House Republicans on Monday said Joe Biden engaged in “impeachable conduct” in a final report on their investigation into the president — but don’t expect the House to vote on articles of impeachment anytime soon.
After investigating the Biden family for the past year and a half, interviewing dozens of witnesses and reviewing thousands of documents, Republicans couldn’t find clear evidence of official wrongdoing by the president.
Instead, their final report faults Biden for having repeatedly interacted with his son Hunter Biden’s business partners and giving them the impression that paying Hunter Biden would win them influence with Joe Biden.
“Based on the totality of the evidence, it is inconceivable that President Biden did not understand that he was taking part in an effort to enrich his family by abusing his office of public trust,” the report says.
Almost all of the conduct Republicans described in their report occurred before Biden became president in 2021, with most of it occurring after he left the vice presidency in 2017. Republicans also complained that the Biden administration stonewalled their investigation and stifled a criminal investigation into his son, even though the Justice Department is pursuing gun and tax charges against Hunter Biden.
Several of Hunter Biden’s former business partners told impeachment investigators that he would talk to his father almost daily and that he would occasionally put his dad on speakerphone in the company of their clients. They also described in-person encounters with the president, but none of the witnesses said they ever saw the older Biden talk business.
“The entire Biden influence peddling model relied on Joe Biden’s presence — at meetings, on the phone, or at dinners — to demonstrate his family members’ influence over him, and he repeatedly provided it,” House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), one of the impeachment inquiry’s leaders, said in a statement on Monday.
The top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), said Republicans had succeeded — at proving Joe Biden hadn’t committed any high crimes or misdemeanors.
“What do you call a hellbent 20-month impeachment drive whose managers finally just dissolve into compulsive repetition of thoroughly discredited and meaningless accusations? I would call it a complete exoneration of the target of their pathetic attacks,” Raskin said.
For most of the past year, Comer and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) had hoped to prove that Joe Biden had received millions in bribes from the founder of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that hired Hunter Biden as a board member in 2014. For years, Republicans have dubiously claimed that, as vice president, Joe Biden pushed for the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor in 2015 in order to benefit his son.
The bribery allegation came from an FBI agent’s confidential source, and Jordan at one point called it the “most corroborating evidence we have” about Biden’s corruption. But the FBI warned last year that the allegation hadn’t been verified, and when it conducted its own investigation, it discovered that the source had made it up and charged him with a crime for lying.
The final impeachment report doesn’t mention the bribery allegation that got away.
Instead, Republicans claim that payments Joe Biden received from his brother, James Biden, looked fishy.
“While Jim Biden claimed he gave this money to Joe Biden to repay personal loans, Jim Biden did not provide any evidence to support this claim,” the report says.
There is some evidence that the payments were loans, however, including the fact that images of the checks show they were marked as “loan repayment.”
The report doesn’t include articles of impeachment against Biden, instead saying it is being presented to the full House for “consideration of appropriate next steps.”
