House impeachment inquiry enters crucial week as Republicans prepare for key vote
By Annie Grayer and Marshall Cohen, CNN
House Republicans are preparing to formalize their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden with a House vote this week, as their investigation reaches a critical juncture while right-wing pressure grows.
Up until this point, House Republicans have not had enough votes to legitimize their ongoing inquiry with a full chamber vote. The probe has struggled to uncover wrongdoing by the president which is why it hasn’t garnered the unified support of the full GOP conference.
Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy unilaterally launched the inquiry in September, even though he had previously criticized Democrats for taking the same step in 2019 when they launched the first impeachment probe of then-President Donald Trump without taking a vote at the beginning.
The dynamics for House Republicans changed, however, when the White House told the trio of GOP-led congressional committees leading the investigation that its subpoenas were illegitimate without a formal House vote to authorize the inquiry. The Trump administration made a similar argument against House Democrats at the start of his 2019 impeachment.
That gauntlet thrown by the White House has appeared to help reluctant, more moderate Republican members get on board with formalizing the inquiry.
The argument from Republican proponents of the effort, according to multiple GOP lawmakers and aides, is that a floor vote will strengthen their legal standing against the White House and fortify their subpoenas targeting witnesses like Hunter Biden, the president’s son, who has signaled he will not appear for his scheduled closed-door deposition this week.
“I didn’t come to Washington to expel a member of Congress or impeach a president,” Rep. Marc Molinaro, a swing district Republican from New York, told CNN. “The White House would do well by honoring subpoenas and participating in the investigation. If they chose not to and they obstruct, with all due respect, it’s the legislative branch’s responsibility to assert our right and responsibility to provide that oversight.”
Also potentially bolstering the GOP inquiry: Last week’s tax indictment against Hunter Biden, which overlapped with many of the alleged financial imports and overseas business deals that Republicans have intensely scrutinized with their own probes.
In response to allegations they have stonewalled the inquiry, a recent White House memo touted that Republicans have accessed more than 35,000 pages of private financial records, more than 2,000 pages of Treasury Department financial reports, thousands of records from Biden’s vice presidential tenure from the National Archives, and at least 36 hours of witness interviews. Still, Republicans have been clamoring to get access to emails where then-Vice President Joe Biden used an email pseudonym, as they have only received 14 of those pages to date. Just this week, the National Archives informed the House Oversight Committee it would receive 62,000 pages in response to their request, which will include pseudonym emails, on top of the 20,000 pages already made available to them, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer said, “The impeachment inquiry strengthens our hand when we go to court against this administration or anyone who refuses our subpoena.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team are still working to build support for the vote and overcome their razor-thin majority.
“This vote is not a vote to impeach President Biden,” Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, said last week. “This is a vote to continue the inquiry of impeachment, that is a necessary constitutional step and I believe we’ll get every vote that we need.”
While the vote will appease the far-right members in the conference who have been clamoring to impeach the president, some of their colleagues, like retiring GOP Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, who has been an outspoken critic of the inquiry, plan to vote against it. Johnson argued the reason the vote is happening now is because House Republicans have reached an “inflection point” with the White House, and insisted the vote will not put moderate GOP members in a tough spot: “This is not a political decision. This is a legal decision.”
The House Rules Committee is scheduled to meet on Tuesday to discuss the resolution formalizing the inquiry, and the vote is expected later this week, two sources familiar with the resolution told CNN.
Meanwhile, House Republicans are also gearing up for a showdown with the president’s son this week over his testimony.
While committee chairmen have demanded Hunter Biden appear for a closed-door deposition on December 13, Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, has told Congress his client is only willing to appear for a public hearing. If Biden does not appear on Wednesday, Comer said he will hold the president’s son in contempt of Congress for evading his subpoena, taking the standoff to a breaking point.
Lacking evidence
Since McCarthy launched the inquiry in September, the trio of committees leading the investigation have interviewed various officials from the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service while also obtaining a mountain of documents and new bank records, including from Biden family members.
Even as Republicans issue new subpoenas and schedule more depositions, including with the president’s brother and son, they still have not uncovered credible evidence that backs up their loftiest claims against Biden. There has only been one hearing related to the inquiry since its launch, where the expert witnesses called by Republicans acknowledged GOP investigators hadn’t yet presented enough evidence to prove the accusations they were leveling.
