WASHINGTON — Top House Republicans are eyeing potential impeachment charges of bribery and abuse of power against President Joe Biden, according to senior House officials familiar with their plans, as they push forward with an inquiry that seeks to tie him to his son’s foreign business dealings.
Building up to the inquiry’s first hearing, scheduled for Thursday, Republicans released records of wire transfers from a Chinese businessperson to Hunter Biden in 2019 that listed his father’s address. A powerful panel voted Wednesday to release 700 more pages from the confidential tax investigation into the younger Biden, as the lawmakers grasp for evidence to fuel their impeachment case, which has yet to yield proof of either potential charge.
The vote came a day before Republicans on the House Oversight Committee were to meet to lay out that case publicly in the first impeachment hearing since Speaker Kevin McCarthy, under pressure from his right flank, announced the inquiry. They plan to present information they have found thus far about Hunter Biden’s international business deals.
The GOP has struggled so far to link any of that activity to the president or get anywhere close to revealing proof of high crimes and misdemeanors. Despite their review of more than 12,000 pages of Hunter Biden’s bank records and 2,000 pages of suspicious activity reports, none of the material released so far shows any payment to his father.
Leaders of the three panels carrying out the inquiry — the Judiciary, Oversight, and Ways and Means committees — hope to accumulate evidence that the elder Biden abused his office, accepted bribes or both, according to the officials familiar with it, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the details.
Republicans are privately cognizant that they lack enough support within their ranks to push charges through the House, and that any charges would be dead on arrival in the Democrat-controlled Senate.
With divisions among House Republicans threatening to lead to a government shutdown this weekend, McCarthy has explicitly tried to leverage his impeachment inquiry to persuade hard-right lawmakers to keep the government open. Thursday’s hearing is — at least in part — an attempt to make the case to right-wing lawmakers and voters that Republican-led committees are making progress in their investigation of Joe Biden, the chief political rival of former President Donald Trump.This article originally appeared in .
