The articles of impeachment were fairly narrow, related only to inciting the crowd. If they wanted to there is a lot outside of that they could point to and bring new articles of impeachment.
There isn’t actually a double jeopardy element to the impeachment process either, although there would be a strong norm around that idea.
There is it…already announced they’re going to be investigating Hunter Biden for the thing.
which is probably about as much precision we will ever hear about what they are investigating.
Although to be fair. The GOP lead house seem to have already crime under control
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It doesn’t matter. All they need is for it to be rumbling along in the background for the next two years.
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Didn’t this all start while Trump was in the white house with the department of Justice under his influence? If there was a crime (that could be prosecuted) they’d have tared and feathered him already. That’s why he sent Giuliani over to manufacture some crap outside of government channels, or that’s what i remember. I can’t believe they’ll have anything new now. They’ll muddy the water a whole bunch though 
.
They literally just got whooped in the mid-terms for focusing on this exact kind of nonsense social war.
Hunter or crime?
I was reading recently that the DOJ might be on the brink of charging Hunter Biden with something to do with having a gun without a licence. There’s also the possiblility of fraud /false accounting charges. (Both relatively minor offences I think.)
If they were to charge might that not serve to take the wind out of any ‘investigation’ the Republicans are cooking up ?
Best plan would be to put Hunter and Jared in a room and lock the door.
With those two in the room there’d be no need to lock the door 
There is a legit criminal investigation into his taxes and illegally purchasing a gun. The problem is they need to tie it to Joe, “the big guy”, in ways that case doesnt so they need something else. What they want is a continuation of the original Ukraine issue, where Hunter allegedly peddled influence in ways that affected policy of the Obama administration. This was the basis for the first Trump impeachment and if you go back to that, the argument from the GOP fanatics were completely at odds with the known facts. Their “just asking questions” were questions to which the answers were already known and part of the contemporary public record. It didnt matter though, they were still able to spin a story out of it their people ate up. So, this isnt supposed to be real. That is not how the RW information system works. They just need something real they can point to and then misrepresent what it is and what it means, and make all sorts of insinuation about unsupported conclusions.
It’s basically just like discussing nutrition research -
“this article says sugar is toxic”
“Have you read it? Is says no such thing.”
“Oh, you go ahead and keep eating that toxic stuff then, sugar boy.”
Hunter - they’ve done this to death already. They released a film about it with Gina Carano and still no one cared.
Since Trump was impeached twice, and since Congress has investigated/is investigating the attempted coup on January 6 and ensuing Capital riots, the Republicans need to whip something up to soothe themselves with news that the Dems are at it.
The word that has come into the vernacular is whataboutism.
In this instance it is a joke. Except it isn’t. As the ‘crimes’ in one side are egregious, and should result in jail terms for multiple people, including the former President.
The ‘crimes’ in the other side were not committed by Joe Biden, and while I don’t know the tariff for tax dodging (line up every Republican politician if that’s the game we want to play) or owning a gun without due process, I would imagine fines would cover it, but even if not, that was Hunter Biden, and is massively different in scope and impact of what we’ve seen in recent years from Republicans.
Just reading about the potential gun charge…It’s really sad actually. His girlfriend (the widow of his brother…) took a gun out of his truck and threw it in a trash can behind a grocery store because she was worried he would kill himself. She went to retrieve it later and it was gone, so she called the police to report it. It was later returned by someone who periodically looks through the grocery store trash looking for recyclables. The only ‘crime’ would be lying on the application for a hand gun saying that he does not use drugs, when he was discharged from the navy for using cocaine. I don’t think there is a crime here, just a sad story. A few quotes the police attribute to Hunter Biden at the scene sound like he is a depressed individual.
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So wtf are they actually hoping to achieve by giving this whole business another public airing where they’re not just preaching to the converted , but rather will be having their insinuations , half-truths and outright lies scrutinised and challenged by the Democrats on the committee by whatever witnesses are called. I just see a big own goal.
The GOP understand very well that how you respond to a story depends in large part on what you think about the person in the story. Democrats are soft on crime…any story prior to an election about crime will make people disinclined to vote for them. Clinton is untrustworthy so even accusations of wrong doing are enough to make people react as if it were true with a narrative that deeply solidified. Even the act of demonstrating the falsity of that accusation will drive home the narrative because the very discussion of the subject proves it is something she would probably do.
This is exactly how they brought down the Clinton campaign - planting insinuations that were consistent with the distrustful narrative without ever having to have demonstrated a there there. For a variety of reasons I think the party as a whole are now stuck in this mode of pushing narratives they think will make neutral stories land positively for them. More often than not they create them out of thin air, but it doesnt really matter, because they don’t need anything solid to tie to it. There is something called the illusionary truth effect that means people react to something as if it is true if they hear it enough times. So their goal is simply to talk about it enough that people start taking it as true, once that threshold is hit they dont need to even demonstrate anything real to make people believe it.
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I get what you’re saying , but I still think they are flogging a dead horse by bringing all this up again.
Obviously the famous ‘Hunter Biden Laptop’ is likely to play a starring role in their sham investigations. But once again , I think they should be very careful where they go with this unless they want to end up with eggy faces.
Funnily enough Marcy Wheeler has just been making the same point today ;
I think you can credibly argue they have learned the wrong lessons from their past success leveraging this concept and with the narratives they have tried to push have done more to create the narrative that they are unserious, extreme wackos than anything the Dems have done to create that narrative. I think in that context stuff like this is actually likely to rebound and reinforce the perception they are an unserious party.
It didn’t seem to resonate so a lot of people missed it, but in 2020 they leaned very heavily on the idea that Biden was corrupt. I only appreciate the extent of that in their messaging because I know people who voted for Trump who cited it as their primary reason - he’s been in politics for 40 years and he has to be taking something on the side to justify that. You just cannot trust him and his son. So they’ve tried it and it failed. I think this time it wont just fail but will actively rebound. So Im not saying that I think there is value, it is just my reading on what they think they can get out of it. I just think the current version of the party doesnt know any other way to operate…it has no more tools in its belt.
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