The trio of Republican-led committees leading the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden on Monday released a report arguing that the president has “engaged in impeachable conduct” without making a formal recommendation for the House of Representatives to move forward with impeachment.
Instead, the 291-page report recycles previous unsupported claims to argue that Biden “knowingly participated” in a conspiracy to leverage his office while as vice president and beyond to financially benefit his family, and leaves it up to the House of Representatives to evaluate.
Republicans unveiled the report on the day the Democratic National Convention begins in Chicago, hours before Biden is expected to address the event in a keynote speech. CNN has reached out to the White House for comment on the report and has not yet received a response.
The report’s release also comes at a precarious moment for House Republicans. Since Republicans launched their impeachment inquiry into Biden 11 months ago, they have failed to convince their narrow majority to move forward with articles of impeachment. With Biden no longer seeking reelection, and attention on Capitol Hill shifting to the 2024 presidential election, the GOP momentum to continue to use investigative muscle to scrutinize Biden and his family has also dissipated.
It will all come down to House Speaker Mike Johnson and whether he decides to try to push through articles of impeachment during the three weeks the House returns to Washington in September while simultaneously addressing the crucial September 30 government funding deadline.
“I think it’s kind of a moot point now,” GOP Rep. Lisa McClain of Michigan, who serves on the House Oversight Committee, one of the trio of committees leading the inquiry, told CNN last month.
Another GOP lawmaker serving on the House Judiciary Committee, also part of the inquiry effort, acknowledged that Biden stepping aside takes the political undertones out of the report.
“I think the American people have a right to know what was going on with the family enterprises,” GOP Rep. Tom McClintock of California said ahead of the report’s release. “I think it has the advantage of being less politically charged now because Biden is no longer facing voters.”
GOP Rep. Doug LaMalfa, also of California, who has said he thought it would be unproductive for Republicans to try to impeach Biden given that it would go nowhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate, said in July of the prospect of a final report, “If they need to tidy up something to put a bow on it, fine, but putting a lot of effort into it wouldn’t really be too productive either.”
This was not how Republicans wanted their prized investigation into Biden to end after pouring over subpoenaed bank records and conducting key interviews with the president’s son, Hunter, and brother, James, as well as a slew of family business associates.
GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, who has long called for Biden to be impeached, told CNN, “No,” this is not how he wanted the investigation to end.
But other Republicans said regardless of the political moment, the report needed to be released. In the wake of Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June that led to the unraveling of his reelection bid, Republicans sat on their final report and let the Democratic infighting play out. But with Biden’s decision to step aside and the final stretch before the November elections closing in, Republicans acknowledged that their window was closing.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio, who is co-leading the inquiry, told CNN ahead of the report’s release, “We have a constitutional duty to do oversight. We’ve done oversight. It’s important that I think we put the findings out there and issue a report. So, I do think it’s important to come out.”
House Oversight Chairman James Comer of Kentucky, another co-lead on the inquiry, has long maintained that his goal is to pursue legislation banning influence peddling and that it is not his job to impeach, even if he believes the evidence supports impeachment.
Another Judiciary Committee member, Rep. Harriet Hageman of Wyoming told CNN in July Biden’s decision to bow out of the presidential race has no bearings on the inquiry’s final report.
“I wanted this investigation to end with the truth,” Hageman said. “Whatever decision they make doesn’t make any difference to me. The way I wanted this to end is for the American people to understand the magnitude of the Biden crime family.”
GOP claims of ‘influence peddling and grift’
The Republican-led report claims to “expose a years-long pattern of influence peddling and grift centered around and facilitated by Joe Biden.” However, it is largely a retread of previous GOP theories that exaggerate Biden’s connections to his brother’s and son’s highly lucrative foreign business dealings, which the report claimed totaled “over $18 million from foreign sources.”
Perhaps the claim investigators said was most damning is the allegation that Hunter Biden, James Biden and their business partners knowingly sold “the brand” — or potential access to Joe Biden.
But one of these business partners testified that they were only offering an “illusion” of access.
That partner, Devon Archer, who was convicted in a separate fraud scheme unrelated to the Bidens, told investigators that Hunter Biden put his father on speakerphone “maybe 20 times” during meetings with foreign partners, and that they saw this as “access and influence,” according to the report, which highlighted these details from Archer’s testimony that were already made public months ago.
“The people to whom this ‘illusion’ of access was sold by Biden family members did, in fact, obtain access to Joe Biden in private, non-disclosed settings,” the report says.
However, Archer also testified that “nothing” material to the business was discussed when Joe Biden was on the phone or at a handful of dinners with business partners where Joe Biden stopped by. And the Republican report doesn’t appear to contain any new examples of substantive business interactions between Joe Biden and his family’s business associates in Ukraine, China, Russia or elsewhere.
