White House highlighting past GOP criticisms of impeachment ahead of inquiry floor vote

EXCLUSIVE — Ahead of the House voting to authorize an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, which is expected to happen on Wednesday, the White House is pointing at past statements from Republican members and ramping up pressure ahead of the vote.

The White House is focusing on statements from House Republicans that say there isn’t enough evidence to impeach the president and are trying to tie them to the more hard-line members of the conference in pursuing an inquiry.

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“Marjorie Taylor Greene and the most extreme members of the House Republican conference are pushing ahead with this partisan smear campaign despite the fact that members of their own party have admitted there is no evidence to support impeaching President Biden,” Ian Sams, White House spokesman for Oversight and Investigations, said in a statement.

Sams continued, “If they press onwards with this baseless fishing expedition, it only proves how divorced from reality this sham investigation is, and will come at the expense of meaningful work to actually address the issues the American people care about, like lowering costs, creating jobs, and strengthening our health care.”

They point to comments from Republican members of both the House and Senate who acknowledge that there is not yet evidence to impeach the president.

“I think before we move on to [an] impeachment inquiry, we should … there should be a direct link to the president in some evidence,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) told the Hill in an interview in August. “We should have some clear evidence of a high crime or misdemeanor, not just assuming there may be one. I think we need to have more concrete evidence to go down that path.”

Bacon now supports the inquiry and says he plans to vote for it because the Biden administration has not provided information requested by the House.

Republicans who represent swing seats and their past statements seem to be a big focus of the pressure push. And, with the vote likely to happen on Wednesday, they are starting to further highlight their past statements.

“We’ve got to get back to a point where impeachment is what it was intended to be. I feel like, you know, both in the last cycle and in this cycle, we’re converting into essentially a vote of no confidence in the British Parliament. And I don’t want to see our country go down that path,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) told NBC News in August.

Outgoing Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) was highly critical of the impeachment inquiry on Sunday, saying on NBC News’s Meet the Press that he doesn’t see any evidence to warrant impeachment and that “before you begin an impeachment inquiry you ought to have some evidence.”

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However, House Oversight Republicans have pushed back on the White House highlighting these claims, pointing to the fact that they’re not voting on impeachment. Rather, it is a vote to authorize the inquiry so they can have more legal backing to enforce subpoenas and have full investigative power.

“The White House is spending more time stirring up fake news stories than answering basic questions the American people have about President Biden’s involvement in his family’s business schemes,” a House Oversight spokesperson said. “We’ve documented how President Biden lied about his family’s business schemes close to 20 times yet the White House’s war room of two dozen staff continue to block our efforts to follow the evidence. If the White House has nothing to hide, then they should have no concerns with following where the evidence leads in our impeachment inquiry.”