WASHINGTON — House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday ordered an impeachment inquiry into President Biden’s alleged involvement in his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals.
“House Republicans have uncovered serious and credible allegations into President Biden’s conduct. Taken together, these allegations paint a picture of a culture of corruption,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said at the Capitol.
“Through our investigations, we have found that President Biden did lie to the American people about his own knowledge of his family’s foreign business dealings,” the speaker charged.
“Eyewitnesses have testified that the president joined on multiple phone calls and had multiple interactions. Dinners resulted in cars and millions of dollars into his sons and his son’s business partners.”
Biden has repeatedly claimed he never spoke with his son Hunter or brother James about their foreign ventures, but witness statements and records from Hunter’s abandoned laptop and other sources show otherwise.
“I do not make this decision lightly. Regardless of your party or who you voted for, these facts should concern all Americans,” McCarthy said.
“The American people deserve to know that the public offices are not for sale and that the federal government is not being used to cover up the actions of a politically associated family.”
Kevin McCarthy speaks at the Capitol in Washington on Tuesday, Sept. 12th 2023.AP
McCarthy cited bank records that show more than $20 million flowed from China, Kazakhstan, Romania, Russia and Ukraine to the Biden family and its associates.
He also noted an unproven claim that Joe and Hunter Biden took $10 million in bribes from Ukrainian gas company Burisma, which paid Hunter up to $1 million per year beginning in 2014 as his dad led US policy toward Ukraine.
“Despite the serious allegations, it appears that the president’s family has been offered special treatment by Biden’s own administration,” McCarthy said — referring to whistleblower allegations of a coverup in the ongoing criminal investigation of Hunter for tax fraud and other alleged offenses.
I am directing our House committees to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. Over the past several months, House Republicans have uncovered serious and credible allegations into President Biden’s conduct—a culture of corruption. https://t.co/3uoDlUB3Sy
— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) September 12, 2023
“These are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction and corruption,” the House speaker went on.
“They warrant further investigation by the House of Representatives. That’s why today I am directing our House committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.
McCarthy added, “This logical next step will give our committees the full power to gather all the facts and answers for the American public. That’s exactly what we want to know, the answers. I believe the president would want to answer these questions and allegations as well.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced plans Tuesday to launch a formal impeachment inquiry against President Biden.REUTERS
The speaker said that Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) would lead the inquiry.
Comer and Jordan will give a presentation Thursday to House Republicans outlining the case against President Biden, including his links to the dealings of Hunter and James Biden in countries such as China and Ukraine and the Biden administration’s alleged stonewalling of requests for information, two sources told The Post.
One senior Republican aide told The Post that the existence of a formal inquiry will be particularly helpful if the House needs to go to court to enforce subpoenas for records held by the executive branch, as detailed in a 2019 report by the Congressional Research Service.
Federal agencies including the Justice Department have repeatedly balked at or ignored House deadlines and many recent congressional requests set mid- to late-September deadlines for voluntary compliance.
Two sources close to the developments said that it’s unclear when or whether McCarthy would call a vote on the House floor to give retroactive assent to launching the inquiry.
McCarthy committed this month to such a floor vote, but some House Republicans urged focus to remain on pushing for spending cuts ahead of a government funding deadline on Sept. 30.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said opening an impeachment inquiry is the “next logical step” amid ongoing investigations into Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.Getty Images
The speaker’s prior pledge to hold a floor vote led to initial confusion about the meaning of his remarks, but GOP aides clarified that the inquiry launched Tuesday and that a floor vote authorizing the move could still come sometime this fall.
White House spokesman Ian Sams slammed McCarthy’s statement as “[e]xtreme politics at its worst.”
Sams claimed in a tweet that “House Republicans have been investigating the President for 9 months, and they’ve turned up no evidence of wrongdoing.”
McCarthy said there were “allegations of abuse of power, obstruction and corruption” against Biden.NHAC NGUYEN/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
“He vowed to hold a vote to open impeachment, now he flip flopped because he doesn’t have support,” Sams wrote.
A House leadership aide fired back, “Is that a criticism of how [former House Speaker] Pelosi handled impeachment?”
The 80-year-old president, who is seeking a second term in next year’s election, had no public events scheduled Tuesday after returning late Monday from a trip to Asia.
Biden would be the fourth president to be impeached — after Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998 and Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021— but barring explosive new findings, he’d likely be acquitted by the Democrat-held Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required to convict a president and remove them from office.
An impeachment inquiry doesn’t necessarily mean that Biden will be impeached, especially due to Republicans holding a mere 10-vote majority, but it’s widely expected that articles of impeachment will be drafted and considered.
President John Tyler was the first president subjected to an impeachment inquiry in the 1840s during a power struggle with fellow Whigs over vetoed bills. Tyler was thrown out of his own party but wasn’t impeached.
