It’s perhaps a little too simplistic to cast the impeachment inquiry of President Biden, which the House will vote to formalize Wednesday, as a “Seinfeld”-ian impeachment “about nothing.”
Republicans have at the very least put forward a broadly theoretical case for how Biden’s actions could conceivably constitute corrupt foreign influence peddling. But at this point it’s almost entirely speculative, and key assertions they’ve built their inquiry on have been undermined by evidence — or been outright debunked.
Perhaps nothing has driven home just how speculative and unwieldy it is like a key exchange at a House hearing Tuesday.
The House Rules Committee was considering whether to advance a vote on a formal impeachment inquiry to the House floor, which it did along party lines. In the course of the debate, Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) had a pretty basic question for his Republican colleagues.
“What is the specific constitutional crime that you’re investigating?” Neguse asked Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.).
“Well, we’re having an inquiry so we can do an investigation to compel the production of witnesses and documents,” Reschenthaler said.
Neguse, who served as a House prosecutor during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, pressed again: “And what is the crime you’re investigating?”
Reschenthaler responded merely, “High crimes, misdemeanors and bribery.” It was a reference to the constitutional threshold for impeachment, not a specific offense.
“What high crime and misdemeanor are you investigating?” Neguse asked.
“Look,” Reschenthaler said, “once I get time, I will explain what we’re looking at.”
That there wasn’t an easy, concise answer available to Reschenthaler was telling. Republicans have indeed struggled to explain specifically what this inquiry is about. They’ve mostly focused on Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings without being able to link his father, President Biden, to them in any concrete way. When confronted with the lack of evidence of the president’s wrongdoing, they’ve sometimes acknowledged it doesn’t really exist — while saying the inquiry is needed to find the evidence.
Asking what constitutional offense is alleged still seems to be a seemingly simple question.
Yet even when Reschenthaler did get time to expound shortly after the exchange, it still wasn’t so clear what the inquiry was about: Was there any reason to believe anything implicated Biden?
Reschenthaler began by pointing to Biden’s effort to get Ukraine’s former top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, fired.
“We have him on tape, dead to rights, bragging about shutting off aid to Ukraine in order to get a prosecutor — who’s actually probably the one guy in that government that wasn’t corrupt — that guy going after [Ukrainian energy firm] Burisma, which his son sat on the board of Burisma,” Reschenthaler said. “Quite amazing.”
This is indeed quite an amazing summary.
Republicans have regularly suggested that then-Vice President Joe Biden’s push was meant to benefit his son. The problem is that this was not just an initiative of Biden’s — Shokin’s ouster was widely sought by other Western nations. And Shokin didn’t appear to be actually scrutinizing Burisma at the time. A key witness Republicans has hailed, former Hunter Biden business partner Devon Archer, has testified about how Burisma’s team in Washington cast Shokin as an asset rather than a liability.
But Reschenthaler truly takes it to another level by calling Shokin “probably the one guy in that government that wasn’t corrupt.” That is diametrically opposed to how much of the West — including Republican members of Congress — described the situation back then. There was a chorus alleging Shokin was too soft on corruption and needed to go because of it.
Reschenthaler went on to cite millions of foreign dollars that went to Biden family members and a “quarter of a million dollars in direct payments” to Joe Biden from those family members. Except virtually all of that money appears to be loan repayments between family members rather than proceeds from foreign business deals.
Lastly, Reschenthaler wagered, “We’ll probably be able to show that President Biden was personally involved in his family’s foreign business dealings and business arrangements with others, and that Biden has not been truthful about his family’s foreign business entanglements.”
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) echoed that in his own response to Neguse, saying that “the question before us, I think, is whether President Biden used his office for his personal gain or his family’s gain, whether there was influence-peddling involved, whether there was international dollars flowing to the president as vice president or as a private citizen after leaving the office of the vice presidency.”
There may be valid grounds for impeachment in that list — just not grounds that have actually been substantiated as the House takes this historic step.
Indeed, there appears to be less evidence to substantiate this impeachment inquiry than there have been for any of its predecessors, including Trump’s two. Even the GOP’s own impeachment hearing in September devolved into its witnesses saying the evidence of impeachable offenses wasn’t there.
At another point, immediately after Neguse’s grilling, Reschenthaler seemed to get at the crux of the matter. He pointed to his opposition to Trump’s impeachments.
“Now we have a situation where the standard of impeachment has been lowered to such a degree that, again, it’s merely at this point a political exercise,” he said.
He quickly added, “Not that this is a political exercise, but the bar has been lowered.”
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