The other failure of the Republican investigation into Biden

Donald Trump needs money. Maybe he doesn’t need as much as it seemed like he was going to need a week ago; a judge on Monday substantially reduced the size of the bond Trump needs to post while he appeals the judgment from his civil fraud trial in New York. But he still has a lot of bills, from paying other judgments to paying his attorneys to running a presidential campaign.

Luckily for the former president, he also has a lot of streams of income. Lots of businesses that offer supporters (“customers” in the pre-politics vernacular) an opportunity to put money in Trump’s pocket. More opportunities than most people recognize — but a lot of opportunities that certain people recognize very well.

This is the other failure of the House Republican effort to impugn President Biden: The much-lower-hanging fruit of Donald Trump’s efforts to make money was left to rot in the trees.

It’s slightly premature to declare the Biden impeachment inquiry dead, since House Republican leaders are still trying to figure out how to declare some sort of victory from the broadly unsuccessful effort. Last week’s hearing featuring people once involved in business deals with Joe Biden’s son Hunter didn’t do much but reinforce the lack of success Republican leaders like House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) had in trying to tie the president to those deals. Far from proving that Joe Biden took corrupt action to make him or his son some cash, the investigation mostly succeeded in showing that more than a year of scrutiny couldn’t even make a robust circumstantial case.

In April, Comer insisted that an investigation into Biden was important because of the dangers of influence-peddling in American politics.

“We’re going to fix the laws on influence-peddling because this is getting out of control,” Comer said on Fox News nearly a year ago. “If we don’t have tighter ethics laws, we’re going to have countries like China that are going to come in and buy off relatives of high-ranking government officials.” He insisted that he and his colleagues were “very concerned that [Biden’s] family was getting this money because of things he was doing, both as vice president and president.”

Even then, he only meant some presidents and some influence-peddling. Once Republicans took control of the Oversight Committee in January 2023, they pulled the plug on a long-running probe into Trump’s finances initiated by the former Democratic majority. A settlement agreement reached between Congress and the accounting firm Mazars in which Mazars would provide subpoenaed tax documents was simply abandoned. Comer and his allies were turning their spotlight to Biden — and letting Trump’s actions remain in the dark.

If the issue of concern is foreign actors paying money to presidents or their family members, Trump already has a substantial chain of receipts. Oversight Democrats tallied nearly $8 million in payments made from foreign actors to a handful of Trump Organization properties during his presidency, including millions from a bank run by the Chinese government.

And that’s just those properties, information about which was the product of what Mazars turned over when it had to. It doesn’t include other known deals, like arrangements between Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle Eastern interests that yielded Kushner billions of dollars to invest. (One planned investment is already generating controversy of its own.)

Nor does it include Trump’s deal with LIV Golf, which has held events at Trump Organization properties since its founding soon after Trump left office. The golf tournament is primarily funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. That fund also gave generously to Kushner — the Trump administration’s point person on the Middle East — despite some initial concerns.

Opportunities to slip money into Trump’s pockets proliferate. On Friday, shareholders voted to let Trump’s media company — the umbrella entity for his social media site — go public. Trump holds a majority of shares in the company, meaning increases in the stock price mean more value for the former president.

The largest institutional holder of shares in Digital World Acquisition at the time of a December filing was Susquehanna International Group, a trading firm run by billionaire Jeff Yass. Yass has poured millions of dollars into politics this year, an increase from past years that might be related to attacks by Washington on TikTok — an app that’s owned by ByteDance, in which Yass also has invested heavily.

Trump recently reversed his long-standing opposition to banning TikTok, a shift that was tied in part to a lobbying campaign connected to Yass. The reversal came days after Trump and Yass met at an event in Florida, though Trump denies that the two discussed TikTok.

This chain of events would seem like it might be interesting to a congressional committee focused on oversight and worried about influence-peddling. Just not the current House Oversight Committee. They simply take Trump’s word for it, as the former president hopes all of us will.

There are a lot of ways for non-billionaires to boost Trump, too, of course. You can make a contribution to his joint fundraising committee with the GOP, of course, money that (at least in one instance) goes to his campaign and then a political action committee that pays Trump’s legal bills before the Republican Party gets anything. You can buy a Trump NFT, earning the right to say that an illustration of Trump, say, driving a racecar, is only “owned” by you and a select few other people. Or you can display your Trump loyalty more obviously, picking up a pair of Trump-branded sneakers.

Those lesser hustles aren’t necessarily ones that ought to prompt concerns about how Trump is selling off policy positions, certainly. They are, instead, a reminder of Trump’s sprawling money-acceptance machine — a machine that involves scores of the limited-liability companies that Comer so frequently disparages.

Nor is it necessarily the case that Trump’s policy positions are motivated only by money. More than once during his presidency, questions arose about international interactions centered on offering Trump the benefit of boosting his political position. He reportedly offered his approval of Uyghur internment camps in China during a discussion that included a request that the Chinese government aid his 2020 reelection bid by increasing purchases of agricultural products. And then there was the whole Ukraine thing, the subject of his first impeachment — and a situation that Comer and his allies have since tried to clumsily use against Biden.

It is unquestionably true that American officials should make decisions based on what they believe is best for the American people and not on what donors or business partners would like to see happen. As he ramped up his efforts to investigate Biden, Comer insisted that this was his goal. But in addition to failing to demonstrate corrupt behavior by Biden, Comer and his allies failed to even question more obviously dubious behavior on the part of Trump.

The Biden probe demonstrated an active failure by House Republicans to uncover pay-for-play politics. Not paying any consideration to Trump’s actions and relationships was a passive failure — and a more egregious one.