Democrats who grilled IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler could not offer effective counterarguments to their testimony, and only could muster emotional diatribes targeting former President Donald Trump and invoking George Floyd, critics said Wednesday.
During the hearing, Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., invoked George Floyd when speaking about Republicans' claims of a two-tiered justice system favoring the Bidens, while House Oversight Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin of Maryland made a "Pink Panther" reference in calling the probe an "Inspector Clouseau-style quest for something that doesn't exist."
Several other Democrats invoked Trump during their speaking time, including Kweisi Mfume of Baltimore and Gerald Connolly of Northern Virginia.
Mfume quipped that he wanted to thank Republicans for gathering lawmakers and "almost distracting us from the biggest investigation that is going on right now… involving the former president."
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Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., claimed the GOP presented "a lot of allegations, zero proof, no receipts, but apparently some d--- pics," after lurid photos of the first son were presented as exhibits by one Republican.
On "The Five" Wednesday, co-host Kennedy said many of the Democrats' lines of questioning revealed their lack of a rebuttal to the whistleblowers' claims and statements made by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and other Republicans in public.
"What really upsets me is this overly-emotional conflation. And you've got people on the committee who refuse to take apart or question these points, which, you know, it might be convenient if this is a basis for prosecution or investigation for an opposing party when they are back in power, but instead their dismissal of it," she said.
"All that means is Republicans can dismiss anything they want when it is a Republican child of a president who is accused."
She added the lawmakers' invoking of Floyd and Breonna Taylor – a woman killed in a police-involved situation in Kentucky wherein some officers were federally charged – is "offensive because when you don't have facts to go to or you don't have the ability to really question and examine those facts, then you go to something that is so completely emotional, not realizing that, there is no mutual exclusivity here."
Co-host Jesse Watters reported that Ziegler, the whistleblower formerly only known as "Mr. X." did not actively seek out Hunter Biden as a subject, but that his identity came up during an unrelated investigation.
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"[Ziegler] wasn't told to go look into Hunter," he said. "He stumbled upon Hunter when he was looking into some international porn investigation and noticed that Hunter was buying escorts and Hunter was using his bank as basically an escort slush fund and his corporate bank account as an escort slush fund that sets alarm bells off with tax investigators that something's fishy."
During the hearing, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., held up sexually-explicit images of Biden as well as a United Airlines receipt she claimed was funded by Biden to fly a woman from LAX to Dulles for sex, which she alleged is a federal crime.
Greene cited the Mann Act, a 1910 woman-trafficking law named for former House Minority Leader James Mann, R-Ill., and asked Ziegler about the situation.
Ziegler testified Biden itemized a $10,000 deduction on his 2018 tax return for a purported golf club membership that was in reality a sex club membership and that he categorized payments to prostitutes as business expenses.
Judge Jeanine Pirro referenced that testimony on "The Five," adding President Biden and the Democrats want to essentially fund 87,000 mostly-armed IRS agents to make sure Americans properly pay and file their taxes, while not scrutinizing the president's own son's filings.
"Let me just say that apparently, Ziegler said between 2014 and 2019, there was $17 million in foreign money that the Bidens got," she said.
