WASHINGTON – Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, one of the leading Republicans, James Comer impeachment inquiry President Joe Biden is increasingly offering a potential departure from pursuing articles of impeachment.
Like GOP leaders they struggle to convince their members Comer, R-Ky., said Biden should be impeached, telling supporters it would be futile because Democrats would block the effort anyway.
Some of them Republicans say they don’t see enough evidence for impeachment President. But in a fundraising email earlier this week, Comer said he would impeach the House, blaming “rogue Democrats” in the Senate. impeachment Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as evidence that they will also reject Biden’s impeachment.
In the same email, Comer offered a potential new outcome for his inquiry, which he also presented to reporters: Instead of pushing for an impeachment in the Senate, House Republicans could send criminal referrals to the Justice Department so that a future Donald Trump administration could prosecute. Republicans won back the White House in November.
“It is clear that the democrats will choose their party over their country and the truth at every step. They should be ashamed of themselves. Therefore, I am preparing criminal investigations as the culmination of my investigation,” Comer wrote in an email. “When President Trump returns to the White House, it is critical that the new leadership at the DOJ has what it takes to prosecute the Biden Crime Family and ensure swift justice.”
Criminal referrals are nonbinding recommendations from Congress to the Justice Department, which has the power to decide whether to act.
With an extremely thin GOP majority in the House — Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., will be one vote short of defections when he resigns on April 19 — party leaders face an uphill battle for impeachment. Biden, especially among Republican lawmakers in swing districts that Biden carried in 2020. They don’t expect to win any Democratic votes.
A GOP spokesperson for the House Oversight Committee said “impeachment is still 100% on the table. The committees will continue to investigate President Biden’s abuse of public office and will issue a final report with recommendations.
But the Senate requires a two-thirds majority to impeach and remove an official. Senate Democrats, who hold a 51-49 majority, can vote to reject the impeachment inquiry with a simple majority. That could happen with Mayorkas’ impeachment in the House, where some Democrats, including centrist Sen. Joe Manchin, DW.Va., have indicated they would vote for him to resign. Republicans considered Mayorkas an easier target for impeachment than Biden, arguing that the secretary had committed immigration violations.
In an interview with Fox News Radio on Monday, Comer explained why the news agency’s committee found no concrete evidence of wrongdoing by Biden in the investigation and why Attorney General Merrick Garland was reporting whether he wanted to protect Biden.
Comer suggested it was part of former President Donald Trump’s “deep state” plan uses Alleging a conspiracy against him and his movement among career government officials. (Although it’s not well-defined, the term is popular on the right, and Trump is running in 2024 on its “must-be-destroyed” message.)
“Well, Garland is working with the deep state, working with the liberal mainstream media, trying to instill in people’s minds that there is no evidence,” he said.
A Republican investigation found that Hunter Biden communicated frequently with his father, even in front of business partners, without any evidence that they discussed business. Several witnesses at the inquest, including Hunter Biden himself and former business partners Rob Walker and Eric Schwerin, testified unequivocally that President Biden was never involved in their business activities. And an FBI informant whose testimony was in court Center There was a GOP investigation was recently arrested and accused of lying to the bureau about the Bidens.
Republicans held a public hearing last week with testimony from two of Hunter Biden’s former business partners, Tony Bobulinski and Jason Galanis, as well as Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-American businessman. Hunter Biden was invited to the hearing but declined, citing his court schedule and the committee’s failure to call Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, to testify about his foreign business dealings.
Bobulinski and Galanis testified that they had either met in person or participated in a phone call with Biden initiated by Hunter Biden years ago. But when pressed to describe the content of those interactions, no witness offered concrete evidence that Joe Biden’s son, then the vice president, or a private citizen, was involved in the business dealings.
Comer closed the meeting by promising to subpoena the president himself to testify in the investigation, although the committee has yet to formally issue an invitation. A few days ago, White House adviser Edward Siskel wrote a letter to US Speaker Mike Johnson and called for an end to the investigation.
“Obviously, it’s time to move on, Mr. Speaker. This impeachment is over. There is too much important work to be done for the American people to continue to waste time with this confusion,” Siskel wrote.