The Republican party, unable to handle the reality that Joe Biden is a very normal American politician who happens to have one extremely messed-up son, has instead constructed a lurid alternate reality in which the president of the United States has masterminded a long-running global scheme to pocket millions while betraying his country.
The most recent accusation of criminality centers around an allegation that Biden accepted bribes from China in cooperation with his son Hunter. Back in May, James Comer, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, claimed he had a witness who would testify to Joe Biden’s involvement. Then, several days later, Comer said on Fox News that he had lost touch with the witness. “Well, unfortunately we can’t track down the informant. We are hopeful the informant is still there,” he told Maria Bartiromo.
Last week, the New York Post identified Comer’s star witness as Gal Luft, executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. And as recently as Sunday, Comer was insisting the informant was extremely credible. “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,” he boasted. “And this is their worst nightmare. Again, this is a credible witness that the FBI flew all the way to Brussels to interview.”
Now it turns out Luft is being charged by the Justice Department with working as an unregistered foreign agent on behalf of China, violating the Arms Export Control Act by trying to broker secret arms deals to multiple countries, and conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions by purchasing and selling Iranian oil.
Note that none of these charges involve doing anything illegal with Joe Biden. The first charges involve giving payments to an advisor to Donald Trump. According to the Justice Department, while Luft was serving on a think tank, he “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 without Luft or Individual-1 filing a registration statement as an agent of a foreign principal …”
Republicans have a habit of imputing all of Donald Trump’s crimes to Trump’s opponents, but this is really on the nose.
Obviously these crimes are merely alleged and have not been proved in a court of law. Still, you’d think it would make Republicans just a wee bit skeptical of Luft’s credibility as a witness. It’s almost as if he knew he had been caught committing a series of federal crimes and his best chance was to rally Republicans to his side by making a bunch of allegations against their current favorite target.
In the video he gave to the Post days earlier, Luft alleges he is being charged by the Justice Department because he has such devastating dirt on President Biden:
Indeed, conservatives are beginning to suggest Luft is being set up by the Justice Department to silence him:
Well, it’s possible. And if you’re convinced Joe Biden has spent years running and successfully concealing an immensely lucrative bribery scheme, and he has entire federal agencies working to cover it up, then this explanation might even sound plausible. But it probably isn’t the most likely explanation.
