WASHINGTON — The White House declared Friday that the impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden is finished.
White House counsel Edward Siskel delivered the news in a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).
“I write to you today because it is clear the House Republican impeachment is over,” Siskel wrote.
The impeachment inquiry never had much credibility in the eyes of the White House, of course, and the president’s underlings have previously told Republicans to drop it because there was no evidence incriminating the president.
Friday’s letter — addressed to the House Republican leader, going over the heads of the committee chairmen actually running the inquiry — pointed to the fact that not even Republicans think they’ve got a good case against Biden.
“Just this week, it has been reported that members of the House Majority believe the inquiry is ‘falling apart,’” Siskel wrote, citing comments from unnamed sources in a Tuesday ABCNews report.
“One House Republican leadership aide told a news outlet the Majority has uncovered ‘nothing anywhere close to an impeachable offense,’” Siskel wrote, citing more reports from this week. “A Republican Congressman told Fox News the Majority ‘can’t identify a particular crime.’”
As HuffPost previously reported, House Oversight Committee James Comer (R-Ky.), a leader of the inquiry, has increasingly talked about impeachment alternatives, such as passing new ethics laws for presidential family members or asking the Justice Department to prosecute the president’s son (which it’s already doing).
Republicans formally certified their investigation of the president’s family as an impeachment inquiry in December, but it was never clear they would achieve the near-unanimous support they’d need to actually impeach the president.
From the outset, Republicans based the corruption case against Joe Biden on the debunked theory that as vice president, he twisted U.S. foreign policy to enrich his family by pushing out a Ukrainian prosecutor who was supposedly investigating Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that hired Hunter Biden to serve on its board.
U.S. diplomats have repeatedly told Republicans, in 2019 and 2020, that as vice president, Joe Biden merely carried out the policy they designed. Donald Trump’s Treasury Department even sanctioned several members of a Russia-linked foreign influence network for advancing “disinformation narratives that U.S. government officials have engaged in corrupt dealings in Ukraine.”
Republicans ignored all that and last year pointed to an FBI informant’s unverified claim that Burisma’s owner paid the Bidens bribes. When the Justice Department announced in February that the informant had made it all up, several Democrats on Capitol Hill pronounced the impeachment inquiry dead.
“It feels to me as if everyone knows the impeachment investigation is over,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said during an impeachment inquiry interview with James Biden, the president’s brother.
At another deposition the following week (of the president’s son), Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) wore somber funeral attire out of respect, he said, for the death of the inquiry. “You have to pay respects.”
But Republicans have soldiered on, demanding AT&T hand over a decade of Hunter Biden’s phone records to complement the thousands of pages of bank statements, emails, text messages and photos they’ve already obtained.
Friday’s letter from the White House shows the Biden administration catching up to the caustic, dismissive stance assumed by Hill Democrats and Hunter Biden’s legal team, which this week rebuffed Republicans’ request that the president’s son testify in a public hearing next week.
“It is obviously time to move on, Mr. Speaker,” Siskel wrote. “This impeachment is over. There is too much important work to be done for the American people to continue wasting time on this charade.”