House Republicans will try to give their seemingly stalled impeachment inquiry some new life in the near future with a fresh strategy — but it's one that's already being panned by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD).
Punchbowl News reports that there is growing acceptance within the House Republican caucus that there will not be a successful vote on the floor to impeach Biden, even though Rep. James Comer (R-KY), who has been leading the investigation, has spent months hyping potential bribery charges against him.
Instead, it seems that Comer plans to make "criminal referrals for those in the Biden family orbit," which may or may not include the president himself.
However, it's unclear why Comer would bother making a criminal referral to the Department of Justice given that DOJ policy states that a sitting president cannot be indicted and that the remedy for alleged presidential criminal conduct is impeachment.
Additionally, as noted by Raskin, some of the witnesses that the GOP was relying on to make their case against Biden, such as former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, have themselves been charged with crimes.
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"Criminal referrals generally relate to crimes, and we haven’t identified any except for the ones committed by their star witnesses,” Raskin said.
Smirnov was charged last month with lying to law enforcement officials about Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, receiving bribes from Ukrainian energy company Burisma in exchange for the firing of former Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, although many foreign policy experts had long been skeptical of this claim given that pushing for Shokin's firing had been official American government policy and not simply an initiative concocted by Biden.
Even if the GOP were to impeach Biden, the president would still have only half the impeachments tallied by his likely opponent, former President Donald Trump, who was impeached twice during his four years in office.
