Washington — House Republicans released their initial impeachment inquiry report into President Biden, alleging abuse of power and obstruction of justice in Biden’s financial dealings. his son Hunter Biden and family associates.
The nearly year-long Republican investigation has stopped short of accusing the president of criminal wrongdoing. Instead, the nearly 300-page report, released Monday before the presidential election, has been released.The Democratic National Convention covers familiar ground, claiming that the Biden family leveraged its “brand” in business ventures in corrupt ways that meet the Constitution’s high standards for impeachment.
With Mr. Biden no longer running for re-election, the next steps are highly uncertain.
House Republicans have not received support from within their ranks to impeach the president, and impeachment by the Senate is even further away. Many Republicans prefer to focus their attention on the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, who has some investigations underway.
The report released Monday makes more than 20 mentions of the “Biden-Harris administration,” while previous statements from the committees investigating Mr. Biden have generally made only direct references to him.
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images
And while Harris is not named alone in the report, the same committees leading the investigation have begun opening new investigations into her and her vice presidential pick, Tim Walz.
The White House called the House impeachment inquiry a “setup” and encouraged Republicans to “move on.”
Conclusions of the panels
“The full range of corrupt behavior uncovered by the committees is egregious,” wrote the House Oversight and Accountability, Justice and Ways and Means committees that conducted the investigation.
The report states that the “constitutional remedy for gross abuse of power by a president is clear: impeachment by the House of Representatives and removal from office by the Senate.”
Republicans have spent most of their tenure in the House of Representatives focused on Mr. Biden and his family’s businesses, emboldened by Donald Trump as the twice-impeached and indicted former president returns to the White House.
The impeachment inquiry is a cornerstone of the Republican Party’s efforts in the House of Representatives, launched by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy shortly before he was ousted from the presidency and formalized in December under new Speaker Mike Johnson. Republicans have been investigating many aspects of Mr. Biden’s family finances since 2009, when he was Barack Obama’s vice president.
Through bank records, interviews with some 30 witnesses, whistleblower testimony and millions of documents, House Republicans are denouncing a long-standing practice by Hunter Biden and his associates of soliciting foreign business deals by taking advantage of the family’s proximity to power in Washington.
Much of the report focuses not on Mr. Biden’s time as president, but on the years when the Biden family was in turmoil following the death of his eldest son, Beau, in 2015, and as the vice president withdrew from elected office, declining to run for president in 2016.
Hunter Biden has admitted to having a serious crack addiction during those years. convicted in June of firearms-related offenses and is scheduled to go to trial next month on federal tax charges.
Former Hunter Biden associate Devon Archer, who was sentenced to a year in prison in 2022 in a separate case, told the committee: “At the end of the day, part of what was delivered is the brand.”
To tie Biden Sr. to his son’s actions, Republicans are relying on a series of phone calls and visits by Biden to dinner parties while Hunter was on assignment. Sometimes, Hunter would put his father on speakerphone for his guests while the father and son exchanged pleasantries.
The Bidens are a family known for being very close-knit and acknowledge that they speak almost daily, including during this time, with the father checking on his son’s well-being.
In his own closed-door testimony before House investigators, Hunter Biden insisted he did not involve his father in his business dealings.
In all, House Republicans accuse the Biden family and its associates of receiving some $27 million in business payments from partners or clients in Russia, China and other countries. They also accuse the Biden family of receiving an additional $8 million in loans, including some from Hunter Biden’s benefactor, Kevin Morris, a Hollywood lawyer, and question the son’s art purchases.
The report said it was “inconceivable” that Mr Biden did not understand what was happening. “President Biden participated in a conspiracy to monetize his position of public trust to enrich his family,” the report said.
Mr. Biden himself declined a request to testify before the House.
References to the Democrats’ impeachment of Trump run through the pages of the report, while Republicans seek to contrast the motives for his impeachment with the actions and “scams” of the Biden family.
Trump impeachments compared to GOP accusations against Biden
But the difference is stark, because the indicted Trump faces actual criminal charges, including conspiring to overturn Mr. Biden’s election in 2020 and drawing supporters to Washington on Election Day. The Capitol Attack of January 6, 2021.
The report also accuses Mr. Biden of obstructing justice in the investigation, revisiting previous complaints about the Justice Department’s handling of the Hunter Biden investigation. Attorney General Merrick Garland has vigorously denied the accusations, defending the department against allegations of political influence.
The article highlights what Republicans have long accused of being a pattern of “going slow” in investigations and delaying enforcement action in favor of the president’s son.
But the report provides no evidence that Mr. Biden was involved in the investigation into his son, launched under Trump and led by a U.S. attorney from Delaware appointed by Trump. The U.S. attorney, David Weiss, was kept in place by Garland to shield the investigation from accusations of political interference.
Garland insisted that no one at the White House gave him or any other senior Justice Department official any direction on how to handle the Hunter Biden investigation.
James Biden also in the spotlight
Beyond Hunter Biden, the report includes details about Joe Biden’s brother James’ involvement in the family’s various businesses.
Republicans have highlighted a series of payments that they say show the president benefited from his brother’s work. They point to a $200,000 personal check from James Biden to Joe Biden on the same day in 2018 that Biden received a matching amount from Americore, a health care company.
House Democrats have defended the transaction, pointing to bank records that they say show Biden was repaying a loan from his brother, who had transferred him $200,000 about six weeks earlier. The money changed hands while Biden was a private citizen.
Short of impeaching Mr. Biden, House Republicans have issued criminal motions recommending that the Justice Department prosecute Hunter Biden and James Biden, accusing them of making false statements to Congress as part of the GOP investigation. Lawyers for the men have argued that the charges are baseless or a distraction.
Until recently, the president was a focal point for Republicans in Congress, but his decision last month to withdraw from the presidential race and Harris’ rise to the top of the ticket have forced GOP leaders to reassess their flagship poll.
A year ago, Republican lawmakers hoped that the Biden investigation would build a strong enough case for the “high crimes and misdemeanors” charge of impeachment. But the longer the investigation dragged on and the less direct evidence investigators were able to produce against Mr. Biden in public or even closed hearings, the more alarmed moderate Republicans, wary of a vote on the issue, grew.
