House Republicans are moving forward with their impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden with a hearing scheduled for next Thursday — but their core narrative is already disintegrating, Newsweek reported Tuesday.
The impeachment is based on the idea that the president somehow profited from his son Hunter Biden's overseas business deals while he was vice president. A key theory was that his involvement in ousting Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin was to prevent the investigation of an energy company Hunter was involved in — but this has been debunked several times, and ironically the latest evidence destroying it comes from right-wing commentator John Solomon, who published a pre-meeting memo from the State Department to Biden on Shokin.
That memo, noted Bickerton, "called for Shokin's 'removal,' claiming he was 'widely regarded as an obstacle to fighting corruption, if not a source of the problem'" — in other words, making clear that Biden was simply executing the official U.S. foreign policy position that a corrupt prosecutor needed to be removed.
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This comes after Republicans have held hearings trying to tie Biden to his son's business dealings, but have not established any evidence for this. One of Hunter's business associates, Devon Archer, testified that the elder Biden was sometimes on calls with his son while they met, but that they didn't discuss business and Biden was simply checking in on his son's well-being.
Even a number of House Republicans have expressed doubts that the evidence is there to charge Biden with an impeachable offense, with Freedom Caucus stalwart Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) suggesting this whole thing is motivated more by "revenge" for former President Donald Trump's impeachments than any compelling evidence against Biden.
Hunter Biden is separately facing federal charges for tax violations and the improper purchase of a firearm, in a case that some legal experts have criticized as excessively charged.
