James Comer Is Drooling at the Chance to Go After the Bidens Again

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer may finally get his greatest wish: to weaponize the federal government against Donald Trump’s political enemies.  

In an interview on Newsmax’s National Report Thursday, Comer was asked whether he planned to pursue further charges against Hunter Biden in the wake of Trump’s election victory. 

“We’re gonna see what the new Trump Department of Justice wants to do. I fully expect Joe Biden to pardon his son,” Comer said. “I think the most important thing for me, honestly, is that we hold people in the government accountable.”

“And I’m pretty optimistic that with this new administration that we can finally start holding some Deep State actors accountable for bad behavior,” he added. 

Comer has alleged that his investigations into the Bidens uncovered that the president’s family had been “selling access” to foreign adversaries of the United States.

After conducting a disastrous impeachment inquiry that failed to scrounge up even the slightest bit of evidence that Joe Biden had committed any wrongdoing, Comer, alongside other GOP House committee chairs, made criminal referrals to the Justice Department in June for Hunter Biden and Jim Biden, the president’s brother. 

After Hunter was found guilty on three felony gun charges that same month in a separate case, Comer said it was only a “step toward accountability.” 

“Until the Department of Justice investigates everyone involved in the Bidens’ corrupt influence peddling schemes that generated over $18 million in foreign payments to the Biden family, it will be clear department officials continue to cover for the Big Guy, Joe Biden,” Comer said.

At the time, even GOP lawmakers were saying that Comer had yet to dig up any evidence the president had committed a crime or impeachable offense. 

In August, several GOP-led House committees published a lengthy report claiming that Hunter and James Biden, and their associates, had raked in more than $27 million from foreign individuals or entities since 2014. It also alleged that Joe Biden had used his position as vice president to leverage more than $8 million in loans from Democratic donors. 

Oversight Committee Democrats responded, saying that the report was based on “vague, unsubstantiated, and thoroughly debunked allegations.”

Notably missing from the nearly 300 pages of the report was any evidence that Joe Biden himself had benefited from business dealings, or participated in any foreign business deals.

Now that Trump is headed back to the White House and is set to install his own attorney general, it looks like Comer may get the shot at Hunter Biden he’s been dreaming of for months. 

New York’s Democrats have finally made a comeback, two years after their disastrous performances in the 2022 midterm elections that helped cost their party the House of Representatives.

Democrats flipped three Republican seats, and no Democrats lost their seats, leaving the split at 19 Democrats and seven Republicans.

Democrat Josh Riley beat Republican Representative Marc Molinaro, who recently pivoted from a pragmatic brand of conservatism to full-on MAGA, with 51.8 percent of the vote at 96 percent reporting in a rematch from the 2022 midterms.

Democratic State Senator John Mannion beat Representative Brandon Williams with 53.9 percent of the vote at 84 percent reporting, flipping New York’s 22nd congressional district from red to blue. Williams took the seat in 2022, after after former Representative John Katko, a more moderate Republican, announced his retirement.

Laura Gillen beat Representative Anthony D’Esposito Thursday, with 50.9 percent of the vote at 98 percent reporting. D’Esposito’s campaign was marred by a damning report that he gave jobs in his office to his former lover and his fiancée’s daughter.

Cook Political Report had updated its rating of D’Esposito’s race just four days ahead of the election, shifting its prediction from “toss up” to “lean Democrat,” signaling that D’Esposito would likely lose his seat.

At the same time, Democratic lawmakers were able to defend their House seats in races against strong Republican challengers. Democratic Representative Tom Suozzi held his ground against GOP challenger Mike LiPetri, leading him by 51.3 percent to 48.7 percent with 97 percent reporting. Suozzi won the special House election in New York’s 3rd congressional district after the ouster of George Santos, flipping the Long Island and Queens–based district from red to blue.

Still, many Republicans were able to fend off challenges from Democrats.

In New York’s 17th congressional district, Representative Mike Lawler crushed a challenge from former Representative Mondaire Jones, earning a whopping 57 percent of the vote with 94 percent reporting. Jones’s already struggling campaign was further weakened by a spoiler candidate that left the Working Families Party campaigning against itself.

In Long Island, Republican Representative Nick LaLota defeated former CNN commentator John Avalon with 55.7 percent of the vote with 88 percent reporting.

Republican Representatives Nicole Malliotakis, Elise Stefanik, Andrew Garabino, Nicholas Langworthy, and Claudia Tenney were also able to maintain their seats.

With Republicans winning both the presidency and the Senate, it’s become clear that every Democratic House seat matters. Even with many House races yet to be called, it currently looks like there will be a Republican majority in the House.

In 2022, the ascensions of Molinaro and Lawler in the Hudson Valley, D’Esposito and LaLota on Long Island, and Williams in central New York were credited with losing the Democratic Party’s slim majority in the House.

That widespread failure came as an unhappy surprise for Democrats, especially considering that in New York state, there are nearly twice as many active registered Democrats as Republicans, indicating a significantly depressed turnout among Democratic voters for the 2022 midterm elections. In 2023, there were roughly 5.9 million active Democrats and only 2.7 million Republicans.

The rich are already adding to their wealth after Donald Trump’s election.

According to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, the world’s 10 richest people got even richer on Wednesday, collectively adding $64 billion to their coffers on the day Trump captured the presidency for the second time. It’s the biggest one-day increase since Bloomberg set up the index in 2012.

