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Biden impeachment inquiry latest news: Republicans hold first hearing [1]
['Jacqueline Alemany', 'Amy B Wang']
Date: 2023-09-28
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House Republicans are holding their first hearing Thursday as part of an inquiry into whether to impeach President Biden, which House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has said will lay out the basis for a probe that has so far shown no evidence of wrongdoing by the president.
Comer, along with Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason T. Smith (R-Mo.), have called four witnesses to testify, three of whom were invited by Republicans.
Comer has repeatedly touted evidence that has fallen short of substantiating his claims that President Biden has engaged in corruption and abuse of public office. But Comer is expected to try again Thursday, promising “emails, text messages, bank records, and testimony of Biden business associates,” according to his opening statement.
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The Post has previously reported that Hunter Biden accepted money from Chinese nationals and that he sought to sell the Biden family “brand” and the illusion of access to and influence over his father. But there is no evidence that President Biden himself used his official perch to enrich his family, and a key witness testified last month that Hunter Biden was unable to influence his father’s actions or policy decisions — and that during their frequent communications, “nothing of material” was ever discussed.
Comer, Raskin set tone for contentious hearing
In his opening statement, Comer alleged Biden has for years “lied to the American people about his knowledge of and participation in his family’s corrupt business schemes.” Comer accused Biden of having developed relationships with his family’s foreign business targets.
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“These business targets include foreign oligarchs who sent millions of dollars to his family,” he said. “It also includes a Chinese national who wired a quarter of a million dollars to his son.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, hit back in his opening statement by quoting other Republicans’ criticism of their own party in the last week.
“ ‘Clown show,’ ‘foolishness,’ ‘terribly misguided,’ ‘stupidity,’ ‘failure to lead,'” Raskin said. “These are Republicans talking about Republicans. So let’s be clear: This isn’t partisan warfare America is seeing today. It is chaotic infighting between Republicans and Republicans.”
Raskin concluded his fiery remarks by saying that the inquiry all boils down to a “thoroughly demolished lie” that Rudy Giuliani and Trump launched years ago regarding Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine.
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Raskin went on to cite various witnesses — including a former Giuliani associate — who have all disputed the GOP’s allegations that Viktor Shokin, the then-prosecutor general of Ukraine, was fired because he was investigating Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden served.
The witnesses
The committee is hearing live testimony from conservative legal scholar Jonathan Turley, forensic accountant Bruce Dubinsky and a former Justice Department tax attorney, Eileen O’Connor. They are expected to try to bolster the case that President Biden engaged in wrongdoing but will not be able to speak to how Hunter Biden conducted his business or whether his father assisted him.
Turley has become a mainstay expert witness at impeachment hearings. He first appeared before Congress in 2019 as an expert on impeachment, arguing against impeaching President Donald Trump over a July 2019 phone call in which Trump asked the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden.
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Dubinsky has previously provided analysis for Fox News on bank records associated with members of the Biden family that Comer released this year. In an August 2023 interview, Dubinsky insinuated that the Biden family may be utilizing shell companies for “nefarious” reasons — “to either launder money or hide a transaction.”
O’Connor, who served during President George W. Bush’s administration, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed in July, recommending that a judge reject a proposed plea agreement in the Hunter Biden case related to tax and gun charges.”
Democrats, who are allowed to summon one witness, will feature testimony from Michael J. Gerhardt, an impeachment expert and law school professor at the University of North Carolina. Gerhardt first testified in Congress during President Bill Clinton’s 1998 impeachment and then again during the first impeachment of Trump.
A more nuanced take than from Republicans
Turley struck a more nuanced position that Comer and other hard-right Republicans may not have appreciated or anticipated: He said that he supported an impeachment inquiry but that the current evidence did not warrant articles of impeachment.
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“I do not believe that the current evidence would support articles of impeachment,” said Turley. “But I also do believe that the House has passed the threshold for an impeachment inquiry.”
