House Republicans are working on formalising their investigation into impeaching President Biden with a possible floor vote over coming weeks, The Washington Post reports.
House majority influencing official Tom Emmer (Minnesota Republican) told Republicans in a closed-door conference meeting on Wednesday morning that House members would likely have to vote for formal authorisation. Biden’s impeachment will be discussed in the coming weeks after then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (California Republican) unilaterally initiated an investigation without a vote in the House.
Republican leaders are seeking to intensify pressure on the Biden administration as the White House has become more aggressive in resisting what House GOPs consider legitimate supervision requests, people familiar with the matter say.
The impeachment investigation is focused on whether Biden benefited from his son Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings. However, House Republicans have yet to release any direct evidence that Biden profited from his son’s financial involvement in Ukraine or elsewhere.
House Republicans revealed allegations that the Justice Department under Biden blocked an investigation into Hunter Biden’s financial past, but that testimony has been repeatedly disputed by officials involved in the case.
White House special counsel Dick Sauber has questioned the legitimacy of investigations into the impeachment of the US president on the grounds that the House of Representatives has yet to formally authorise the investigation by majority vote, and has also argued that some requests were unreasonable and beyond the scope of the investigation. Representative Kelly Armstrong (a Democratic Republican), said:
If we are going to have to fight in court against the administration, we want the House to be in the best legal position possible.
In 2020, the Trump-led Justice Department issued an opinion that impeachment investigations authorised by the House without a general vote were constitutionally invalid.
So far, the Biden administration has largely cooperated with various oversight efforts by the House Republican Party. About a dozen former and current administration officials have appeared before the committee, and congressional investigators have obtained thousands of pages of private banking records, as well as over 2,000 pages of suspicious activity reports from the Treasury Department, along with documents from the National Archives.
“This is yet another sad attempt by extreme House Republicans to try to distract from their own chaos and dysfunction, including whether to expel their own member and how they are yet again on a path to shut down the government. Their baseless fishing expedition targeting the President has been going on for an entire year and, over and over again, their allegations of wrongdoing by President Biden have been thoroughly debunked.”
On Tuesday, the lawyer representing Hunter Biden responded to a court subpoena from House Republicans demanding closed-door testimony with a counter-offer to testify at a public hearing. Private negotiations over his deposition, scheduled for December 13, continue.
It remains to be seen whether House Speaker Mike Johnson (Louisiana Republican) has the votes to launch a formal investigation, as some Republican lawmakers continue to question the enquiry. House member Ken Buck (Colorado Republican), who previously opposed McCarthy’s decision to launch an investigation because of a lack of evidence, reported on Wednesday the following:
I thought [McCarthy] didn’t bring it to the floor before because he didn’t have the votes, and my guess is that we still don’t have the votes.