The increase came from a big day on the stock market, which rallied in the hopes that Trump will decrease regulations and lower taxes. The S&P 500 had a 2.5 percent increase, the best-ever performance following an election, and the U.S. dollar also went up. The world’s richest man, Trump supporter Elon Musk, saw his net worth go up by a whopping $26.5 billion, helped by a big jump in Tesla’s stock price.

Behind Musk, Jeff Bezos’s net worth went up by $7.14 billion. Bezos infamously decided that his newspaper, The Washington Post, should refrain from making a presidential endorsement this election, and he congratulated Trump on his “extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory” in an X post soon after the news of Trump’s win broke.

The Republican Party has always counted business leaders and executives among its main backers, and that hasn’t changed with the rise of Trump. Trump, as a business executive himself, shares their aims of fewer taxes and regulations. Naturally, this means that these executives and their companies see a chance for more profits with a new Trump administration.

Many of these plutocrats made their money from tech companies and Silicon Valley, where executives like Musk think of themselves as exceptional and see Trump as someone who will protect their wealth and status. They’ll see their gains from the past day as proof that they made the right decision, even if they foresee a future financial crisis from Trump’s agenda.

Trump’s flawed plans to institute tariffs also promise to make the rich even richer, despite the fact that prices will go up for many goods and services. However, economic metrics show that those tariffs would destroy the economy and send inflation skyrocketing. So while many billionaires today are toasting their immediate gains, tomorrow they may be lamenting what Trump has done. Historically, when business leaders have backed a fascist autocrat, it has ended up backfiring on them.

The most stubborn man in the Senate is rumored to be in the running for secretary of transportation.

Alabama Republican and former college football coach Tommy Tuberville’s name was mentioned for the Cabinet position. In response, Tuberville’s office told Reuters, “If there was a position where he could be more impactful for both Alabama and the country he would listen, but he believes that President Trump needs a sledgehammer in the Senate and right now he is focused on playing that role.”

But Tuberville has been more of a blockade than a sledgehammer during his Senate tenure. Tuberville spent nearly all of 2023 inexplicably and single-handedly blocking more than 450 military promotions, leading to widespread chaos within the U.S. military. He justified this blockade by stating that he was protesting the Pentagon’s abortion policy, which allows service members to be reimbursed if they are forced to leave their state of deployment to access an abortion. Tuberville was lambasted by Democrats and Republicans alike and eventually dropped his protest last December, leaving the policy in place and his colleagues incensed.

Tuberville has also refused to acknowledge that white nationalists are indeed racist, stating that the definition of white nationalism is a matter of personal opinion. His co-workers said he wasn’t racist, just very stupid.

“I do not believe that Tommy Tuberville is a racist at all,” an anonymous senator said. “I really believe that maybe he doesn’t have an understanding of the English language.”

These are not encouraging words regarding our potential secretary of transportation.

Donald Trump already has a handful of potential Cabinet picks in mind for his second administration—and they couldn’t be more alarming.

For White House chief of staff, the MAGA leader is reportedly considering either Susie Wiles, his top campaign adviser, or Brooke Rollins, president of the far-right America First Policy Institute, according to Trump allies that spoke with The Washington Post.

Other options for top positions include either billionaire hedge fund investor John Paulson or economic adviser Scott Bessent for Treasury secretary, and a toss-up between former Trump staffer Ric Grenell and Senator Marco Rubio for secretary of state.

But people who had previously worked alongside these candidates had their qualms about Trump’s choices.

Grenell, who was roundly criticized for his inexperience while serving as Trump’s acting director of national intelligence for a handful of months in 2020, is reportedly also in the running for other top intelligence positions, including heading the Central Intelligence Agency in order to unearth the secrets of the “deep state,” according to RawStory.

“Everyone knows he has no qualifications for this job,” Mark Groombridge, who worked closely with Grenell at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, told Foreign Policy upon Grenell’s ascension to the coveted Cabinet position in 2020. According to Groombridge, Grenell had “many talents,” but the job’s requirements—such as impartiality—“don’t comport with that skill set at all.”

Upon hearing the news that Grenell had a pathway toward becoming CIA director, at least one former FBI agent lamented to her followers on X: “God help us.”

Trump has also thrown around other names for potential roles in his administration, including suggesting that renowned anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would have free rein over the nation’s health policies. World’s richest man Elon Musk has already agreed to head up a new department under the Trump admin—the Department of Government Efficiency, otherwise known as “DOGE”—which will focus on slashing government spending.

If Musk is to be believed, he’ll be looking to cut more than $2 trillion in federal spending—more than the country’s entire discretionary spending budget, which funds the military, national defense, as well as allocations for other federal agencies. The tech billionaire has also promised to launch a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government.”

Trump’s campaign had reportedly scoured thousands of potential names but refused to disclose them ahead of the election due to Trump’s own superstitions. The picks largely come at the recommendation of the soon-to-be 47th president’s allies, who have claimed that incoming staffers would be given their positions based on their devotion to Trump’s vision for America—and to Trump himself, placing a premium on loyalty above all other skills, qualifications, or attributes.

In an interview with the Financial Times last month, Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick lamented that Trump’s last administration buckled under the weight of staff turnover due to disagreements in “vision,” promising that a second Trump term would focus on eradicating any internal hostility to the Republican’s plans.