The White House declared Friday that the impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden is finished.
White House counsel Edward Siskel delivered the news in a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).
“I write to you today because it is clear the House Republican impeachment is over,” Siskel wrote.
The impeachment inquiry never had much credibility in the eyes of the White House, of course, and the president’s underlings have previously told Republicans to drop it because there was no evidence incriminating the president.
Friday’s letter — addressed to the House Republican leader, going over the heads of the committee chairmen actually running the inquiry — pointed to the fact that not even Republicans think they’ve got a good case against Biden.
“Just this week, it has been reported that members of the House Majority believe the inquiry is ‘falling apart,’” Siskel wrote, citing comments from unnamed sources in a Tuesday ABCNews report.
“One House Republican leadership aide told a news outlet the Majority has uncovered ‘nothing anywhere close to an impeachable offense,’” Siskel wrote, citing more reports from this week. “A Republican Congressman told Fox News the Majority ‘can’t identify a particular crime.’”
As HuffPost reported last week, House Oversight Committee James Comer (R-Ky.), a leader of the inquiry, has increasingly talked about impeachment alternatives, such as passing new ethics laws for presidential family members or asking the Justice Department to prosecute the president’s son (which it’s already doing).
Republicans formally certified their investigation of the president’s family as an impeachment inquiry in December, but it was never clear they would achieve the near-unanimous support they’d need to actually impeach the president.
From the outset, Republicans based the corruption case against Joe Biden on the debunked theory that as vice president, he twisted U.S. foreign policy to enrich his family by pushing out a Ukrainian prosecutor who was supposedly investigating Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that hired Hunter Biden to serve on its board.
