Republicans Have Nothing to Impeach Joe Biden On. And They Finally Know It.
House Republicans are starting to realize that, even after months of investigation, they have no reason to impeach Joe Biden.
The House GOP has for months accused Biden of corruption. But after interviewing dozens of witnesses and sifting through the Biden family’s financial records, they have found no evidence of wrongdoing by the president. Senior Republicans are finally starting to come around to that, CNN reported Friday.
“While I think that it’s pretty clear, I don’t know that the case has been adequately made to the American people,” Representative Scott Perry told CNN.
But it doesn’t seem as if the case has been “adequately made” to the Republican caucus, either. The party hasn’t done a formal count yet, but one GOP lawmaker, speaking anonymously, told CNN there are likely about 20 Republican representatives who don’t think there is sufficient evidence to impeach Biden.
Republicans have such a narrow majority that they can only afford to lose two votes. And even if the House did manage to pass articles of impeachment, the move would fail immediately in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
One Republican source, speaking anonymously, described the impeachment inquiry as a “jumbled mess.” “You’d be hard pressed to say it’s going well,” they said.
A second Republican lawmaker anonymously told CNN they “don’t think it goes anywhere.”
With failure on the horizon, the goal appears to have shifted from impeaching Biden to just waiting and seeing how people vote in November.
“Let the American people decide in November if they want to take this country in a different direction,” Representative Nicole Malliotakis said.
One of the Republicans investigating Biden told CNN anonymously they aren’t “trying to sell any case. We want to collect the facts and tell people what the facts are.”
Multiple House Republicans, including Matt Gaetz and Ken Buck, have previously indicated that the impeachment inquiry is really just a move to discredit Biden in voters’ eyes, instead of actually impeaching him. But the investigation hasn’t turned up anything to actually discredit Biden, either.
Instead, almost every one of Republicans’ witnesses has actually debunked the GOP’s claims. Multiple witnesses said that Biden was never involved in his son’s foreign business dealings and never benefited from them, either.
Even House Oversight Chair James Comer, who spearheaded the investigation, has started backing down from his previously gung-ho attitude about impeachment. Despite spending all of 2023 insisting Biden was guilty and should be impeached, Comer said just two weeks ago that his “job was never to impeach.”
On Thursday, Comer admitted that his star witnesses “have a hard time remembering the bad things” about the Bidens and that his investigation has “hit a brick wall.”