Still, the report asserts that it was known “the Biden family business model centered on Joe Biden’s influence and positions of power,” citing Archer’s testimony. But that isn’t necessarily a new revelation: Even Hunter Biden has publicly acknowledged that he would “probably not” have been tapped to serve on the highly paid board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma if he weren’t Joe Biden’s son.
The report features a series of unproven allegations from former Biden family business associate Tony Bobulinski, including claims that have been disputed by other witnesses.
It states that Bobulinski testified that “Joe Biden was more than a participant in and a beneficiary of his family’s business; he was an enabler, despite being buffered by a complex scheme to maintain plausible deniability.”
The claims, however, stand in stark contrast to a list of other Biden family business associates who have stated that Joe Biden, as a private citizen and as vice president, was never involved in his any of his family’s foreign business dealings.
While congressional Republicans have seized on the claims, Democrats have argued that Bobulinski is not a credible witness.
The committees highlight a 2017 email sent by James Gilliar, whom the committee describes as another Biden family associate, to Bobulinski that, according to the report, was about “remuneration packages” for a venture involving Chinese energy interests. The email outlines a “provisional agreement” for equity distribution with a breakdown of numbers alongside a series of initials. One-line states, “10 held by H for the big guy ?”
Bobulinski testified to the committees that the H referred to Hunter Biden and the “big guy” was a reference to Joe Biden.
Hunter Biden’s lawyers have countered that the proposed equity breakdown from the email was “never included in any agreement” and that the breakdown was actually proposed by Bobulinski, and never even garnered any response from Hunter Biden.
According to the report, Bobulinski disputed that, saying, “Hunter Biden responded to this email I think three-plus times.”
Separately, the report states that in a different exchange Hunter Biden sent a message to an official with a Chinese energy conglomerate in which he invoked his father a way that was “threatening.”
“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,” the message reads, according to the report.
The message states that “if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you” or a select few other individuals, “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.”
Biden has fired back against claims from House Republicans that he was involved in business dealings with his son and brother, telling reporters last year that the GOP claims are “a bunch of lies.”
Report accuses White House of hampering Congress’ access to key documents and witnesses
The report also accused the White House and others in the Biden administration of hampering Congress’ efforts to obtain key documents and witnesses related to probes of the president’s handling of classified materials and his son’s business dealings.
In the aftermath of the February release of the report on Special Counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents, the committees sought an audio recording of the two-day interview Biden sat for with Hur in October. Hur’s report did not lead to charges against Biden, but it contained politically and personally damaging judgments about the president’s age and mental fitness.
The transcript of Biden’s interview with Hur was released weeks later, but Republicans have demanded the DOJ turn over the recording because they say it would provide greater insight into Biden’s cognition. They also accused the White House of editing verbal miscues from previous official transcripts of Biden.
The president asserted his executive privilege over the audio files, and the DOJ has defended its decision to not release them by saying doing so raises privacy concerns and could dissuade cooperation from witnesses in future investigations. It also strongly implied the Republican committees sought the audio for political purposes.
The report said the White House also prevented the National Archives and Records Administration from releasing the bulk of emails requested by the committee that Joe Biden sent and received from a pseudonymous email account during his time as vice president.
It also claimed the Biden administration obstructed federal investigations into Hunter Biden’s taxes and business — though many of the committee’s allegations were nonspecific or stemmed from before Biden was president.
The committee said both the FBI and IRS investigations into Hunter Biden were hampered by red tape or required additional layers of approval and oversight before parts of the investigation could proceed — a result that the committee said was due to his father’s then-position as a former vice president, and a likely future candidate for the top of the ticket. The tax investigation into Hunter Biden began in 2018, before Biden announced his 2020 candidacy. The FBI, with the assistance of the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, opened a separate probe into his business dealings in 2019.
“From the outset, the FBI, the Justice Department, and IRS all recognized the sensitivity of investigation the former Vice President’s son, particularly in the state in which the Bidens are a prominent family,” the report said. “As a result, Hunter Biden was afforded extra protection, and investigators were forced to jump through additional hoops they would not normally experience in a typical case.”
While witnesses acknowledged the Bidens’ prominence in Delaware added to the sensitivity surrounding the home-state investigation into Hunter Biden, examples provided in the report seemed to reflect on the anxieties of the agents involved in the investigation rather than any influence from Biden.
An IRS agent involved in the Biden probe, who later became a whistleblower alleging political interference in the investigation, testified that an FBI agent in Wilmington “was concerned about the consequences for him and his family” if he had to be involved in a Biden case in Delaware. Top IRS officials have disputed the whistleblower’s claims.
CNN’s Asher Moskowitz contributed to this report.
