GOP Must ‘Paint Picture’ of Biden Family Business Deals to Find Impeachable Offense
© AP Photo / Andrew Harnik
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While Hunter Biden’s business communiques suggest his politician father was highly involved in his affairs, GOP lawmakers will have to be careful in their pursuit of a potential presidential impeachment not to mistake Hunter’s “desire to look relevant” for genuine corruption, an analyst told Sputnik.
Republican majority leaders in the US House of Representatives said on Monday the lower congressional chamber would likely vote next week on formalizing their impeachment inquiry into US President Joe Biden. The inquiry was opened in September to probe potential misconduct between the president and his businessman son, Hunter Biden.
“We’ve come to this sort of inflection point because the White House is stonewalling that investigation. They’re refusing to turn over key witnesses to allow them to testify as they’ve been subpoenaed. They’re refusing to turn over thousands of documents from the National Archives,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told reporters.
“The House has no choice: if it’s going to follow his constitutional responsibility to formally adopt an impeachment inquiry on the floor, so when the subpoenas are challenged in court, we are at the apex of our constitutional authority.”
Johnson cautioned that the vote would not be about impeaching Biden, which means to bring formal criminal charges against the president. “This is a vote to continue the inquiry of impeachment, and that’s a necessary constitutional step,” he said.
3 December 2023, 06:31 GMT
Domestic policy expert Armen Kurdian told Radio Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Tuesday that GOP lawmakers were trying to “paint a picture” of a series of business deals, communications, and money wires they said suggested improper behavior while Joe Biden was a US senator and US vice president.
“Do they have enough evidence [to impeach Biden]? At this point, no. Do they have a lot of evidence that shows that Joe Biden hasn’t been honest and forthright with the American people? Absolutely. So, this impeachment inquiry, as I understand it, will open up the doors for additional subpoena power, enable them to get some witnesses, I think there are some tax attorneys from the DOJ, they want to get in front [of them] and really understand, following the money, where it came from, where it went, was it deliberately hidden, and understand of course the exact timeline,” he said.
“There’s a lot of smoke there, and it’s smoke of their own doing,” he said. “I don’t think there was any reason to hide a lot of this stuff because it was going to come out, that he did receive money, that he was aware of his son’s business dealings, his son did receive a lot of money. At the very least, it’s just more evidence to show that Joe Biden just doesn’t know what’s happening around him.”
Kurdian said since the inquiry was opened in September, the GOP had been “stonewalled” and encountered new evidence leading them to “additional trails they want to go down.” However, he cautioned he wasn’t sure that any new “bombshell evidence” had been found.
21 November 2023, 18:23 GMT
“I mean, there was this thing that you saw about these three payments that were made back in 2018, they may very well have been for Hunter Biden’s truck, but the question is: was the truck a legitimate business expense? Did you actually use it? And you’re getting money from a Chinese company,” he explained, adding it was “something small” unlikely to lead to impeachment.
“There are a lot of paths that they have to go do and we have to understand the tax implications, where the money came from, tracing it from its point of origin to its destination, and if you can do that then you’ll be able to paint a picture that’ll say either ‘nothing bad happened’ or ‘some things happened here that were not proper, that definitely showed a lot of dishonesty but maybe don’t rise to the point of impeachment,’” he said, such as that perhaps Joe Biden wasn’t actually sitting next to Hunter during business talks, as Hunter suggested in one message that has attracted considerable attention.
Kurdian speculated that perhaps there was a more mundane explanation for comments like that, and for Hunter Biden’s suspicious-seeming behavior in general. “If you look at Hunter’s behavior, his issue with drugs, his desire to look relevant, being on the boards and selling his influence, is it beyond the realm of credibility to say that Hunter Biden was trying to make himself look a lot more important than he was, that he was overselling his influence, that he said, ‘Yeah, my dad’s sitting right next to me,’ and maybe his dad had no knowledge of that text being sent. So I think that could be a very reasonable potential outcome of this inquiry.”
“But at the same time, Joe, don’t say you don’t know what’s happening, I mean you obviously had some knowledge,” Kurdian said.
29 August 2023, 21:25 GMT
“I mean, name-dropping can be a very useful tool,” he said. “It could’ve opened doors for him, it could’ve made him more wealthy, in which case he’s putting himself on the line there, he may even be putting his life in danger, considering some of the people that he was dealing with.”
“The one place where I’m not convinced it was done just for the purpose of name-dropping was the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor,” he said of the 2015 termination of Viktor Shokin under duress by then-Vice President Biden.
“That is probably the biggest thing that I see going on against Joe Biden. Remember, Democrats were falling all over themselves to impeach Donald Trump based on half a sentence that was taken out of context, and that was a legitimate discussion that he was having. Utterly baseless. There’s a ton more here - and that’s not saying much - on Joe Biden than there was on Donald Trump, and Republicans are having a hard time getting to the finish line on it.”
