Meanwhile, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), the top impeachment investigator who appeared on Hannity’s show dozens of times to talk about Hunter Biden in 2023, has not been on the program since March 12. Comer recently told a colleague he is “ready to be 'done with' the impeachment inquiry,” CNN reported Wednesday, as the probe “appears to be at a dead end, with Republicans resigned to the reality that they don’t have the votes to impeach the president.”
No one worked harder to turn Biden’s son into a political liability than Hannity. He started talking about Hunter Biden as early as 2018, and teamed up with Rudy Giuliani and other Trump cronies to kneecap Joe Biden’s presidential bid via the disinformation campaign that Biden, as vice president, corruptly interfered with U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine to benefit his son’s business interests. Hannity maintained an obsessive focus on Hunter Biden after Joe Biden took office: In 2023 alone, his Fox show aired at least 325 segments about the president’s son, goading House Republicans to launch an impeachment probe over the allegations in September.
Hannity promised his viewers that Comer and his congressional allies had the goods. He and his regular guests claimed they had uncovered “potentially the biggest bribery, money laundering scandal in American history,” one in which Joe Biden had been “very credibly accused of public corruption on a scale this country has never seen before,” was “compromised” by foreign governments, and may have committed crimes including “bribery and treason” in “a blockbuster scandal that could doom Biden's presidency.”
But when House Republicans tried to substantiate those frothy claims via an impeachment inquiry — one undertaken by three committee chairs who were Hannity green room regulars —- they proved only the stupidity of following the Fox host’s lead. Reporters savaged the shambolic exercise for failing to uncover evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden, while right-wing pundits and GOP lawmakers slammed Comer for embarrassing the party.
By February, House Republicans began leaking that their probe was unlikely to result in an impeachment vote. Then, later that month, disaster struck. Hannity had credulously promoted in dozens of Fox segments an FBI informant’s claims that a Ukrainian oligarch had paid the Bidens millions of dollars in bribes, calling them “smoking-gun evidence” and perhaps “the biggest story of the year.” But the Justice Department announced on February 16 that the informant, identified as Alexander Smirnov, had been charged with federal crimes for fabricating that tale.
Hannity remained the impeachment probe’s biggest public supporter well into this year. He touted the “mountain of evidence” congressional investigators were supposedly uncovering, carried water for their most dubious allegations, and hyped years-old, rewarmed claims as “bombshell testimony” and “an unmitigated disaster for team Biden.” He kept doing damage control for the inquiry even after Smirnov’s arrest, describing the informant’s story as “only one tiny piece of the case against what I call the Biden family and the Biden family syndicate.”
But in March, with the GOP impeachment effort clearly in shambles and the party’s leaders desperately searching for a way out of their charade, Hannity turned on a dime. He stopped giving significant coverage to the probe, stopped hosting Comer, and refrained from even mentioning Biden and impeachment in the same sentence.
As for Trump's very real corruption scandals --- his businesses took millions of dollars from foreign governments while he was in the White House and his sons, who ran that empire and would likely do so again if he were returned to office, are reportedly playing a lead role in staffing a restored Trump administration --- the Fox host could not care less.