He added that “dishonesty alone” is not sufficient grounds to pursue articles of impeachment — a reference to Biden’s claims that his son Hunter was not accepting money from China and that he did not discuss his business dealings with him.
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A different kind of inquiry
Half a dozen legal and constitutional experts told The Washington Post that the House’s inquiry appears different from how impeachment has been used in the past. It is the first to delve primarily into the behavior of a presidential relative and the first to investigate actions by the president before he entered the Oval Office.
“It seems to me that if I were a doctor and I were examining the body of Congress, I’d say something is going wrong here,” said Philip Bobbitt, an impeachment scholar at Columbia Law School. “When Congress becomes distracted and immobilized, that’s a real crisis for us.”
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Timothy Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia University and co-author of “Impeachment: An American History,” lamented what he called a “troubling” precedent for a generation of lawmakers who have come to view impeachment as another tool of partisan warfare.
“Impeachment was in a glass case for a century,” Naftali said. “Now, the House starts an impeachment inquiry because the speaker is trying to hold on to his job.”
Only three presidents have been formally impeached by Congress — Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump — and none ever convicted by Congress.
Richard M. Nixon thwarted his impeachment by resigning from office after learning that even some of his most loyal allies in Congress were in favor of his removal for abuse of his power and obstruction of justice in his efforts to cover up his ties to the burglars who broke into the Democratic Party offices in 1972. Lesser known are the impeachment inquiries or articles of impeachment filed against past presidents that failed to take flight.
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Trump was impeached by the House twice while in office, first for his phone call with the Ukrainian president and, again, in 2021 for his actions leading to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He was not convicted by the Senate in either instance.
Shutdown looms as GOP pursues impeachment
McCarthy has had his back against the wall on two big things: his tenuous hold on the speakership and how to pass legislation to avoid a government shutdown in a few days. He appears to have calculated that moving to impeach Biden will appease a powerful group of far-right House Republicans who could rather easily remove him as speaker.
“Very clearly the speaker is feeling the pressure not just on impeachment but a whole host of issues,” said Brendan Buck, a former communications adviser to the previous two House Republican speakers, “and he needs a release valve for member angst and frustration, and he’s hoping that this can be that release valve.”
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That means McCarthy might not be sure how an impeachment investigation into Biden would end.
House Republicans could face a political backlash for impeaching Biden, according to Republican and Democratic strategists. There are 18 House Republicans representing districts that also voted for Biden. “Those voters are, by nature, moderate and nonpartisan,” said former Democratic congressman Steve Israel, who heads a nonpartisan institute at Cornell University, “and they will take it out on a Republican who supports a frivolous impeachment.”
Buck agreed that Republicans are putting themselves in a precarious position by pursuing impeachment.
“They have basically laid out conclusions [about Biden’s alleged wrongdoing] and are trying to find the facts, and that’s never a good place to be,” he said, adding: “This is an easy opportunity for Joe Biden to point at Republicans and say, ‘Look at these people, they are crazy, these are not serious folks’ and use that to contrast to help himself get reelected.”
White House responds
Thus far, the White House has slammed the impeachment inquiry as a political stunt and emphasized that GOP lawmakers have spent months investigating Biden and found no evidence of wrongdoing by the president. At the outset of the hearing Thursday, the White House released a statement suggesting that the proceeding was intended to serve as a distraction from the looming shutdown.
“There are 61 hours and 55 minutes until the government shuts down because of extreme House Republicans’ chaos and inability to govern,” White House spokeswoman Sharon Yang said. “The consequences for the American people will be very damaging — from lost jobs, to troops working without pay, to jeopardizing important efforts to fight fentanyl, deliver disaster relief, provide food assistance, and more. Nothing can distract from that.”
Throughout the hearing, the White House continued to release the same statement every half-hour, with slight changes to note that there was less and less time until a government shutdown.
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[1] Url:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/09/28/biden-impeachment-inquiry-hearing/
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