The signature investigation of the Republican-led House fizzled to a close Monday as the GOP capped a yearlong probe into President Biden with a series of allegations but no recommendation to move forward with impeachment.
It’s an unusual end for a process that took up much of the oxygen in Washington for months at a time.
The investigation started with a pledge to showcase that President Biden abused his power and was at the center of a corrupt plot to enrich his family – a high bar that raised doubts from some in the GOP.
But the report failed to uncover a smoking gun, instead relying on largely debunked threads, disputed testimony, and circumstantial evidence that failed to directly tie any official action from President Biden to his family’s business dealings.
The report was also released at the start of the Democratic National Convention, a move that could be seen as aiming to ensure political impact before the president speaks Monday evening, but likely ensures it is buried by days of coverage of the new presidential ticket.
Even as the report asserts that he engaged in impeachable conduct, its release is cementing the sense among House Republicans that Biden – unexpectedly no longer their main political opponent – will not be impeached.
“With the President not running again, I’m increasingly more doubtful the House will take up impeachment,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a moderate.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) released a statement on Monday that commended the committees for their work and said the report showed the “extent of President Biden’s corrupt practices,” but notably did not call to impeach the president.
The report itself did not recommend impeachment articles, despite its harsh tone, saying that “the House’s decision to pursue articles of impeachment must not be made lightly.”
Impeachment would require near-unanimity in the fractious House GOP, given its slim majority, and GOP doubts that plagued the effort early on have never fully dissipated. Several Republicans expressed skepticism about the weight of the evidence connecting the president to the actions of his family members even before former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) put the GOP investigations under the umbrella of an impeachment inquiry.
Now that President Biden is in his lame-duck era and Republicans have turned their focus to attacking Vice President Harris with just 77 days before Election Day, the appetite for spending valuable time and energy on impeachment is close to zero.
“If Republicans want to win in November we need to focus on reminding the voters of an open border caused by Harris’ failed policies, the anxious economic situation, and the erosion of safe communities. Impeachment inquiry of Biden is a fool’s errand and jeopardizes a second Trump presidency,” Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) told The Hill.
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said shortly after Republicans took control of the House last year that his investigation was designed to focus on the president, rather than his private citizen family members, pledging to root out President Biden’s role in his family’s “influence peddling schemes.”
“Let me be clear: We’re not investigating Hunter Biden, we’re investigating Joe Biden,” he said during an appearance on Fox News in January 2023.
But some Democrats saw that as a risky move – with the GOP setting high stakes for their investigation that they may not be able to deliver.
“He consistently over-promised and underperformed, and the gap between his claims and his evidence just grew to a Grand Canyon size,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee.
The early days of the investigation revealed numerous different prongs.
Investigators weren’t just focused on disentangling Hunter Biden and other Biden family members’ business interests, a process that involved speaking to spurned former business partners and subpoenaing bank records.
The House Ways and Means Committee was also speaking with two IRS whistleblowers about a Justice Department investigation into Hunter Biden, guided by alarm over whether there were political concerns behind what the duo described as a slow-walked investigation.
And the Oversight panel also spent months chasing the most salacious allegation, but one that would ultimately be shown to be false: that an FBI tipster accused Biden of taking a bribe.
But after roughly nine months of investigating, the first GOP hearing on the subject last September, represented a huge blow as Republican-invited witnesses said the party had thus far failed to uncover evidence of impeachable crimes.
“I do not believe that the current evidence would support articles of impeachment that is something that an inquiry has to establish,” conservative legal scholar Jonathan Turley said at the time, adding that Republicans would need to find a “nexus” between President Biden and actions taken by his family.
For Raskin, the episode reminded him of testimony offered during the Jan. 6 investigation, when seeking to convince Arizona authorities to hold off on certifying the election, then-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was alleged to have said, “We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.”
“The first impeachment hearing is remembered for all of the witnesses agreeing that there was not remotely sufficient evidence for impeachment, and it underscored the way that the whole exercise was basically hypothetical and academic,” Raskin said.
“There were a bunch of theories going off in a whole lot of different directions, but there was just no evidence suggesting anything like an impeachable offense by the president.”
A few months later in December, all House Republicans voted to back formalizing the impeachment inquiry into President Biden. However, many said they did so only to boost the House GOP’s arguments in court and to show support for continuing to investigate.
Despite that support, in the weeks and months after Republicans would both publicly and privately convey reservations about the probe, the evidence it would uncover, and offer frank assessments that it would never be able to secure enough votes given the party’s razor-thin margin.
“I don’t think we are going to get to a point quite honestly where we are going to be able to impeach him,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Penn.), who was supportive of the effort, said just a few weeks later.
The probe also took a major hit in February, when the FBI arrested Alexander Smirnov on charges related to fabricating the claim that President Biden accepted a bribe in relation to his son’s work with Ukrainian energy company Burimsa. Smirnov did so, prosecutors wrote in court filings, out of political animus.
GOP leaders like Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) had not backed away from what was already the most tenuous line of inquiry of the probe, suggesting that a bribe was “the key thing” to establishing an impeachable crime.
Monday’s report makes no mention of the bribery allegations long pursued during the probe.
“There was a lot of Russian disinformation and propaganda at the foundation of the whole enterprise,” Raskin said.
“It might have helped them just to admit that and try to come clean at that point, but even with the Alexander Smirnov revelations and the fact that he was arrested by the FBI for planting all this false information, they just buried their heads in the sand and pretended like nothing had ever happened.”
The report lands as Republicans are scattered, not scheduled to return to Washington until September, where they’ll meet for a few brief weeks before departing again for October recess.
But not all GOP members are ready to abandon the probe into President Biden. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has introduced multiple articles of impeachment against Biden, wrote in support of impeachment on X on Monday.
“Republicans need to learn how to weld power, hold criminals accountable, work for America First, and stop living in fear constantly controlled by the never ending two year campaign election cycle,” Greene said.
It is still possible that a Republican forces a vote on impeachment articles, though Greene did not threaten to do so.
The investigation concluding with a lack of action is frustrating for other GOP members, too.
“I along with a growing number of voters are sick & tired of hearing after hearing and no consequences for anyone,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) told The Hill.
Even those who support impeachment in theory could be glad that the impeachment chapter is essentially over. Comer, whose birthday coincided with the report’s release, had expressed a desire to be “done with this” as far back as January.
Raskin sees signs Comer and the GOP are ready to let go of the probe.
“The fact that they released it during a congressional recess at the beginning of the Democratic Convention suggests that they don’t have any hopes, much less any real interest in people paying attention,” he said.
“I think that they’re all content to just let the whole thing fade away.”
