Washington – The Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, of the opposition Republican Party, announced yesterday that he will begin an investigation for a possible impeachment against President Joe Biden for the alleged illegal activities of his family.
“I am directing our House committees to open a formal impeachment investigation into President Joe Biden. “In recent months, House Republicans have uncovered serious and credible allegations about President Biden’s conduct: a culture of corruption,” he said in a statement.
A White House spokesperson said on X (former Twitter) that this impeachment process, that is, the impeachment trial, is “extreme politics at its worst.”
“The House of Representatives has investigated the president for nine months and has found no evidence of wrongdoing,” Ian Sams, the government spokesman for oversight and investigations, wrote on that social network.
McCarthy, for his part, pointed out that the investigation will allow the House committees to collect concrete data on the accusation against Biden of allegedly having abused his power when he was vice president in the administration of Barack Obama (2009-2017) to facilitate his son Hunter’s overseas businesses.
He also assured reporters in Congress that the president “lied to the American people about what he knew about his family’s businesses abroad.”
House Republicans, who have held the majority since January, are conducting a series of parliamentary investigations into the affairs of Hunter Biden, the president’s youngest son.
At the moment, this investigation has practically no chance of leading to Biden’s impeachment, since the Democrats have the majority of seats in the Senate, the chamber in charge of trying presidents.
Hunter Biden, 53, came under fire for the business he did with China and Ukraine when his father was vice president, and the House Oversight and Transparency Committee is already conducting an investigation into his activities.
Biden has always publicly supported his son, who has a history of drug addiction and problems with the law.
The investigation for possible impeachment will be led by the chairman of the Oversight and Transparency Committee, James Comer, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Jason Smith.
McCarthy said he hoped Biden and his team would cooperate fully with the investigation.
The opening of impeachment proceedings has been demanded for months by the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party, with which McCarthy had to make numerous compromises to come to power in January. However, several moderate Republican legislators oppose this investigation, for fear of transforming the procedure into a purely partisan exercise.
The US Constitution states that Congress can remove the president for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Democrats responded that these efforts by the right are nothing more than smoke screens used to hide the legal problems that are accumulating for former President Donald Trump, criminally indicted four times in less than six months.
Until now, a president has never been removed from office in an impeachment trial in the history of the United States.
Three were charged: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Trump in 2019 and 2021, but all were acquitted.
Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 to avoid certain impeachment by Congress due to the Watergate scandal, unleashed by the theft of documents at the Watergate office complex in Washington, headquarters of the Democratic Party National Committee, and the subsequent attempt by the administration Nixon to cover up those responsible.
Source: Ambito
