The Republican-led House committees investigating whether to impeach President Joe Biden released their long-awaited report about their findings Monday morning, arguing that Biden has committed impeachable conduct but deferring to the full House on whether to pursue a formal impeachment.
The nearly 300-page report is a summary of the investigation conducted by the House Oversight, Judiciary and Ways and Means committees over the past year and a half, nearly all of which has already been made public.
It argues that Biden enriched himself through his family’s business ventures and concealed his mishandling of classified information in office, the subject of the investigation conducted by special counsel Robert Hur, who declined to press charges this year.
In addition, the committees say that the Justice Department mishandled its investigation into his son Hunter Biden’s tax problems and that the White House has withheld key documents and witnesses from the impeachment investigation.
“The totality of the corrupt conduct uncovered by the Committees is egregious. President Joe Biden conspired to commit influence peddling and grift. In doing so, he abused his office and, by repeatedly lying about his abuse of office, has defrauded the United States to enrich his family,” the report says.
White House spokesperson Sharon Yang criticized the impeachment proceedings on Monday, saying, “After wasting nearly two years and millions of taxpayer dollars, House Republicans have finally given up on their wild goose chase. This failed stunt will only be remembered for how it became an embarrassment that their own members distanced themselves from as they only managed to turn up evidence that refuted their false and baseless conspiracy theories.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, hailed the GOP report as “a complete exoneration” of the president.
“Their compulsive flailing about has not only proven, once more, that President Biden committed no wrongdoing, much less an impeachable crime, but has paradoxically vindicated President Biden’s essential honor and decency,” Raskin said in a statement.
House Oversight Democratic staff released their own competing memo Monday with additional quotes and information gathered during the impeachment probe that rebut the Republican allegations, including a widely debunked claim that Biden pushed for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor while he was vice president in order to stop an investigation into Burisma, the energy company on the board of which Hunter Biden was serving.
The push for the prosecutor’s removal was the official policy of the Obama administration and other Western nations trying to reduce corruption in Ukraine. Then-President Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelenskyy to announce an investigation into the Bidens over the matter led to his first impeachment in 2019.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., on Monday morning dismissed the report led by allies of Trump as a “baseless” effort to impeach Biden in a post to X.
“House Democrats will continue to put people over politics,” Jeffries wrote. “Extreme MAGA Republicans are baselessly threatening to impeach President Biden and shut down the government in September.”
“These extremists are unfit to govern,” he added.
The report itself provides extensive details about the interactions with and payments from foreign companies to Hunter Biden and the president’s brother James Biden and their business associates during the end of his time as vice president and when he was a private citizen.
The investigators put the total at $27 million, according to the bank records they received. But the investigators failed to turn up evidence that Biden himself received money from those companies or participated in the foreign business deals beyond the occasions when Hunter Biden called him on speakerphone to exchange pleasantries while in the company of foreign business associates or when he saw them at his son’s birthday dinner.
One of the examples the committees cite is the case of Russian businesswoman Yelena Baturina, the wife of former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzkhkov, who invested $3.5 million with Hunter Biden’s business partner Devon Archer through a company that had some ties to Hunter Biden in 2014. The investment was finalized after Hunter Biden’s birthday dinner at Café Milano in Washington, D.C., which Baturina attended and Joe Biden, then the vice president, dropped by. Archer described the conversation in an interview with the Oversight Committee last year as being about “the world, I guess, and the weather, and then everybody — everybody left.”
Later in the year, when another of Hunter Biden’s business partners, Jason Galanis, was seeking further investment from Baturina that would have benefited Hunter Biden through an equity agreement, Hunter Biden called his father and put him on speakerphone, Galanis said. He told the Oversight and Judiciary committees that the short call included some “pleasantries and hellos and safe travels,” after which Joe Biden said, “You be good to my boy,” before the conversation ended. Though the committees present an email from Galanis indicating that Baturina had committed to an additional investment, it does not indicate it ever happened.
In other parts of the report, the committees provide numerous examples of financial deals between Hunter Biden and Chinese corporations but does not provide direct links to Joe Biden while he was vice president or evidence of specific policies he changed or encouraged during that time. They also point to an example in 2017 when Sara Biden, the wife of the president’s brother James, signed a $40,000 check to Biden designated as “loan repayment” from an account with money that had come into her account through various transfers that originated from Hunter Biden’s dealings with a Chinese energy company.
The committees also point to instances of Hunter Biden’s business associates’ describing a future role in certain business ventures for Joe Biden after his time as vice president ended. In his testimony before the Oversight and Judiciary committees, Hunter Biden denied his father’s involvement or ascribed any references he made to his father to his drug and alcohol use at the time.
Other associates of Hunter Biden’s, including Archer and Gilliar, have also stated that the president was uninvolved in their business activities.
In June, the chairmen of the three committees pursuing impeachment sent criminal referrals to the Justice Department recommending that Hunter and James Biden be charged with making false statements to Congress.
“House Republicans commend the thorough, diligent, and thoughtful work of the Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement following the release of the report, though he did not say what further actions the House might take — including a formal impeachment vote — and a spokesperson did not respond to NBC News’ question about next steps.
Other sections of the report deal with the IRS’ investigation into Hunter Biden’s failure to pay taxes in 2017 and 2018, which began in 2018 during the Trump administration and continued during the Biden administration under the supervision of special counsel David Weiss. Two employees of the IRS came forward as whistleblowers to allege that the Justice Department was purposely slow-walking the investigation. Hunter Biden was offered a plea deal on federal firearms charges that fell apart in court last year, and he was later convicted on those charges at a jury trial this year. He is awaiting trial for his failure to pay taxes later this year.
The report makes no mention of the role of Alexander Smirnov, the possible Russian spy who fed false information about Hunter and Joe Biden to the FBI. Smirnov, who has also been charged with making false reports about the president’s son by Weiss, is scheduled to go on trial in December.
“Although the Committees’ fact-finding is ongoing amid President Biden’s obstruction, the evidence uncovered in the impeachment inquiry to date already amounts to impeachable conduct. The Committees present this information to the House of Representatives for its evaluation and consideration of appropriate next steps,” the report concludes.
The impeachment inquiry was announced in September by Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., then the House speaker, and formally ratified by the House in December in a party-line vote.
It’s unclear that Republican leadership would have enough votes to impeach Biden, and in any event, impeachment would be all but certain to fail to meet the two-thirds bar for conviction in the Senate. Senate Democrats, who hold a 51-49 edge, can vote to dismiss an impeachment inquiry with a simple majority.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
