Republicans held their first impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden on Thursday, where they repeatedly raised the possibility that existing evidence against the president could amount to abuse of power, an impeachable offense.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), who led the hearing, opened the six-hour event by saying evidence members would examine revealed Biden’s “corruption and abuse of public office.”
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He would go on to point out as an example two wire transfers the president’s son Hunter Biden received from Beijing in 2019 for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The transfers listed Joe Biden’s Delaware home as the beneficiary address, and while Hunter Biden’s lawyer has argued the transfers were mere loans, Comer countered that he had no evidence the loans were ever paid back.
“We all know what this payment’s really for. It’s for influence peddling and selling the Biden brand,” Comer said as he contended the younger Biden sold access to his father in several business ventures and that his father aided him while he was vice president or a presidential candidate.
One of Republicans’ witnesses, Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, also introduced impeachable offenses he believed were “relevant” to the inquiry into Biden.
Bribery, obstruction, conspiracy, and abuse of power were all the “most obvious potential articles of impeachment,” Turley said but warned he could not at this stage say those crimes had been established and that “criminal” acts should be established before abuse of power, which could include noncriminal acts.
“Abuse of power is the article that is very, very common,” Turley said. “It tends to be a catchall, and it is the one that I’ve always been a little bit uncomfortable with, which is why I suggest you end there rather than start there because that’s the article that brings in a lot of noncriminal conduct, and frankly I think that you need to focus as much as you can on the evidence and whether you can establish these connections.”
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) also broached in the hearing what he called the “abuse of power model” concerning evidence he and the others had uncovered suggesting Hunter Biden could have received preferential treatment during the Department of Justice’s investigation into him.
The Ohio Republican asked Turley if he would consider that an abuse of power.
“It certainly can be if there’s a linkage to the president,” Turley said.
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Democrats have countered that a substantial portion of the DOJ’s investigation of the first son, which has been ongoing for about five years, actually occurred under the purview of the Trump administration’s DOJ and that any missteps in the investigation therefore could not implicate Joe Biden.
In 2019, the House voted to impeach former President Donald Trump on two charges, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, over a controversial phone call he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump was later acquitted of both charges in the Senate.
