2023-12-14 17:29:29
With just a few days left to enter the election year, House Republicans have just gotten the votes they needed to formalize an impeachment investigation against President Joe Biden. This does not mean that the process is inevitable, but it is true that three of the four previous times that the House made this decision ended in “impeachment.”
Without solid evidence after months of investigation, Republicans allege that Biden profited from his family’s overseas businesses. Given the lack of evidence obtained and anticipating the legal challenges that the White House will launch against them, Republicans have requested a formal vote to have access to more information. “Today’s resolution simply formalizes that investigation and gives the House full authority to enforce its subpoenas that have been denied to date,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Oklahoma. The resolution authorizes the three panels leading the investigation to request material for the grand jury and also allows the hiring of outside attorneys to assist in the investigation.
The vote came hours after Hunter Biden, the president’s son and the main focus of the investigation, defied a subpoena to testify behind closed doors about his business dealings in Ukraine, China and other countries. Biden’s second man spoke at a press conference this Wednesday for the first time since he was charged twice with tax crimes and fraud. “I’m here,” Hunter said, “let me say it as clearly as possible: my father was not financially involved in my business, neither as a practicing attorney, nor as a board member of Burisma, nor in my partnership with a private businessman. Chinese, neither in my investments at home nor abroad.
Hunter has said he is willing to testify publicly if necessary, but not privately. That would be a “farce,” he has said, because House Republicans have consistently tried to “dehumanize me and harm my father.” Additionally, he said he fears they will leak only part of his testimony in an effort to distort his words.
Republicans also intend to examine whether the Biden administration interfered in the Justice Department’s investigation into his son or whether the president mishandled classified documents when he was vice president or senator. So far, the opposition to the Government has obtained 36,000 pages of bank records, 2,000 more of reports of “suspicious” activities from the Treasury Department, as well as several testimonies from two of Hunter Biden’s associates, but so far nothing firm.
Shortly after the formalization of the impeachment investigation became known, Joe Biden lamented that “instead of doing their urgent work that is so necessary,” Republicans “choose to waste time with this baseless political trick that even Republicans in the Congress admit that it is not supported by facts.”
The truth is that this process will last several months in 2024 and will be a severe headache for a president who, at 81 years old, has decided to bet on re-election even though the polls are becoming less and less favorable. Once the investigation is over, the full House of Representatives will vote on whether Biden is impeached. If so, the Senate, with a Democratic majority, will hold the impeachment trial and vote on the removal of the president.
So far no president has been removed from office. Some experts suggest that, in reality, this announced failure to subject the Democrat to impeachment is rather a strategy by the Republicans to divert attention from the real legal situation facing their probable candidate Donald Trump. The former president has yet to answer for 91 criminal offenses in 4 different criminal cases, in 4 different states of the country. A strategy to make an election year even more toxic that has all the components you can imagine. There are even those who are already talking about using this process to “counterprogram” the possible federal trial that Trump faces in March for his attempt to annul the 2020 presidential elections.
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