Republicans continue to search, without success, for evidence to justify the political trial that their hard-wing Congress has promoted against Joe Biden. They accuse him and his family of having benefited from the position of vice president during the mandate of Barack Obama (2009-2017) to promote “murky commercial practices” in foreign countries.
After collecting Biden’s bank records and interviewing eight witnesses, the House Judiciary Committee, led by Republicans, subpoenaed the president’s younger brother, James Biden, yesterday behind closed doors, who testified in connection with loans that he Joe Biden did when he was no longer in office. He is the first member of the family to testify before the committee, which will interview his son, Hunter Biden, next week.
James Biden testified that his brother “never had any involvement or any direct or indirect financial interest” in his businesses. “I’ve had a 50-year career in a variety of companies and Joe Biden has never had any involvement in these activities,” he said.
Until last week, Republicans had based the investigation on the statements of an FBI informant, Aleksandr Smirnov, who assured that his son Hunter had done illicit business in an alleged bribery scheme with the energy Ukrainian Burisma Holdings. However, the special prosecutor leading the investigation on Thursday charged the informant with giving “false testimony” to the FBI and said that Smirnov admitted in the statement to contacts with “officials associated with Russian intelligence ”, which would discredit his accusations.
This episode has dismantled the centerpiece of the investigation by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, which aims to begin a process that needs conclusive evidence of the commission of a serious crime.
Congressman Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the committee, said the demonstration of the whistleblower’s ties to Russia should be enough to drop the investigation, which has not produced any weighty evidence in the two months since have happened since it started.
“This impeachment is nothing more than a futile investigation based on Russian disinformation and propaganda,” he said before testifying behind closed doors. “I don’t understand why we have to continue with this farce.”
The person in charge of starting this process was Kevin McCarthy, the previous Speaker of the House of Commons, who for months was reluctant to start it, until he gave in in September to pressure from the most conservative sector of his party, the same as later organized a boycott to dismiss him.
His successor and the current president, Mike Johnson, close to Donald Trump, is determined to bring it to a vote when Hunter Biden has declared. But it will hardly be approved by the narrow Republican majority in the House of Representatives, where several congressmen have spoken out against using this provision so lightly, as happened with the Secretary of National Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, for its management of the border.
If it is approved, the impeachment does not seem to be able to succeed in the Senate, which has a Democratic majority. But he will have fulfilled, in part, the objective of the Republicans: to sow doubts about the figure of the president and Democratic candidate in this election year, in which he will probably face Trump in November, the first president in history to receive two processes of ‘ impeachment during his term.
