Three House committees that have spent more than 18 months investigating President Biden have released a report recommending that the commander in chief be impeached for abusing his office to enrich his family.

It is unclear if the proposed basis for impeachment will receive a floor vote before November. 

On Monday, the three chairmen of the committees — James Comer of the Oversight Committee, Jason Smith of the Ways and Means Committee, and Jim Jordan of the Judiciary Committee — made their joint report public after launching their investigation into Mr. Biden in January 2023. Speaker McCarthy announced a formal impeachment inquiry in September of that year. 

The inquiry has centered around the president’s son, Hunter Biden, who for years worked as a lawyer, consultant, and lobbyist for powerful interests at home and abroad. The first son is awaiting trial on felony tax evasion charges for failing to pay his tax bills while he was making millions from overseas clients. 

“President Biden’s legacy is marked by abuse of public office, corruption, and obstruction. The evidence produced by our impeachment inquiry is the strongest case for impeachment of a sitting president the House of Representatives has ever investigated,” Mr. Comer said in a statement today.

“The entire Biden influence peddling model relied on Joe Biden’s presence — at meetings, on the phone, or at dinners — to demonstrate his family members’ influence over him, and he repeatedly provided it.” The committees have also claimed that the Biden–Harris administration was engaged in a cover-up and an effort to obstruct the inquiry. 

The report is nearly 300 pages long, and includes evidence obtained from multiple witnesses who worked with the first son and other family members over the course of their combined decades as Washington powerbrokers. The committees have so far accounted for at least $27 million made by Biden family members and associates over just the last decade, as well as more than $8 million in loans that Republicans say were granted on overly favorable terms. They say much of those supposed loans to Biden family members came from influential Democrats. 

The key claims of the report are that Mr. Biden — in his position as vice president from at least 2014 to 2017 — “used his status as Vice President to garner favorable outcomes for his son’s and his business partners’ foreign business dealings.” His son’s business partners in Russia, Romania, Kazakhstan, and Communist China all had some varying level of contact with the then-vice president, whether it was a brief meeting during a trip to Beijing or an expensive dinner back in America’s capital. 

The president’s son’s foreign business ties have long been under scrutiny ever since the 2020 presidential campaign, and those concerns may once again burst into the spotlight just weeks before the 2024 election. One of the first son’s business partners, who worked with him on his foreign business dealings, is expected to testify at his upcoming tax trial about his attempts to end an investigation in Romania for a client by writing letters to American officials. Those same officials wrote to colleagues that they were concerned about the politically delicate nature of the proposition, given that Biden’s father was vice president at the time. 

Democrats on the Oversight Committee have long defended the president from accusations of wrongdoing, saying that it was the president’s son — not the president himself — who was working abroad for foreign clients, and who should be held accountable for any wrongdoing. On Monday, the top Democrat on the Oversight panel, Congressman Jamie Raskin, slammed both the investigation and its conclusions. 

“The report they throw out into the world during an August Congressional recess and at the start of the Democratic National Convention as a last-minute face-saving gesture is actually a Banana Republican cream pie they have just pressed into their own faces,” Mr. Raskin said. “If there is any merit to the tiny and barely audible plea for impeachment of President Biden, why are the Republicans doing nothing about it?”

In a memo to committee Democrats, Mr. Raskin’s staff wrote that the president’s close connection with his son during the same time of his foreign work was actually the result of his fear of losing another child after his elder son Beau Biden succumbed to brain cancer in 2015. 

“To be clear, there is no evidence that Joe Biden ever discussed his son’s business ventures during any of these calls or visits. This investigation has sought to weaponize the bond between President Biden and Hunter at a time when Joe Biden feared losing Hunter to drug addiction,” Mr. Raskin’s staff wrote. 

A spokeswoman for the Oversight Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether or not Americans should expect a floor vote on specific articles of impeachment before the November election.

A spokeswoman for Speaker Johnson similarly did not respond to a question about a floor vote for articles based on the report, though Mr. Johnson in a statement did praise “the thorough, diligent, and thoughtful work” of the impeachment inquiry committees.