At every stage, House Democrats and the White House have refuted and sometimes even debunked the accusations leveled by Republicans, who have tried to connect Joe Biden to his son’s million-dollar overseas deals.
In the lead-up to this week’s vote, each of the three committees, leading a different portion of the inquiry, has sought to build momentum.
The House Oversight panel has focused on Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings and sought to make connections to his father. In the early stages of their investigation, they interviewed five people and issued nine bank subpoenas, but have ramped up to issue nine subpoenas for testimony in the last month. The Republican-led committee released a document last week showing payment from Hunter Biden’s business entity, Owasco PC, to Joe Biden when he was not in office – but they omitted evidence that the president’s son was repaying his father for a car.
There have also been two personal checks from the president’s brother, James Biden, to Joe Biden when he was not in office, that the committee released. However, available evidence suggests these were loan repayments.
Even though these payments are a far cry from the Republican accusations that the president profited from his family’s foreign business dealings, the existence of the checks have provided fuel to the president’s political opponents and the GOP far-right base.
Testimony from Hunter Biden business associate, Devon Archer, revealed that the president has had various surface-level interactions with his son’s business partners, putting the president closer to his son’s business activities than previously let on, and undermining some of his earlier unequivocal denials. But so far there is no evidence that business was ever discussed during these interactions.
What has been demonstrated clearly is a son using his father’s famous name and political standing to help further his business. On that note, Archer testified to Congress that he agreed it’s fair to say Hunter Biden was selling an “illusion” of access to his father.
Overlap with Hunter Biden charges
The House Ways and Means Committee has handled the documents and testimony from two IRS whistleblowers who worked on the Hunter Biden criminal probe and alleged that the case has been politicized and mishandled.
Special Counsel David Weiss, who is overseeing the ongoing criminal probe, and the Justice Department leadership have denied the politicization claims. Weiss indicted Hunter Biden on Thursday in connection with the tax probe. He filed separate felony gun charges in September. (Hunter Biden denies wrongdoing.)
The pair of IRS whistleblowers, who first brought their claims to Congress over the summer, testified again to the panel behind closed doors last week to raise concerns over Joe Biden using email aliases to communicate with one of his son’s business partners when he was vice president, though they didn’t disclose the contents of the emails.
The IRS whistleblowers, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, have said prosecutors in the Hunter Biden probe refused to look into Joe Biden’s potential role in the business deals. They said prosecutors blocked their efforts to potentially interview the president and hunt for information about his possible business involvement with subpoenas, though Weiss has said the probe followed the facts.
The staggering tax indictment against Hunter Biden revealed last week could give a boost to the House Republicans who have spent months arguing that he corruptly cashed in on his father’s name to make millions from business deals in China, Ukraine, Romania and elsewhere.
Further, the charges offer some vindication for Shapley and Ziegler, who have accused federal prosecutors of politicizing the case.
They previously told House lawmakers there was significant evidence that Hunter Biden committed tax evasion – and they were outraged that their recommendation for these felony charges went nowhere. Hunter Biden is now charged with many of the same crimes that these IRS whistleblowers said he should have been facing all along.
Comer was quick to credit Shapley and Ziegler, saying the tax indictment was “the result” of their revelations, and he praised their “brave” decision “to expose the truth.”
But the 56-page indictment offers nothing to back up the explosive claims that Comer and other Republicans put at the heart of their impeachment inquiry: That Joe Biden was involved in “corrupt” business deals with his son, and abused his government powers to enrich his family.
Joe Biden is not mentioned in the indictment. And prosecutors didn’t accuse Hunter Biden of funneling any of his foreign money back to his father, as House Republicans have claimed.
This is where the House Judiciary Committee’s probe has come in – to further investigate allegations brought forward by the IRS whistleblowers. The panel has interviewed seven current and former Justice Department officials, including Weiss, to discuss the sprawling allegations.
While Republicans argue the IRS whistleblower testimony bolsters claims that the Biden administration has impeded the criminal investigation of the president’s son, various Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service officials who have come in for interviews over the last few months have undercut a number of their allegations, CNN reporting has shown.
Still, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan told reporters last week he is looking at potential charges of bribery, abuse of power and obstruction against the president –claims that are largely based on already-debunked claims about Biden’s dealings in Ukraine that emerged during Donald Trump’s first impeachment.
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