James Comer’s Operation Is Finally Winding Down
The Oversight chair was really good at getting himself on Fox News. Everything else was shambolic.
When James Comer assumed control of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform in January 2023, he had two tasks. First was to change the official name to the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.1 The second and more important was to find something that could serve as an impeachable offense committed by President Joe Biden.
So began a long, fraught fishing expedition for evidence of presidential wrongdoing. But while Comer did not succeed in impeaching the president, he did succeed in fulfilling what was arguably the primary purpose of the Oversight Committee under his leadership: content creation for his fellow GOP lawmakers and conservative media.
Comer’s tenure at the Oversight helm was defined by patterns of familiar behavior. He prioritized political stunts over anything having to do with real policy. He parlayed his position as chairman into what amounted to a recurring-guest-star role on cable’s biggest news network. And he steered the committee reactively, often to embarrassing ends.
A telling example of Comer’s leadership came this summer, when Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate. Within days of the announcement, Comer launched a “probe” into Walz’s alleged connections to China and the Chinese Communist Party. Was he a secret commie? Was the gregarious Lutheran from Minnesota doing covert work for the ruthless Chinese intelligence services?
The answers to these questions don’t particularly matter, either to Comer or to others who promoted the stunt probe. What mattered was the repetition of the questions.
Like many of Comer’s investigations, inquiries, and fact-finding initiatives, the probe quickly faded from view without turning up any real, actionable evidence. But Comer did his job. He appeared on cable programs to discuss it and convinced Fox News to run a package on what the committee dubbed “The Great Walz of China.”
Media Matters for America, a Democratic-allied watchdog and research organization, provided me with some remarkable figures on Comer’s cable news hits. The Oversight chair has appeared on weekday broadcasts for Fox News 149 times since the start of the 118th Congress.2 That’s the second-highest number of weekday Fox appearances by any member of Congress during the same timeframe. (The award for most weekday Fox appearances during the 118th Congress goes to another Oversight member: Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), who’s been on 169 times.)
Following a hunch, I asked Media Matters to separate Comer’s appearances into four distinct periods. Comer appeared on Fox three times during the week in which there was no speaker of the House. From the moment Kevin McCarthy assumed the gavel until his ultimate ouster and the succession drama that followed, Comer went on the network 102 times: an appearance nearly every three days. After Mike Johnson’s speakership began, Comer’s Fox appearances slowed down. He made just 40 appearances between October 25, 2023 and July 21 of this year—slightly less than once a week. That latter date is significant, because it’s when Biden—Comer’s primary political target for the last two years—dropped out of the presidential race. Since then, Comer has made just four appearances on Fox News.
These figures suggest Comer’s real job is not oversight but peddling accusations against President Biden to a friendly television network with a massive audience eager to believe the very worst about their Democratic foes. He used his Oversight role both to lend a sense of gravitas to those accusations and to provide raw material—investigations, subpoenas, and probes—for Fox News anchors to turn into outrage bait for its audience.
In an interview, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, acknowledged that media appearances are part of the job: They’re a way to bring extra attention to what the committee is investigating. But everything depends on what is being investigated.
The media dimension is fine, so long as you are actually bringing evidence of significant government and social phenomena to the attention of the public. But if all you’re using media for is the promotion of political slogans and disinformation, then that’s a total waste of the job. . . .
Chairman Comer rarely ventured anywhere away from a completely partisan program in [his] vendetta against Joe Biden and now Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. So there’s been precious little oversight of the government itself, much less problems in the country that require sustained congressional attention.
Maybe Comer’s media work has been just one big audition. After all, the two previous Republicans to chair Oversight—former Reps. Jason Chaffetz (Utah) and Trey Gowdy (S.C.)—draw their salaries today from Fox News, where they work as on-air personalities.
Political improv
Comer took something of a freestyle approach to his investigations. He often launched them as reactions to news events and constantly changed investigative themes. Sometimes he trained his sights on the president; at other times, he went after Biden’s son Hunter or brother James. Occasionally, he went in search of “bombshell” testimony about malfeasance, and when he found what he was looking for, it occasionally turned out to be a complete fabrication.
When he called witnesses, they weren’t witnesses so much as subject matter experts. And while on the stand, many of them undermined the very allegations Comer had summoned them to corroborate.
“I do not believe that the evidence currently meets the standard of a high crime and misdemeanor needed for an article of impeachment,” said George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley during a Biden impeachment inquiry hearing last September. Turley, a regular GOP guest on Capitol Hill, dealt a severe blow to Comer’s years-long effort to punish Biden for his great sin of beating Donald Trump in an election.