President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 when it became clear that even Republicans would vote to impeach him after the court-ordered emergence of smoking-gun tapes showing he was involved in covering up the Watergate break-in of Democratic Party offices.
House Republicans have turned up extensive evidence that Joe Biden was involved in Hunter and James Biden’s foreign dealings, though Democrats emphasize they have yet to establish whether he personally profited.
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Hunter wrote in records retrieved from his abandoned laptop that he had to give “half” of his income to his dad and Comer in May described nine Biden family members who allegedly received foreign income.
McCarthy last month suggested Biden “give us his bank statements” to settle questions about whether he profited — an idea the president laughed off in late August when asked about it by The Post.
Devon Archer, formerly a close Hunter Biden associate, testified to the Oversight Committee on July 31 that then-Vice President Joe Biden was on speaker phone for about 20 business meetings with his son’s associates and that he attended dinners in 2014 and 2015 with Hunter’s Kazakhstani, Russian and Ukrainian partners.
Hunter and two executives from Burisma— owner Mykola Zlochevsky and board advisor Vadym Pozharskyi — stepped away from a December 2015 meeting in Dubai to call the elder Biden, Archer said.
“Where’s the money?” the president told The Post in June when questioned about an FBI informant’s claim that Zlochevsky said in 2016 he was “coerced” into paying $10 million in bribes to Joe and Hunter Biden in exchange for the elder Biden’s help pushing out Ukraine’s prosecutor-general Vikor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma.
House Republicans have requested an array of records from the Biden administration. Comer on Monday demanded from the State Department records showing the evolution of US appraisals of Shokin ahead of his ouster in March 2016, which Biden has publicly claimed credit for forcing.
Although Biden defenders say he was advancing established US policy, internal alleged Obama-Biden administration emails published last month by Just the News indicate officials were surprised that Biden was pushing for Shokin’s ouster as a condition of granting $1 billion in US loan guarantees.
“Yikes. I don’t recall this coming up in our meeting with them on Tuesday,” National Security Council aide Eric Ciamarella alleged wrote in a Jan. 21, 2016, email, adding that “we were super impressed with the group” from Shokin’s office that visited DC.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer have been leading investigations into Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.AP
Comer is also seeking access to Air Force Two flight manifests that would document Hunter and his business associates traveling with Joe Biden to countries including China and Mexico while courting business associates.
Hunter traveled aboard Air Force Two with his dad on an official trip to Beijing in 2013 as he set up a Chinese state-backed investment fund called BHR Partners. Hunter introduced Joe Biden to incoming CEO Jonathan Li and Joe Biden later wrote college recommendation letters for Li’s children.
Archer told Congress that the then-VP had coffee with Li in Beijing — rather than a mere handshake as previously reported — and later greeted him on speaker phone during a subsequent visit to China by Hunter, who held a 10% state in BHR through at least part of his dad’s presidency. The terms of his alleged divestment remain murky.
As part of a later Chinese business venture with government-linked CEFC China Energy, Hunter and James Biden’s associates in May 2017 penciled in a 10% cut for Joe Biden months after he left office as vice president.
IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, who supervised the Hunter BIden tax fraud investigation for more than three years, provided Congress with a text message further implicating Joe Biden in the CEFC deal — in which Hunter wrote to a Chinese government-linked businessman on July 30, 2017, that he was “sitting here with my father” and warned of consequences if a deal was aborted.
Within 10 days of that threatening text message, $5.1 million flowed from CEFC to Biden-linked bank accounts — on top of $1 million that flowed from the same company to the Biden family earlier in 2017 weeks after Joe Biden left office as vice president. The CEFC partnership appears to have begun as early as 2015, congressional Republicans say.
Shapley and another IRS whistleblower, Joseph Ziegler, who worked on the Hunter Biden investigation for about five years, said that Biden-appointed US attorneys in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, refused to charge the president’s son with tax crimes, resulting in a probation-only plea deal that collapsed in July under scrutiny by a federal judge.
Hunter now faces a potential gun-charge trial in Delaware and possible tax cases in DC and Los Angeles following the elevation of Delaware US Attorney David Weiss to the status of a special counsel in August.
House Republicans are deeply skeptical of Weiss, noting that Shapley and Ziegler say that his office repeatedly steered them away from analyzing Joe Biden’s role in his son’s enterprises, even when communications implicated him.
They also note it’s unclear what if anything Weiss’ office did to investigate the $10 million bribery allegation, which was referred to them in 2020.
Kevin McCarthy speaks at the Capitol in Washington on Tuesday, Sept. 12th 2023.AP
Republicans also are seeking, among other documents, emails involving Joe Biden’s use of the pseudonyms “Robert L. Peters” and “Robin Ware,” of which nearly 5,400 reportedly exist. Some of the messages cc-ed Hunter.
After his father took office as president, the first son launched a new career as an artist.
He has earned at least $1.3 million by selling his novice works, including to a presidential commission appointee who visited his father in the West Wing.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
