Republican leader Kevin McCarthy said he would open an investigation into alleged corruption to unseat President Joe Biden
U.S. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy said Tuesday he supports launching an investigation into corruption allegations to remove President Joe Biden from office.
“I am calling on our House committee to launch a formal impeachment investigation into President Joe Biden,” he said, claiming the Democratic president “lied” to the American people about his son’s business dealings abroad.
Hunter Biden, the president’s 53-year-old son, has become a favorite target of the American right.
In particular, they accuse him of conducting questionable transactions in Ukraine and China during Joe Biden’s term as Barack Obama’s vice president (2009-2017), exploiting his father’s contacts and name.
The U.S. Constitution says Congress may remove the president for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Impeachment proceedings have been demanded for months by the Trump wing of the Republican Party, with whom McCarthy had to make numerous compromises in January to gain power.
But several moderate Republican lawmakers oppose the investigation because they fear it will become a purely partisan affair.
Democrats counter that these right-wing efforts are nothing more than smokescreens to obscure the legal problems piling up for Donald Trump, who has been impeached four times in less than six months.
The White House responded to McCarthy’s statements. “The House of Representatives investigated the president for nine months and found no evidence of wrongdoing,” Ian Sams, government spokesman for oversight and investigations, said in X.
Calling for impeachment is “extreme politics at its worst,” he added.
To date, no president has ever been removed from office in an impeachment trial in US history.
Three were indicted: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998 and Trump in 2019 and 2021. But all were ultimately acquitted.
Richard Nixon chose to resign in 1974 to avoid certain impeachment by Congress due to the Watergate scandal.
