It’s time to call it: The House GOP’s shambolic inquiry into the impeachment of President Joe Biden expired on Wednesday night at 9:01 p.m. That’s when Sean Hannity opened his Fox News show by promising “highlights” from the day’s “explosive” hearing with Hunter Biden’s former business partners — and then immediately pivoted to a monologue not about its revelations, but about the president’s poll numbers.
Hannity did more than perhaps any other single figure to will the impeachment probe into existence. Since 2018, he has led a Fox propaganda campaign aimed at using lies about the younger Biden’s foreign business interests to damage his father’s political standing. The resulting House Republican impeachment effort has both followed Fox’s lead and played out in large part on its airwaves. But it has utterly failed to produce evidence of wrongdoing by the president that would convince anyone other than the network’s most fervent fans.
If even Hannity can no longer feign enthusiasm about the impeachment effort, it is truly toast — and Fox itself deserves a big share of the blame for leading Republicans into this debacle.
The House Republican impeachment inquiry satisfied Fox stars’ long-standing demands for a Biden impeachment, which began before he was even elected. When House Republicans regained the majority in the 2022 midterms, their synergy with Fox quickly became apparent. Committee chairs promised to carry out investigations into the various conspiracy theories the network had promoted over the previous years, including “the Biden Crime Family.”
Both sides stood to benefit. House Republicans received a steady stream of easy bookings where they could win plaudits from Fox’s right-wing audience. Fox hosts received fodder for monologues about the Bidens’ purported corruption. But there was a major flaw in the plan: While the heated coverage from the right-wing media convinced the Republican base that impeachment was justified and inevitable, the actual evidence House Republicans amassed tended to disintegrate the moment it left that bubble.
Hannity’s program in particular became a showcase for the GOP’s dubious allegations about Hunter Biden. Hannity ran 325 segments about the president’s son in 2023 alone, regurgitating falsehoods at an incredible rate as he tried to convince his audience that Republicans were about to uncover “potentially the biggest bribery, money laundering scandal in American history.” He made House committee chairs James Comer (43 appearances to discuss Hunter), Jim Jordan (32) and Jason Smith (11) fixtures on his show, giving them platforms to practice their talking points without facing difficult questions.
When then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy finally caved to the right flank of his caucus and announced an impeachment inquiry in September, Hannity cheered the news as a sign that “the walls, as we have been telling you, are closing in on President Joe Biden.” But several Republican legislators warned that the case their colleagues were putting together didn’t add up. “There’s no evidence that Joe Biden got money, or that Joe Biden, you know, agreed to do something so that Hunter could get money,” one GOP lawmaker told CNN. “There’s just no evidence of that. And they can’t impeach without that evidence.”
Those doubts were justified — the core of the inquiry was the conspiracy theory that Biden, as vice president, had pushed the Ukrainian government to fire the country’s top prosecutor to stop a probe of a company that employed Hunter. That fable had been dismantled during Trump’s own 2019 impeachment, and all developments since had only made it more far-fetched.
But that fact didn’t deter Hannity, who had worked with Trump allies like Rudy Giuliani to launch that disinformation campaign the first time around, or many of his colleagues at Fox. And it didn’t stop Comer, Jordan and Smith from moving forward as leaders of the resulting impeachment efforts.
The result has been an unmitigated debacle for House Republicans and the three chairs in particular, demonstrating the danger of taking nonsense geared for Fox’s prime-time block into the real world.
The inquiry’s first hearing ended in disaster, with the Republicans’ own witnesses refusing to say that Biden had committed impeachable offenses and news accounts highlighting their failure, as The New York Times put it, to produce “any new information about Mr. Biden’s conduct — or any support for Republicans’ accusations that he had entered into corrupt overseas business deals.”
Later in the year, Comer tried to concoct scandals out of Joe Biden lending money to his brother and son and getting paid back. Like their predecessors, those allegations flopped outside of the right-wing ecosystem.
The inquiry took on more water in January, when House Democrats released a report showing that Trump’s own companies, while he was president, took in millions of dollars from foreign governments, far more direct evidence of corruption than anything House Republicans have found about Biden.
Then in February, Alexander Smirnov — whose Fox-friendly allegations about a purported Biden bribe had been touted by Hannity as “the biggest story of the year” and by Jordan as the “heart” of the impeachment case — was arrested on charges of fabricating that story.
Which brings us to Wednesday’s hearing, where the Republicans’ star witnesses were two former Hunter Biden business partners. One repeated stories he’d already told at a Trump press conference and a Fox interview in 2020, and the other testified from federal prison, where he is serving a lengthy fraud sentence. Neither could produce hard evidence that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s dealings.
The impeachment inquiry has become such a flop — an embarrassment for Republicans and the media outlets that back them — that the investigators are losing the constant Fox air support that launched it in the first place. The network offered only “scant” live coverage of Wednesday’s hearing, and multiple anchors criticized the House Republicans’ performance. Dana Perino complained before the hearing began that Republicans “just keep doing the same hearing over and over again, and people are starting to wonder, at some point do you fish or cut bait,” while John Roberts told a House Republican that “the needle hasn’t appreciably moved on this case” and asked how long the probe could continue without “evidence of wrongdoing on the president’s part.”
Some Fox hosts, like Jesse Watters and Jeanine Pirro, did try to carry water for House Republicans on Wednesday by talking up their work. But the big tell that the case is collapsing came from Hannity. He gave the hearing only a couple of minutes of airtime in the middle of his opening monologue — and that time was largely devoted to trying to make fun of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). He didn’t bring on any of the committee chairs to expound on what they had proven, or his typical legal analysts to accuse Biden of crimes.
Instead, he just moved on to other topics. When will House Republicans do the same?