Will HarperCollins demand that James Comer return his advance?
The Kentucky Republican, chair of the US House oversight committee, may have used the cash to spin a yarn. As it turns out, All the President’s Money puts words – fairly incendiary words, at that – into the mouth of no less than Bob Woodward, the legendary Washington Post reporter. “My only goal is the truth,” Comer announces in his introduction. Really?
On the page, Comer describes a dinner in February 2023 at Woodward’s home also attended by Bob Costa, Woodward’s sometime writing partner.
“Woodward explained that everyone in DC knew that Joe [Biden] allowed his family to sell access to him, but as far as he was aware, that was not illegal,” Comer writes. “He added that it should be, but it wasn’t. ‘You will have to prove all of Joe Biden’s wrongdoing,’ he said, ‘and you will likely not be able to do that.’”
Woodward says otherwise. “The statements attributed to me in what is apparently his book are false,” he told the Guardian. “I made none of those statements he attributes to me. I repeat none, and not even in a paraphrased form.”
Comer failed to offer a substantive rebuttal. Instead, he issued a belated non-denial denial. “Bob is commenting on a book he hasn’t read,” Comer said, days later. On Newsmax, a rightwing media outlet, Comer added: “Bob Woodward can kiss my rear end.”
Regardless, the representative could have used a better editor. He misspells Costa’s surname as “Costas”. Bob Costas with an “s” is the NBC sports broadcaster, now retired.
Beyond that, All the President’s Money – subtitle Investigating the Secret Foreign Schemes That Made the Biden Family Rich – appears at the very end of Joe Biden’s term and yet manages to be incomplete. Comer fails to refer to Hunter Biden’s September 2024 guilty plea on federal tax charges. Given Comer’s mission, the omission is inexplicable.
Perhaps Comer was enjoying taking his shots too much. Surprisingly, Steve and Peter Doocy of Fox News and Mary Doocy, Steve’s daughter and Peter’s sister, an FBI lawyer, come under fire. Comer claims he and Mary clashed during Comer’s investigation of the Bidens and posits that this dust-up caused Steve and Peter to emerge as his sole critics at Fox. HarperCollins is a Murdoch company, too. Comer has taken shots from Fox in return.
More predictably, Comer dumps on the Democrats. He brands the representatives Dan Goldman, Jared Moskowitz and Jamie Raskin “hoodlums”, while accusing Raskin of being a “vainglorious fool” with a “warped partisan mind”. Moskowitz earns an added sobriquet: “little smart-ass”. Goldman is a “literal trust fund baby”.
That’s rich. From Comer’s own clippings: “Rep James Comer, a multimillionaire farmer, boasts of being one of the largest landholders near his rural Kentucky hometown.” The Hill: “The Republican leading the probe of Hunter Biden has his own shell company and complicated friends.” What was that line about glass houses and stones?
Comer admits that a botched hearing on launching an impeachment investigation into Joe Biden tarnished his own credibility. “I had gone from the House investigative golden boy to the toxic goofball chairman of a clown-car hearing,” he concedes. But never mind: he gleefully casts the outgoing president as a “Chinese stooge” and dutifully lauds Elon Musk, the GOP’s sugar daddy, as an upstanding patriot.
Uh … in a recent filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Tesla reported nearly $14.9bn in revenue from China in the first three-quarters of 2024. Musk’s car company also disclosed: “In April 2024, one of our subsidiaries entered into a loan agreement … with lenders in China for an unsecured revolving facility of up to RMB 20.00 billion to be used for certain production expenditures as well as repayment of certain finance facilities.” In US dollars, that comes to approximately $2.72bn.
Back on Planet Comer, we also find disapproval of Republican moderates, who are derided as “squishy”. As he sees it, such people “were mainly Republicans because they were fiscal conservatives”. But he does not pass judgment on Melania Trump, soon to be first lady again and, by her own admission, unapologetically pro-choice.
Comer may be about as imperfect a messenger as it is possible to imagine, but still, it does bear saying: the Bidens and their retinue benefited from Joe’s time in power.
A few examples: in May 2014, when Joe Biden was vice-president to Barack Obama, Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private natural-gas producer, announced that Hunter Biden had joined its board. Obama’s spokesperson, Jay Carney, notably declined to express support.
“Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens, and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the vice-president or president,” said Carney.
James Biden, Joe’s brother, made a go at public housing … in Iraq. As reported in the waning days of the 2012 presidential campaign, after Joe became vice-president, James joined New Jersey-based Hill International as executive vice-president. Six months after that, in 2010, the company won a $1.5bn federal contract to build at least 100,000 affordable homes in Iraq.
Tom Donilon, Obama’s former national security adviser, joined Fannie Mae and had ties to Biden, too. Donilon’s brother, Mike, was Biden’s counselor as vice-president, and reappeared at the White House as a senior adviser. According to the Nation, “Fannie Mae paid [Tom] Donilon … $15m to lobby Congress to gut the power of government regulators.”
Unlike George HW Bush, Biden had no James A Baker III, secretary of state and White House chief of staff, to push back on bad ideas. Unlike Obama, he had no Valerie Jarrett, who delivered reality checks. Those within Biden’s earshot were family or individuals dependent upon him. They knew he was too old to mount a re-election bid in 2024, yet they encouraged him to run. At least Hunter won a pardon.
All the President’s Money: Investigating the Secret Foreign Schemes That Made the Biden Family Rich is published in the US by HarperCollins
