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The White House on Friday declared “enough is enough” and launched an impeachment effort against President Biden after House Republicans failed to uncover promised high crime and misdemeanor evidence in a months-long investigation. demanded that it be discontinued.
“Mr. Chairman, it is clearly time to move on,” White House Counsel Edward N. Siskel said in a four-page letter to Chairman Mike Johnson. “This impeachment is over. The American people have too much important work to do to continue wasting their time on this farce.”
The letter comes as the Republican impeachment push has all but collapsed after a key witness was indicted on trumped-up charges against the president’s son, Hunter Biden. Many Republicans have questioned the undertaking, and some impeachment advocates have concluded they cannot muster a majority to send articles indicting Biden to the floor.
The White House hopes to take advantage of the Republican turmoil, effectively condemning Republicans for their bluff and forcing them to choose between putting up with it or shutting up, but hardliners in the Republican conference are unlikely to choose either option. Biden’s team has little hope that Republicans will formally close the investigation, much less acknowledge that it won’t show much, but the president’s advisers are hopeful that the Republican setback will lead to closure. I would like to make the following clear to the public. Impeachment is effectively dead.
The move is part of a new aggressive strategy by the president, who is embarking on his re-election campaign in earnest, starting with last week’s divisive State of the Union address and an aggressive travel schedule to battleground states. There was a time when allies feared Biden was being too passive, but he wants to get back on the offensive for a rematch against former President Donald J. Trump, whom he lost in 2020. .
House Republicans aren’t ready to give up just yet. They maintain that they are still investigating and have scheduled a hearing next week with Hunter Biden’s former business associates. They are also requesting audio recordings of Special Counsel Robert K. Hur’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents, which is not the subject of the impeachment inquiry, and Hur has no right to file criminal charges. This is despite the fact that it was determined that there was no sex.
But recognizing that an impeachment vote is unlikely at this point, Republicans have been exploring an alternative strategy: issuing a criminal complaint urging the Justice Department to investigate Biden and those around him. Unless Trump wins and uses the referrals to justify prosecuting Biden after he leaves office, such a move would have no legal weight and would essentially be a symbolic statement.
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Johnson did not accept the advice from the White House. “Isn’t it surprising that the White House would want to end the current House investigation that revealed that the Biden family and their associates received more than $20 million from foreign sources and that President Biden repeatedly lied? No,” said spokesperson Raj Shah. For speakers. “The White House cannot decide how impeachment is resolved; that is for Congress to decide.”
Republicans say the Bidens and their allies earned more than $20 million from foreign sources including China and Ukraine, but fact-checkers have concluded that much of that money went to business associates rather than family members. So what actually happened to the Bidens? The Bidens made the payments to Hunter Biden and the president’s brother, James Biden, with whom they had business dealings.
Republicans have not indicated that Biden received any benefits, only pointing out that so far his son and brother have repaid several interest-free loans. Republicans also have not presented any evidence that the business relationship was illegal or resulted in quid pro quo by the president.
In a letter Friday, Siskel criticized the House Republican majority on the issue of impeachment. He quoted Republicans themselves as saying they “cannot pinpoint specific crimes” that the president allegedly committed and lamenting that they had made impeachment “a social media issue rather than a constitutional concept.”
“The House majority should work with the president on the economy, national security, and other important priorities on behalf of the American people, and not continue to waste time on political stunts like this,” Siskel said. said.
He added that instead of finding evidence that the president committed impeachable offenses, “the investigation is actually uncovering evidence after evidence that the president has done nothing wrong.” He cited 20 witnesses whose testimony he believes undermines the Republican theory that payments made to Hunter Biden by foreign companies amounted to bribes. It is not possible to identify specific policies or governance decisions.”
Siskel criticized Republicans’ efforts to reinterview witnesses who have already testified, saying they are “hoping that the facts will probably be different the second time around,” calling it “the latest abuse in this investigation.” “It’s just a tactic,” he said. He added that Republican efforts to seize control of the investigation into Mr. Huh amounted to searching for a “floating device for a sinking impeachment effort.”
The Republican investigation began shortly after Republicans took control of the House early last year and was approved as a formal impeachment inquiry by then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in September. The full House voted in December to formally conduct an investigation on a strictly party-line vote.
But the impeachment effort suffered a major blow last month when a Republican-trusted witness, Alexander Smirnov, was indicted on trumped-up charges alleging that Biden and his son each solicited $5 million in bribes from Ukrainian companies. Mr. Smirnov told investigators that “Russian intelligence officials were involved” in connection with Hunter Biden.
“There is no evidence that the president did anything wrong,” Siskel wrote. “In fact, the results showed the opposite of what House Republicans claimed.”
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