Biden inquiry restarted in House
Speaker urges ‘fair’ investigation
During the 22-day fight to fill the post of House speaker, the Republican-led impeachment inquiry against President Biden gathered dust on the sidelines.
Closed-door transcribed interviews with various witnesses and investigative work continued. But since then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, made the sudden decision to launch a formal inquiry, in part to appease hardline Republicans who would soon move to oust him from the speaker’s seat, momentum behind the effort has waned.
As Republican lawmakers have resumed regular business, the new speaker of the House, a former member of the Judiciary Committee where a part of the inquiry is being conducted, has staked out a different position than those leading the inquiry.
Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, a constitutional lawyer by training, has taken a more reserved tone, both publicly and privately, urging members to conduct a thorough and fair investigation with no predetermined outcome. In a closed-door meeting with House GOP moderates this week, he indicated that there is insufficient evidence at the moment to initiate formal impeachment proceedings, according to people who attended the meeting.
“We’ll just go where the evidence goes and we’re not there yet,” Representative Don Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska, said, paraphrasing Johnson’s comments on the inquiry at the Republican Governance Group’s weekly lunch on Tuesday. “Most of us are saying, ‘Look, we can’t even get a single Democratic vote on this right now.’ I think the voters will reject what they are seeing when it comes to Biden [policies] — but high crimes and misdemeanors? I don’t think we’ve seen that or enough data to really make a good case and I feel like [Johnson] really agreed with us on that.”
So far, House Republicans have not put forth any direct evidence that Biden profited from his son Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine and elsewhere, nor has the president been linked to any potential wrongdoing in the probe of the Justice Department’s investigation of his son — the two issues Republicans identified when announcing the inquiry.
Republicans identified two IRS agents who alleged the administration hamstrung the DOJ’s investigation into the president’s son’s finances. But the special counsel in charge of that investigation has flatly rejected that theory, as have other investigators and witnesses involved with the case. The White House has called the inquiry a “baseless, evidence-free” stunt.
Johnson, who told reporters during a news conference last week that he has been “intellectually consistent” in cautioning against a rushed investigation, has previously accused Biden of bribing or pressuring a foreign leader. During a Fox News appearance over the summer, Johnson accused Biden of wielding taxpayer resources to fire Ukraine’s top prosecutor to benefit his son’s business dealings — an allegation widely disputed by both US and foreign officials. And in another interview on Fox News last week, Johnson said that “if, in fact, all the evidence leads to where we believe it will, that’s very likely impeachable offenses.”
But in this week’s private meeting with moderates, Johnson appeared to agree with Republican lawmakers who argued that since Biden’s polling numbers have been so weak, there is less of a political imperative to impeach him, according to Bacon and others at the meeting.