First Impeachment Hearing, Scheduled for September 28, Will Probe Biden’s ‘Involvement in Corruption and Abuse of Public Office’

GOP lawmakers hope expanded subpoena powers will allow them to obtain Biden family financial records that they expect will tie the president directly to his son’s foreign business affairs.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images
President Biden and his son Hunter Biden at the White House on April 10, 2023. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

House Republicans are moving forward with their impeachment inquiry into allegations of corruption involving President Biden and his son Hunter and the greater Biden family, scheduling the first hearing of the inquiry for September 28, just days before the deadline for funding the government.

In a statement to USA Today, the House Oversight Committee spokeswoman, Jessica Collins, said the hearing would focus on “constitutional and legal questions surrounding” what Republicans allege to be “the President’s involvement in corruption and abuse of public office.”

House Republicans are attempting to focus the impeachment inquiry on their allegations that Mr. Biden benefited from his son’s overseas business dealings while he was vice president.

The formal impeachment inquiry gives them expanded subpoena powers as they probe for a “smoking gun” to show that Mr. Biden unlawfully aided Hunter Biden’s business affairs and was personally rewarded. They have yet to provide concrete evidence of these claims. 

House Republicans plan to send subpoenas to members of the president’s family early next week. 

So far, the president has dismissed the impeachment inquiry, saying, “I’ve got a job to do,” adding that Republicans have been attempting to impeach him since he took office.

“They just knew they wanted to impeach me,” Mr. Biden said at a Democratic fundraiser last week. “And now, the best I can tell, they want to impeach me because they want to shut down the government.”

In a statement to CNN, the Oversight Committee chairman, James Comer, who’s overseeing the inquiry, said that the hearing will be “informative” and that “we’re going to have some experts in different areas of the law that can answer questions pertaining to specific crimes, as well as to educate and inform exactly what an impeachment inquiry is.”

The White House has already pushed back against the Republican plans, with a spokesman, Ian Sams, saying in a statement, “Extreme House Republicans are already telegraphing their plans to try to distract from their own chaotic inability to govern and the impacts of it on the country.”

“Staging a political stunt hearing in the waning days before they may shut down the government reveals their true priorities: To them, baseless personal attacks on President Biden are more important than preventing a government shutdown and the pain it would inflict on American families,” Mr. Sams said.

The hearing is scheduled to occur just days before funding for the government will expire at the end of September. While reports indicated that Speaker McCarthy hoped that authorizing an impeachment inquiry would sate House conservatives and help him whip votes for a government funding bill, House Republicans are no closer to a funding deal that could pass the Senate than they were before Mr. McCarthy authorized the inquiry.

Mr. McCarthy has also provoked the ire of the more moderate members of his conference who see the impeachment as “relying on an imagined history,” like Congressman Ken Buck.

“Without doubt, Hunter Biden’s shady business deals undermined America’s image and our anti-corruption goals, and his conduct was thoroughly reprehensible,” Mr. Buck wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post. “What’s missing, despite years of investigation, is the smoking gun that connects Joe Biden to his ne’er-do-well son’s corruption.”


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