House Speaker flags impeachment inquiry for Joe Biden over Hunter’s business dealings

Joe Biden warned he could face an impeachment inquiry as evidence he was involved in Hunter’s foreign business dealings grows.

US Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. Picture: AFP

Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy has for the first time suggested congress might move to impeach Joe Biden over allegations the President had repeatedly lied about his involvement in his son Hunter’s business lucrative business dealings with foreigners.

Mr McCarthy said accumulating revelations and questions surrounding the Biden family’s receipt of millions of dollars of payments from foreigners, along with separate claims by whistleblowers that the Justice Department had treated the President’s son favourably, could warrant an impeachment inquiry.

“We have a president who told the American public that he’s never spoken to his family about any of their business, he said no-one in the family had ever got money from China, that’s proven not to be correct,” he told reporters on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST).

“You’ve got IRS whistle-blowers saying the government was treating the Bidens differently, you’ve got an informant claiming the Biden family had been bribed – should you ignore that or investigate it?”

US President Joe Biden talks to his son, Hunter Biden, while shopping in Nantucket, Massachusetts in 2022. Picture: AFP

The Speaker was referring to multiple strands of evidence produced by Republican-controlled congressional committees that appear to corroborate the batch of incriminating emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which first pointed to potentially corrupt relationships between the Bidens and foreign businesses when it emerged publicly in late 2020.

The speaker‘s comments came a day after White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Joe Biden “was never in business with his son”, a notable change in the White House’s standard response to months of questioning over the president’s knowledge of his son’s business dealings.

Before he was elected president in November 2020 and since Mr Biden has repeatedly said he never spoke to his son about, nor had knowledge of, his business dealings, claims that appear increasingly at odds with evidence from a variety of sources that suggest at least some knowledge.

“When more of this continues to unravel it rises to the level of impeachment inquiry, where you would have the congress have the power to get all the answers,” Mr McCarthys said.

A former good friend and business associate of Hunter Biden, Devon Archer, 48, is expected to testify on Monday that the younger Biden put his then Vice President father on speaker phone at least a two dozen times in Mr Archer’s presence to impress the younger Biden’s foreign business partners.

In response to a question about the prospective testimony, President Biden only smiled during an event at the White House on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST) about mental health funding.

White House spokesman Ian Sams slammed the impeachment push as “nonsensical” in a statement on social media. “Their eagerness to go after @POTUS regardless of the truth is seemingly bottomless,” he said.

Two IRS whistleblowers last week in testimony before a House of Representatives committee said the Biden family had received approximately US$17 million from Romania, China, and other foreign countries between 2014 and 2019.

They also provided evidence Hunter Biden had demanded payment from a Chinese business in 2017 via a Whatsapp message where he claimed he was “sitting here with my father”.

Separately, Republican senator Chuck Grassley last week released an unclassified document he had obtained from the FBI via whistleblowers that alleged a bribery scheme involving the Biden family and a Ukrainian company on which Hunter Biden was a board member.

“What did the Justice Department and FBI do with the detailed information in the document? And why have they tried to conceal it from Congress and the American people for so long?” the senator said in a statement.

NEW🚨Sen. Chuck Grassley releases the unclassified FBI-generated record describing an alleged criminal scheme involving Joe Biden and a Ukrainian business executive. Grassley acquired the record, an FD-1023, via legally protected disclosures by Justice Department whistleblowers pic.twitter.com/2R8cjANGN8

— Wendell Husebø (@WendellHusebo) July 20, 2023

Any impeachment proceedings would likely drag into the 2024 presidential election campaign, and face a tough passage through the Senate, where Democrats maintain a slight majority.

Republican congressman Darrell Issa on Tuesday said other officials could be impeached too, and expected an inquiry, a prelude to any formal impeachment process, to be established by “early September”.

“Those individuals who won in Biden seats, it doesn’t change the fact they want to get to the truth, and I suspect some Democrats would join us,” he told Fox News on Tuesday, predicting the Republican majority in the lower house would be united behind any push for an inquiry.

Former president Donald Trump was impeached twice by the House of Representatives, first over allegations relating to his 2019 phone call with Ukrainian president Zelensky, and second over his behaviour surrounding the January 6th Capitol Hill riots.

A republican-controlled Senate ultimately rejected both impeachments.