admitted as much to Bill Hemmer. Fun fact: when a Fox talking head says "yeah, that's just all politics" you know they've lost.
ANDY MCCARTHY (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): I think people need to remember that this is politics Dana, not law.
As a legal matter, Hunter is playing with the house money. He knows that the Justice Department – even given everything that Chad just said – the Justice Department's not going to prosecute Hunter Biden for contempt of Congress. There is not only precedents that they can rely on to not do it. Not everybody in the J6 investigation got held – who defied a subpoena got held in contempt and then prosecuted. There were some witnesses like Mark Meadows, I think, they tried to refer him and the Justice Department said no.
But here the Justice Department could easily say look, this guy is facing two indictments. He wasn't going to testify anyway, so we choose not to exercise our discretion to prosecute.
He knows he's not going to be prosecuted and he knew when he showed up today that they were not actually going to question him. So it was a safe – it was an interesting calculation for him and certainly an eye-opening one -- but it was a pretty safe calculation for him he wasn't going to end up in a witness chair.
And when we talked about this the last time, my suggestion was that they should reissue the subpoena once they authorize the impeachment committee because in politics, which is what this is, you are either on offense or defense. And I think today the committee ends up being on defense when they ought to be on offense...
And then whoa Nelly we get into what exactly IS the politics involved in these tit-for-tat stunts? And all of a sudden Trump's name comes into it and the truth REALLY spills out:
MCCARTHY: Why is he not going to be prosecuted? Because the Biden Justice Department is not going to prosecute the president's son for contempt of Congress under circumstances where they oppose the congressional committee, politically they portray the congressional committee as basically executing a Trump-orchestrated theater, and they have a valid reason to exercise discretion not to prosecute him, namely, he is already facing two indictments, and in point of fact, if he ended up in the witness chair, he would take the fifth so he wouldn't testify anyway.
BILL HEMMER (CO-ANCHOR): Got it. Just to play this out with Congress, do they do this song and dance until November?
MCCARTHY: Yeah, of course they do. What they want, Bill, I think what they want here is while Trump is running this gauntlet of criminal prosecutions, his supporters in Congress want Biden and people connected to Biden to be running a gauntlet of something that's under the auspices of an impeachment committee. They want to have a parallel proceeding going on so they can argue their guy is more corrupt than our guy. It's really politics. I don't really see that there is much law to it here.
A rare moment of candor and truth on Fox? Catch me before I faint.