I reached out to Comer’s office for comment. A House Oversight Committee spokeswoman provided me a statement that read, in part:
The Oversight Committee’s investigation of Joe Biden is one of the most successful investigations in recent congressional history. The Committee exposed how Joe Biden was ‘the brand’ the Bidens sold around the world to enrich the Biden family, and Joe Biden knew of, benefitted from, and participated in his family’s influence peddling schemes. As a result of the investigation, Americans now know the truth about President Biden’s corruption and abuse of public office and the Committee has introduced bipartisan presidential ethics reform legislation to address influence peddling.
This statement was sent along with another detailing what Oversight has accomplished during the 118th Congress; the latter was tendentious and full of spin. But both statements echo the key themes of the almost 300-page report released by Oversight, the House Judiciary committee, and the Ways and Means Committee on the first day of the Democratic National Convention. It details Republicans’ various allegations of Biden’s “impeachable conduct” at great length. The Republican House majority had no interest in acting on these allegations, of course, especially after Biden’s decision to forgo the 2024 presidential campaign. But Comer can have it printed and bound and placed on his bookshelf at home all the same.
Comer’s efforts failed to register with the public, whose fears and hatreds they were meant to inflame. Many Republicans found his investigations of Biden underwhelming.
One particularly embarrassing episode found Comer trying to secure a potential witness to Biden’s alleged crimes. The witness—Gal Luft, an Israeli-American and conservative author—had ended up on the wrong side of the law, and he claimed the charges against him, which involved violating arms trafficking laws and U.S. sanctions, were brought in retaliation over “information” he had on the Bidens.
This caught Comer’s interest. Luft’s lawyer flew to meet congressional investigators in March 2023, according to documents on file with the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) unit.
Then Luft went missing after being let out on bail while courts in Cyprus debated extraditing him to the United States. This caused a great deal of confusion among Oversight’s Republicans. When he was on the lam, several of the committee’s Republicans gave me conflicting accounts of everything they knew about Luft: what his role was, where he was, what information he may have had.
The vanishing Luft arc came to its conclusion last month when he was arrested again. His extradition is apparently back on track, and according to a recent FARA filing, his lawyer has informed the Justice Department he is no longer representing Luft’s interests.
There were other Oversight flubs during the 118th Congress. One of Comer’s biggest gaffes was widely publicizing his discovery that Biden received payments from his brother, who in turn had received payments from foreign interests, which established a chain of money laundering. Yeah. It turns out those were just zero-interest loan repayments.
Beyond that, Oversight’s grand hearings, meant to capture the airwaves, were repeatedly panned by Comer’s House Republican colleagues as “disasters” that accomplished the opposite of their political goals. They repeatedly devolved into squabbling and the exchange of personal insults, with belligerents often egged on by other Republicans on the committee whom Comer was powerless to control. It’s not clear he wanted to control them, either. Comer joined in on the name-calling and personal feuds, at one point furiously telling Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) “you look like a smurf” in the middle of a hearing. Whatever you think of the insult, it provided another clip for Fox.
“People are going to expose and embarrass themselves,” Raskin said of the various public confrontations. “But it is up to the leadership of the committee to define subjects of investigation that have a broad appeal and where members from across the aisle can contribute their insights, and I think if we do that, we’ll get a whole new tenor on the committee.”
“I think there was an unnecessary amount of interpersonal meanness and ad hominem attacks,” Raskin added. “And you know, it was sad to see that the leadership of the committee refused to enforce even one rule, and that, of course, was the problem—or the foundation—of our most notorious hearing.”3
Whether the Oversight Committee turns a corner on the seriousness of its investigations most likely depends on who controls it—and who wins the White House. The feuds, meanwhile, will likely remain a staple; Oversight includes one of the highest densities of Freedom Caucus members of any committee.
For whatever reason, the two parties feel the need to keep changing the name of the Oversight Committee, mostly to swap favored synonyms. Its name has changed several times throughout U.S. history, with three of those changes occurring since 2007. In the event that Democrats retake the House, it will probably change again. Perhaps each side thinks they’ve got the cleaner sound.
Even though it’s already high, this figure doesn’t tell the whole story: It excludes Fox Business, NewsMax, and many of the other programs and channels Comer frequently appears on.
Let's hear it for the Bulwark's Hannah Yoest for turning what could have been a hum-drum bar graph into an absolute work of art. The legend had me in tears, with each Comer head representing two appearances on Fox News. Chef's kiss.
Let's hope voters in swing districts across the country are tired of the GOP dysfunction and want to have the house actually govern again...