The parade of witnesses say there is NOTHING they have on the President that would stick….
The effort to divert from the upcoming RightWingNut foirced government shutdown ain’t gonna work….
In Fact?
It probably will HELP Democrats get out their vote going forward….
House Republicans do not have enough evidence yet to justify an impeachment of President Joe Biden, two legal scholars told a congressional panel Thursday as lawmakers sparred over the basis for the GOP-led impeachment investigation.
The first hearing on the high-profile probe quickly devolved into a partisan tit for tat at the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, as Republicans outlined the basis for their investigation while Democrats dismissed the inquiry as baseless.
House Republicans, in describing the basis for the probe, point to an accusation that the president’s son Hunter Biden was selling the illusion of access to his father and would look to leverage his family’s “brand.” The probe also involves arguments that the younger Biden received lenient treatment from the Justice Department.
But for all the heated rhetoric, a Republican-called witness, Jonathan Turley, a legal scholar who has testified in previous impeachment inquiries, said he did not believe the current evidence would support articles of impeachment against President Biden. That’s something an impeachment inquiry would have to establish, he said.
Allegations that Biden might have benefited from an “influence peddling” scheme should not be taken out of context, Turley said.
“They’re merely allegations, and they should not become presumptions of impeachable conduct,” Turley said. “Indeed, as I’ve said in past impeachments, self-dealing is a difficult issue under the impeachment clause. The framers sought to avoid ambiguous standards.”…..
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“I do not believe that the current evidence would support articles of impeachment,” he said, but that he does believe it warrants an inquiry.
Asked later by Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., where the Republican’s evidence is lacking, Turley said on the issue of influence peddling and whether the president was aware of it and “encouraged it.”
The ranking Democrat at the hearing, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said his Republican colleagues were presenting 12,000 pages of bank records that didn’t include a “single dime” going to the president.
“If the Republicans had a smoking gun or even a dripping water pistol, they would be presenting it today, but they’ve got nothing on Joe Biden,” he said. He also accused them of holding the hearing and shutting down the government at the behest of former President Donald Trump.
The House Republicans, Raskin said, were acting “like flying monkeys on a mission for the Wicked Witch of the West.”…..
Right-Wing Thinks McCarthy Set Up Impeachment to Fail
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told CNN that he heard directly from Republicans on the House floor that the right-wing believes Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) set up the initial impeachment hearing into President Biden to fail.
Said Raskin: “They couldn’t believe that such a disaster would just happen by accident.”
Ten Reasons Why the Biden Impeachment Inquiry is Justified
There have been repeated references to the ten facts that I alluded to in my congressional testimony as establishing an ample basis to launch a formal impeachment inquiry. I have received emails asking about those ten developments so I wanted to post them. They are found in my written testimony, but I did not have time to go through them all in the course of my oral statement before the Committee.
While many have noted that I stated that I do not view the current evidence as sufficient for articles of impeachment, that is hardly surprising. This was the first hearing of the inquiry and was called to address why the threshold for an inquiry had been established. I was also asked to address the constitutional standards and best practices going forward. Indeed, I criticized the last two impeachments for prematurely declaring impeachable conduct without fully developing a record to support such articles. This hearing returned the impeachment process to a type of regular order in reserving judgment until all of the evidence could be acquired by the three committees.
Here are the ten developments that I cited as justifying an impeachment inquiry (a view with which my fellow witness University of North Carolina Professor Michael Gerhardt disagreed)….
More by Jonathan Hurley….
Even Republicans See Impeachment Probe as Unfair
Philip Bump: “Given all of this, it’s probably not a surprise that half of Americans have no confidence in the House’s ability to conduct a fair investigation into Biden. That’s according to new polling conducted by Monmouth University — polling that was in the field before the first hearing took place.”
“What’s fascinating about the results of the poll is that even Republicans seem skeptical that the House will be fair in its probe. As many Republicans told Monmouth that they had ‘a lot of confidence’ in the House to conduct the investigation (29 percent) as said they had ‘no confidence’ at all. Among independents, a plurality indicated that they had no confidence in a fair probe.”