The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee criticized the impeachment report released by House Republicans on Monday, arguing there is “voluminous evidence” that President Joe Biden committed no wrongdoing and that Republicans sought to “weaponize” his relationship with his son, Hunter Biden.
In a 72-page response to the report, House Oversight ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) blasted the GOP for investigating Joe Biden for over a year and coming up with what he said was little to no evidence to support “its most baseless and nakedly political investigations.”
A trio of GOP-led committees identified more than $27 million received by members of the president’s family and their associates through their business dealings abroad, leading Republicans to conclude in their long-awaited, 291-page report that Biden engaged in “impeachable conduct,” including abuse of power.
But the GOP struggled to tie that money to Biden conclusively or actions he took as vice president. Eventually, the investigation lost steam in the face of opposition from Republican centrists who feared there was no smoking gun to warrant an article of impeachment for high crimes or misdemeanors.
Raskin said Republicans had to resort to “distorting the evidence” by relying on “cherry-picked and misleading information” in bank documents, transactions, and testimony from key witnesses such as the president’s brother, James Biden, and former Hunter Biden business partners Tony Bobulinski and Jason Galanis.
“Having failed to identify a single high crime, misdemeanor, or impeachable offense against President Biden, Republicans have resorted to asserting vague, unsubstantiated, and thoroughly debunked allegations of so-called ‘influence-peddling’ by ‘the Biden family’ and their ‘associates’ — a tacit admission that they cannot identify any wrongdoing by President Biden himself,” Raskin wrote.
“In sum, this investigation has not simply failed to prove that Joe Biden committed any impeachable offense — it has produced undeniably exculpatory evidence discrediting years of Republican allegations and definitively clearing the President of any wrongdoing,” Raskin continued.
In the GOP report, the committees stopped short of recommending that the House, which Republicans control by a narrow margin, move forward with a vote to impeach Joe Biden. Instead, they said their impeachment inquiry would continue and that the decision to move forward with a vote “must not be made lightly.”
“As such, this report endeavors to present the evidence gathered to date so that all Members of the House may assess the extent of President Biden’s corruption,” the committees wrote.
Raskin countered that the report highlights “the spectacular failure of their endeavor” and the contrast between Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, who was convicted in a New York hush-money case and faces two additional criminal cases.
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Though the release of the report fulfills a goal of congressional Republicans this term, it is not likely to have as much of an impact now that Joe Biden is no longer the presumptive Democratic nominee for the 2024 election. In the weeks following Biden’s decision to step aside, the GOP has quietly moved away from the impeachment inquiry and fixed their attention on Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign.
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), the face of the Biden impeachment inquiry, already has a new target: Tim Walz. The chairman announced last week that the committee would investigate Walz’s ties to China on the basis that they could pose national security threats if he is elevated to the White House next year.