Another response is to lean into it, to try to justify it. That’s the approach that was taken by Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) in an interview with NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. That justification? That the lengthy, fruitless probe into Biden by House Republicans warranted a refreshed probe should Trump be elected president again.
Host Kristen Welker began the interview by presenting Vance — on Trump’s vice-presidential shortlist — with a promise made by Trump at an event last year: “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden.”
Welker asked Vance whether that was something he supported.
“Donald Trump is talking about appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Joe Biden for wrongdoing,” Vance replied. “Joe Biden has done exactly that for the last few years and has done far more in addition to that to engage in a campaign of lawfare against his political opposition.”
“I think what Donald Trump is simply saying is we ought to investigate the prior administration,” he continued. “There are obviously many instances of wrongdoing. The House Oversight Committee has identified a number of corrupt business transactions that may or may not be criminal. Of course, you have to investigate to find out.”
Vance added that he viewed Trump’s position as “reasonable.”
“If you think that what Donald Trump is proposing is a threat to democracy,” he offered, “isn’t what Biden has already done a massive threat to our system of law and government?”
There are two arguments here. The first is that Trump is doing what Biden himself did. The other is that Biden deserves to be investigated.
Welker pointed out that Trump’s promise to investigate Biden is not equivalent to the investigations that Trump himself faces. Biden nominated Merrick Garland to serve as attorney general; Garland eventually took charge of an investigation into the effort to overturn the 2020 election that wasn’t focused on Trump. A probe into Trump’s retention of classified documents after leaving office, meanwhile, was triggered by a referral from the National Archives.
Once Trump announced his 2024 candidacy, Garland appointed Jack Smith as special counsel to shield the ongoing investigations from charges of political interference. It was Smith who eventually obtained federal indictments against Trump as a result of the above investigations, neither of which can be credibly linked to any push from Biden. Both of them instead stem from accrued evidence implicating Trump: his clear role in attempting to subvert the election results and his possession of documents marked as classified.
This gets to Vance’s second argument: that the House investigation into Biden provides similar incriminating evidence.
It doesn’t. We’ve been over this repeatedly, as Republicans tried over and over to implicate Biden in wrongdoing over business deals involving members of his family.
They spent all of last year trying to dig up dirt on Biden; they failed. Well into this year, they tried to make the case that Biden should be impeached; they failed.
The effort by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) to tie Biden to nefarious activity was so unsuccessful that his arguments about wrongdoing didn’t move an inch after months of investigating.
In other words, Vance’s insistence that “you have to investigate to find out” is predicated on an investigation that already sought, unsuccessfully, to find any wrongdoing by Biden.
This irrefutable argument has long been the crux of the Republican position regarding the president: Since they haven’t found anything, it simply proves they need a bigger investigation! It does not take a logician to determine an alternative explanation here.
“All he’s suggesting is that we should investigate credible arguments of wrongdoing,” Vance told Welker. “That’s all that Donald Trump is saying.”
That isn’t at all what Trump was saying. He was saying that Biden was the “most corrupt president” in American history and so deserved to be the subject of an open-ended investigation. Of another open-ended investigation. Trump was starting from the position that Biden was bad, not quietly suggesting to his supporters that this question demanded an answer.
But what else is Vance going to do? He’s all in on Trump after having been very-much-not all-in on Trump. He’s tantalizingly close to being next in line to the presidency, behind a guy who’s 80. All he has to do is use his Yale Law School training to come up with a way to make Trump’s rhetoric seem more palatable.
So that’s what he does.
