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Congress is back this week, and so is talk of impeaching Joe Biden. But after eight months of “investigating” the president, with little to show for it, House Republicans are now facing a bitter pill that Democrats argue the GOP should finally just swallow: that their impeachment effort has gone nowhere.
Democrat Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, asserted in a memo this week that Republican efforts to link the president to the alleged crimes of his son Hunter Biden have been “a complete and total bust.” In the 14-page memo published Monday, Raskin accused House GOP members, including, Oversight chairman James Comer, of attempting to help the Trump campaign by “establishing a false moral equivalency” between Donald Trump’s four indictments and Biden’s alleged infractions as vice president. “House Republicans are weaponizing their offices and exploiting congressional power and resources to promote debunked and outlandish conspiracy theories about President Biden,” Raskin wrote, adding that “there is precisely zero evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever” on the part of the president.
While House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has repeatedly attempted to check his party’s hunger for an impeachment battle, he could be strong-armed into it if he wants to maintain power. After all, to obtain the Speaker’s gavel earlier this year, McCarthy agreed to a rule change that would allow any member to single-handedly trigger a vote to expel him—and there’s at least one representative who says he may do just that if McCarthy doesn’t play along. “If Speaker McCarthy stands in our way, he may not have the job long,” Republican congressman Matt Gaetz threatened last week.
Despite constant investigations since assuming the House majority in January, Republicans haven’t found proof to support either one of their core justifications for seeking impeachment: that Biden, as vice president, profited from the international business dealings of his family, and that Biden used his position to run an influence-peddling scheme with foreign actors. Nevertheless, a spokesperson for Oversight Republicans—who are spearheading the probe into the president’s business dealings—told Fox News Digital Monday that there is “mounting evidence” showing that “then vice president Joe Biden was ‘the brand’ that his family sold around the world to enrich the Bidens.”
The White House has repeatedly denied these accusations, and the Congressional Integrity Project—a Democrat-aligned activist group monitoring the GOP’s Biden probes—has refuted them as well, issuing a rebuttal that tracked closely with Raskin’s memo. “After months of political stunts, dozens of hearings, transcribed interviews, and memos, and despite hours on Fox peddling conspiracy theories, Comer and his MAGA crew have failed to find a single shred of evidence linking President Biden to any of their lurid accusations,” the group stated in a new report. “In fact, Republicans have been forced to walk back claim after claim.”
Despite lacking a smoking gun, Republicans have still successfully managed to paint Biden as corrupt in the court of public opinion: According to a CNN/SSRS poll released last week, 61% of Americans think that Biden, while vice president, played a part in his son’s business dealings, and 42% say they believe he acted illegally.
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Caleb Ecarma
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