By Miriam Raftery
September 17,2023 (Washington D.C.) – House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, under pressure from right-wing extremists in the House who have threatened to remove him as Speaker, has directed that an impeachment inquiry be opened into President Joe Biden.
McCarthy claims that unsubstantiated allegations of “abuse of power, obstruction and corruption” warrant further investigation to learn whether Biden ever benefitted financially from business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden.
The GOP has spent months investigating those claims. Yet major media outlets confirm not as shred of evidence to substantiate those claims has been found.
National Public Radio (NPR) states that thus far, “There has been no evidence that the president has benefitted financially from any of his son Hunter’s business dealings.”
Nor has there been any indication of obstruction by Biden, as some Republicans claim. In fact, 100% of documents subpoenaed or requested by the Republican-led committee have been turned over by the White House. Republican Congressman James Comer appeared on the Fox Business Network last month and confirmed that he has received 100% of records that he as chairman requested as chair of the oversight committee.
While some GOP members have cited a desire to review bank and credit card records, the committee has not bothered to request those records.
McCarthy issued the order unilaterally, without calling for a vote by the full House, likely because such a vote would fail as even some moderate Republicans have voiced opposition to opening an impeachment hearing with no evidence.
Yet the Trump Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion that the House “must expressly authorize a committee to conduct an impeachment investigation” for proceedings to be legal. Thus Biden could challenge the action based on theTrump-era legal opinion.
Former president Donald Trump, currently a presidential candidate, has publicly called for House Republicans to impeach Biden and suggested this was retaliation for House Democrats twice impeaching Trump. HE told Megyn Kelly on Syrius XM that Biden likely would not have been impeached “had they not done it to me…” the Hill reports.
The Democratic National Committee issued this statement in response. “Donald Trump argued what we already know: Republicans’ baseless impeachment inquiry is motivated by politics and revenge.”
Trump was twice impeached, but not convicted. The first was in 2019 over withholding military aid from Ukraine and pressuring Ukraine’s leadership to investigate the Biden family, when Trump was running against Biden.
The second impeachment came days after the January 6, 2021 capitol insurrection, when Trump falsely claimed the election was stolen from him and exhorted his followers to march on the Capitol, where violence occurred in an attempt to disrupt counting of ballots in the 2020 presidential election. Trump has since been criminally charged on 91 counts, many of them tied to a conspiracy by Trump and his followers to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election through a violent mob, pressuring state election officials to break the law, and an elaborate fake electors’ scheme.
The Joe Biden impeachment inquiry is conveniently timed to distract from negative news for Republicans, including criminal trials of Trump in Washington D.C., Florida,Georgia and New York, as well as Republicans’ in Congress attempting to shut down the government unless funding is eliminated for women in the military to travel if they need abortions, and of obstructions of confirmations by Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville that have left all three branches of the military without leaders, a situation military experts call dangerous.
While no one has disputed that Hunter Biden appeared to shamelessly capitalize on his famous father, there has been no evidence that Joe Biden profited off those efforts, nor even any criminal actions filed against Hunter Biden related to his business activities. Hunter Biden has been criminally indicted, but on charges of filing taxes late and failing to disclose drug use when he purchased a gun that he owned for 11 days.
GOP impeachment efforts at Biden appear at time to be grasping at straws. Conservative media outlets have made hay out of the fact that Biden, as Vice President, sometimes used private email addresses under pseudonyms, for example. But so did the administration of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as Mother Jones reported back in 2013. Mother Jones and more recently, the Hill, have reported that high-ranking officials often used pseudonyms to avoid hackers or spammers in sensitive communications.
Mother Jones likened this to the modern equivalent of an unlisted phone number, and indicated that while this raises potential transparency issues in cases such as some Bush-era emails routed through the Republican National Committee, any emails preserved as part of the presidential records as Obama and Biden appear to have done are likely “above board.”
Both the Biden and Obama administrations have retained all emails including those sent or received under aliases as public records archived under federal law. Back in 2013, White House press secretary Jay Carney called this “a practice consistent with prior administrations of both parties,” CBS News reported.