Yesterday, Oversight Committee Republicans announced their witnesses for the first impeachment hearing since Speaker McCarthy opened the inquiry without a vote earlier this month. And who did Comer hand-select as witnesses for this first, highly anticipated blockbuster hearing? A Fox News contributor (Jonathan Turley), another Fox News and Newsmax pundit (Bruce Dubinsky), and a member of the Trump transition team (Eileen O’Connor). No, that’s not a bad joke. It’s the sad reality of what passes for governance in the Oversight Committee.
What won’t be present at the hearing? Any witnesses who deal in facts and any shred of evidence whatsoever that President Biden committed any wrongdoing. This total embarrassment of a hearing was thrown together in order to distract from the looming government shutdown entirely of the Republicans’ own making, showing they’d rather focus on these partisan, political stunts at the behest of Trump rather than solving the real issues keeping working families up at night.
WITNESSES
Jonathan Turley: MAGA Hypocrite. Jonathan Turley is a Trump loyalist who defended Trump during his first and second impeachment trials, demonstrating blatant hypocrisy time and time again. After the 2020 election, Turley claimed that voting machines had switched “thousands of votes” from Trump to Biden in Michigan. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for hundreds of withheld classified documents, Turley said there will be “hell to pay” for the Justice Department, but claimed Biden’s lawyers would be “witnesses in a criminal investigation” when they turned over a handful of classified documents. As Trump’s indictment in Georgia heated up, Turley claimed that Trump was merely seeking a recount when he asked the Secretary of State to “find” enough votes to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia – in stark contrast to 2021, when called the request an “opportunistic move,” and said “I am as mystified by the request as I am the logic.”
- Turley Is a Paid Fox News Contributor. Turley is a paid Fox News contributor who, according to a 2022 Slate analysis, “began to regularly pop up on the Fox shows that purport to be journalistic, but also the clownishly right-wing Fox & Friends in the morning and then the demagogic right-wing propaganda evening programming. […] For at least two years, one of Turley’s most obsessive obsessions has been to play Javert to Hunter Biden’s laptop. […] Because the chief beneficiary of Jonathan Turley’s ideological evolution has always been and will always be Jonathan Turley personally.”
- “A Disgrace To My Profession” – Numerous Legal Experts Have Blasted Turley’s Extreme Takes. After Turley flipped his position on Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, numerous legal experts put him on blast for his extreme ideology, including Georgia State Law Professors Anthony Michael Kreis and Eric Segall and election lawyer Marc Elias. In August, legal experts called Turley out again for misrepresenting the timeline of Joe Biden’s Vice Presidency as he spread allegations about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, claiming that Joe Biden was “then Vice President” in 2018 – during the Trump administration. He also wrote an article misreading Trump’s January 6 trial as after the 2024 election – in fact, the trial is set for over a year before electoral votes would be counted. In September, Harvard University Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe called Turley a “hack” on Fox News after he argued that the 14th amendment could not be used to bar Trump from office if convicted: “I’m afraid that Jonathan Turley is basically a hack. He doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.”
- Turley Is A Repeat MAGA GOP Witness. MAGA House Republicans have already called on Turley to serve as a witness this session. In February, he appeared on Capitol Hill for their very first hearing on the so-called weaponization of the federal government.
Bruce Dubinsky: Self Promoting Rightwing Pundit. Bruce Dubinsky refers to himself as “the Sherlock Holmes of accounting” and makes frequent appearances on far right networks like Newsmax and Fox Business to promote himself and speculate without evidence about lawbreaking by the Biden family.
- Dubinsky Claimed There Were No Major Red Flags In Trump’s Taxes. After viewing a redacted version of Donald Trump’s tax returns for a few hours in December 2022 Dubinsky told CBS News that “nothing jumped out as a red flag” to him. Weeks later the Trump Organization was fined $1.6 million after being convicted for 17 tax crimes, including a scheme in which top executives dodged personal income taxes on lavish job perks and Trump remains under indictment personally in New York for falsifying business records in order to conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from the public.
- Dubinsky Is A Frequent Fox News Contributor. As Dubinsky admitted in his own bio, he is a “frequent contributor on national media tv such as Fox news…” where he primarily discusses white collar crime and other financial investigations. In August 2023, he appeared on Fox Business to speculate – without any evidence – that members of the Biden family broke the law.
Eileen O’Connor: Trump Transition Team Member And MAGA Meme Fan. Eileen O’Connor was a proud member of Donald Trump’s transition team at the Treasury Department and is a far right Federalist Society member. O’Connor uses her LinkedIn account to spread far right anti-immigrant propaganda about an “invasion” at the southern border and has reposted fundraisers for the indicted fake electors in Michigan and memes downplaying the attack on the US Capitol on January 6.
- O’Connor Is A Right Wing Opinion Writer Who Called For Hunter Biden To Be Charged With More Crimes. In addition to her legal work, O’Connor has a long record of right wing opinion writing, including multiple pieces for the Federalist Society blog. In June 2023 O’Connor penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal calling for Hunter Biden’s plea agreement to be thrown “in the trash” based on the testimony of IRS whistleblowers and for a full investigation by House Republicans into “what charges might have been brought” against the president’s son.
- O’Connor Is On The Advisory Counsel Of A Republican Party Organization. O’Connor serves on the Advisory Counsel of the Republican National Lawyers Association, a partisan group that seeks to “gather Republican lawyers for legal education related to law in political, government, legislative and private firm settings” and boasts of providing the leadership for the 2020 “Lawyers for Trump” group.