Investigators will likely intensify their efforts to get several government officials to provide information on matters related to the investigation.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announces an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden to members of the news media outside his office at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Sept. 12, 2023. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Republican leaders in the House of Representatives have announced some of the next steps in the impeachment investigation into the activities of President Joe Biden.
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) announced on Sept. 13 that his committee would hold a hearing on the matter next month. Mr. Comer has been tasked with leading the overall investigation in cooperation with Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Jason Smith (R-Mo.), who chair the Judiciary Committee and Ways and Means Committee, respectively.
Mr. Comer said investigators will look for additional emails from President Biden during the time he served as vice president, from 2009 to 2017, and witness testimony from those claiming that the Biden family profited millions of dollars through influence peddling to foreign nationals.
“We plan on having a hearing in September that will kind of evaluate some of the things that we believe have happened from the Biden family that are in violation with our law,” Mr. Comer said at a press conference on Capitol Hill.
The announcement came a day after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) opened the impeachment inquiry.
“House Republicans have uncovered serious and credible allegations into President Biden’s conduct. Taken together, these allegations paint a picture of a culture of corruption,” Mr. McCarthy said. “This logical next step will give our committees the full power to gather all the facts and answers for the American public.”
Mr. Comer’s hearing will be the first in what is likely to be a flurry of investigative actions over the next few months as the three House committees—Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means—ramp up their efforts to uncover evidence of wrongdoing by the president.
More Manpower, Focus, and Clout
Though the House has been investigating for months a possible connection between the business dealings of Hunter Biden and his father, the president, the designation of the inquiry as an official impeachment investigation will intensify the effort, experts say.
That’s likely to mean adding manpower to the case, according to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who led the effort to impeach President Bill Clinton in 1998.
“I suspect they will bring in more investigators, and I suspect they will lay out a timeline of things they want to know,” Mr. Gingrich, a Epoch Times contributor, told The Epoch Times.
Investigators now have a specific end in view, according to David A. Bateman, a professor of government and policy at Cornell University.
“The various committees will likely continue their existing investigations but will do so now with the goal of putting together a case for impeaching the president that will likely be sent to the Judiciary Committee,” he told The Epoch Times.
Committee chairs also have additional clout in gathering evidence because of the designation of the inquiry as an impeachment investigation.
“My understanding is that when you go to an official impeachment inquiry, your ability to compel the executive branch to provide documents, to testify under oath, and to be available goes up very dramatically,” Mr. Gingrich said.
“I think they can issue a wider range of enforceable subpoenas, and they have automatic standing. They have a legitimate right to know in an impeachment inquiry, which is harder to establish if you’re just a normal oversight committee.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said he hoped the added clout would enable House investigators to obtain information that he and his Senate colleagues have been unable to acquire thus far.
“You know how much trouble I’ve had getting the information, and they’ve carried this thing further than [Sen. Ron] Johnson and I have been able to do, because we haven’t had subpoena power,” Mr. Grassley told reporters on Sept. 12.
Targets
The first target of the more powerful investigation is likely to be a large number of emails held by the National Archives and Records Administration, which investigators think could shed more light on President Biden’s interactions with his son and his son’s business associates.
The agency admitted in August that it possessed emails reportedly sent by President Biden under pseudonymous email accounts while he was vice president, according to the conservative nonprofit Southeastern Legal Foundation.
“They will probably compel the archives to turn over the 5,400 emails that were written using three fake names by Vice President Biden,” Mr. Gingrich said.
Investigators will also seek additional phone and financial records.
“They will compel the credit card companies to turn over the details of a whole range of credit cards. That will probably compel AT&T to turn over the records for the phones that Biden was using, which I’ve been told were probably paid for by one of Hunter Biden’s companies,” Mr. Gingrich added.
Investigators will likely intensify their efforts to get several government officials to provide information related to the investigation.
Mr. Comer is asking the State Department to provide information on what his committee calls “sudden foreign policy decisions related to the dismissal of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin that occurred while Joe Biden was vice president.” That took place while Mr. Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.
The three committees have also called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to provide information on any attempts by Mr. Hunter Biden’s legal team to pressure the Department of Justice (DOJ) to prosecute IRS whistleblowers.
The committees have also called on Mr. Hunter Biden’s attorneys Christopher Clark and Abbe Lowell to provide documents leaked to the media about their interactions with the DOJ concerning their client’s plea deal on tax and gun charges.
And the committee chairs have written to the Office of the Inspector General to provide information on any efforts by that office to hinder the DOJ’s investigation of Mr. Hunter Biden.
At some point, investigators are likely to try to get Mr. Hunter Biden to testify before Congress, according to Mr. Gingrich.
Timeline
Impeachment investigations don’t have a specified process or timeline and it isn’t even always the case that a formal investigation is used.
“There’s nothing legally or constitutionally required about an impeachment inquiry. It’s just been the practice, I think, in order to kind of get a feeling of support … amongst the House of Representatives for an impeachment investigation,” Joe Wert, a professor of political science at Indiana University Southeast, told The Epoch Times.
Previous impeachment investigations have ranged in duration from three months, in the case of the first Trump impeachment, to more than a year, for the investigation into President Richard Nixon, but experts agree that the 2024 election provides a sense of urgency in this case.
“I would think they would be able to wrap up an investigation in a matter of several weeks,” Mr. Wert said. “If an impeachment vote comes, I would certainly expect that before the end of the year.”
The timeline could be longer than that, according to Mark Caleb Smith, a professor of political science at Cedarville University, but the investigation would certainly be concluded before November 2024. “They’re going to feel pressed to produce results that will have an influence on the election,” Mr. Smith told The Epoch Times.
Yet the investigation could be slowed due to the fact that there isn’t a single event under investigation but an alleged pattern of behavior taking place over years, Mr. Smith said.
The investigation formally ends when the results of the committees’ work are handed over to the Judiciary Committee for a decision on whether to bring articles of impeachment. The entire process ends when the people’s representatives in the Senate decide whether the president should be removed from office.
“Impeachment is a political process and not a legal process,” Mr. Smith said, noting that the constitutional grounds for impeachment—“high crimes and misdemeanors”—is vague. “That’s by design. The Constitution really left it to be a political device, not a legal device.”
That means the standard for conviction isn’t proof beyond reasonable doubt but political will. It’s a question of whether the “case against the president is sufficiently compelling that enough members of Congress will think that their constituents will support them if they vote to impeach or convict,” Mr. Bateman said. “That’s tough in a polarized landscape, but it will be a lot tougher unless there is some easily interpretable proof of wrongdoing or an abuse of power.”
Of the Clinton impeachment, Mr. Gingrich said: “We didn’t go slow enough, and weren’t careful enough for the American people to believe in it so decisively that they would bring pressure on the Senate. I think it’s very important in this case to be really serious about it.
“Everything has to come out in public. American people have to have time to digest it. They have to decide that, in fact, it’s not acceptable to have a person who’s done this kind of thing in office. And until that happens, you can play political games, and the House can impeach, but you’re not going to be able to get it through the Senate.”