WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans on Thursday are holding the first hearing of their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden and their effort to tie the him to the business dealings to his son Hunter.
It’s a high-stakes opening act for Republicans as they begin a process that can lead to the ultimate penalty for a president, punishment for what the Constitution describes as “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, said the committee had “uncovered a mountain of evidence” that he said would show how the Democratic president abused his power and repeatedly lied about a “wall” between his political position and his son’s private business dealings. “There was no wall,” Comer said.
Republicans have been investigating Hunter Biden for years, since his father was vice president. While questions have arisen about the ethics surrounding the Biden family’s international business, no evidence has emerged so far to prove that Joe Biden, in his current or previous office, abused his role or accepted bribes.
But the hearing was not full of back-and-forth on questions about evidence because no one under oath was a witness to or directly involved in any of the allegations.
House lawmakers are facing a resistance in the Senate from Republicans who are worried about the political ramifications of another impeachment and who say Biden’s conviction and removal from office is a near impossibility.
Some takeaways from the opening hearing:
ARGUING FOR AND AGAINST IMPEACHMENT
Republicans called George Washington Law School professor Jonathan Turley as an expert witness. He testified in support of the 1998 impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton and against the first of two cases against President Donald Trump.
Turley said he did not believe the evidence so far supported bringing articles of impeachment against Biden. But Turley said the threshold had been met to launch an inquiry. To support his position, he asserted that Biden had made “demonstrably untrue” statements about business deals and had been the focus of a “multimillion-dollar” influence-peddling effort.
Democrats countered with testimony from Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law professor, who also has a long history on impeachment issues. He testified during Trump’s first impeachment. In 1998, Gerhardt was called as a joint witness, by Democrats and Republicans, to testify on impeachment.
Gerhardt said he had heard no evidence for impeachment charges against the president.
“Any further investigation is being done to ensure that Mr. Biden has to prove his innocence rather than rather than the committee being able to connect the dots in a convincing and persuasive way,” Gerhardt said in his opening statement. “It’s not me you have to persuade. It’s the American people whose trust you deserve and whose trust you have to maintain.”
SHADOWED BY A SHUTDOWN
The inquiry is opening as the federal government is days away from a shutdown that would halt paychecks for millions of federal workers and the military.
It’s the responsibility of Congress to fund the government. The House and Senate have to agree to fund the government and the president has to sign that legislation into law.
A shutdown will effectively begin at 12:01 a.m. Sunday without action on Capitol Hill, and lawmakers are nowhere near a deal.
As the hearing began, Democrats displayed a screen showing the days, hours and minutes left until the government would shut down. They questioned the priorities of House Republicans, who hold a slim majority, as they struggle to pass any funding bills.
“We’re 62 hours away from shutting down the government of the United States of America and Republicans are launching an impeachment drive, based on a long debunked and discredited lie,” said Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the committee, in his opening statement.
BIDEN STAYS FOCUSED ON DEMOCRACY
As the hearing went in in Washington, the president gave an address in Arizona on the state of democracy as the 2024 election draws near. It’s a core focus of his reelection campaign that is becoming increasingly intertwined with the political dynamics around him.
Biden said Trump-supporting “extremists across the country have made it clear where they stand. The challenge for the majority of Americans is to make it clear where we stand.”
Trump, his likeliest Republican opponent, continues to spread falsehoods about the results from the 2020 election that he lost to Biden and is battling unprecedented criminal charges stemming in part from those lies. Some members of the House committees investigating the Bidens also spread the falsehoods. Biden has increasingly called out Trump by name and this week said the former president and his supporters were seeking to destroy American democracy.
“Democracies don’t have to die at the end of a rifle. They can die when people are silent, when they fail to stand up and condemn threats to democracy,” Biden said, referring in part to Republicans who have not spoken against Trump’s claims.
With the impeachment inquiry and investigations into Biden’s son, Trump’s supporters in the House are seeking in part to refocus the spotlight around the Biden family and away from Trump’s criminal indictments.
THE BRAND
“Brand.”
That word was repeatedly invoked by Republicans as a shorthand to allege that Hunter Biden was selling access to his family’s power and connections when he pursued lucrative business dealings.
“Hunter Biden cashed in by arranging access to Joe Biden, the family brand,” Comer claimed.
Minutes later, GOP Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, asserted that “the Biden family sold access to Joe Biden’s power and the Biden Justice Department protected the Biden brand.”
It seemed to recall the closed-door testimony in July of Hunter Biden’s onetime business partner, Devon Archer, that Hunter Biden sold access to the “brand” and that Joe Biden “brought the most value to the brand.” Archer also said that Joe Biden was never involved in Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
The “brand” concept is likely to be central to the Republicans’ impeachment push. Republicans are using the idea to insinuate that Hunter Biden was keenly aware of his father’s power and status as Hunter Biden pursued business deals and that people may have sought to gain access to the father though the son.
HUNTER BIDEN GOES ON OFFENSE
Hunter Biden has been the target of Donald Trump and Republicans for years. He’s now fighting back.
This week, he sued Rudy Giuliani and another lawyer, accusing them of obtaining, trading and passing around his private data including purported emails and embarrassing images in their effort to discredit his father.
Hunter Biden’s lawyers say Trump’s allies spent years “hacking into, tampering with, manipulating, copying, disseminating, and generally obsessing over” the data that was “taken or stolen” from Biden’s devices or storage, leading to the “total annihilation” of Biden’s digital privacy.
Over the past few months, Hunter Biden has sued a former aide to Trump over his alleged role in publishing emails and embarrassing images, and filed a lawsuit against the IRS saying his personal data was wrongly shared by two agents who testified as whistleblowers as part of the impeachment investigation by House Republicans.
THE EFFORT TO DEBUNK
Democrats sought to portray the hearing and the long-running GOP investigation as rehashing “debunked” claims from Joe Biden’s time as vice president. One of the main allegations against the Bidens is based on an unverified tip to the FBI that alleged a bribery scheme involving Joe Biden when he was vice president.
The claim, which first emerged in 2019, was that Biden, as vice president, pressured Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor in order to stop an investigation into Burisma, the oil-and-gas company where Hunter Biden was on the board.
“Those facts are consistent” with the tip, Jordan said, adding that the document was something “the Justice Department didn’t want to let this committee see.”
The FBI document adds to information that had widely aired during Trump’s first impeachment trial and related to efforts by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to dig up dirt on the Bidens before the 2020 U.S. election. It was also the subject of a subsequent Justice Department review that Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, launched in 2020 and closed later that year.
“All they can do is return the thoroughly demolished lie that Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump launched five years ago,” Raskin said.
Raskin and other Democrats introduced a motion to issue subpoenas to Giuliani and an associate, Lev Parnas, to come testify. Republicans voted it down.
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This story has been corrected to reflect that Jonathan Turley is a professor at George Washington University Law School, not Georgetown Law School.
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