America's Talking - House Opens Formal Impeachment Inquiry Into President Joe Biden

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., on Tuesday opened a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. McCarthy directed a House Committee to open the inquiry, pointing to the mounting evidence that the president's son, Hunter Biden, and associates took millions of dollars from foreign interests and that President Biden knew about it. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I am Dan McAulb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me again today, as he does every week, is the Center Square's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief Casey Harper. How are you, Casey? Doing good, Dan. A Republican U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy opened a formal impeachment inquiry into President Biden, saying that there is mounting evidence that the president's son and business associates with Joe Biden's influence took millions of dollars from. foreign interests and that the president knew about it. Is this a big deal? This is a big deal for a lot of reasons. This is a big deal for, I mean, historically, you know, weirdly impeachments have become more common in modern times, but historically impeaching a president, though they're not doing that officially yet, but even talking about it is a huge deal, right? It has big implications for Biden's, you know, legacy. It has big political implications going to 2024. And, you know, what presidential election, right? Right, exactly. The presidential election and other elections because

what it's going to do is it's going to force a lot of these lawmakers potentially to vote to back or, you know, go against Biden, right? And so that's going to be a tough vote for some of them. But what we're going to see here is this impeachment inquiry committee is going to have a lot of power to dig up some of the evidence, some more of the evidence that has been hard to get because for whatever reason, the Department of Justice just hasn't had much interest. in digging up this evidence or they haven't released it publicly, one of the two. And so the House Oversight Committee, mostly, mostly that committee, has been painstakingly and slowly just releasing more and more evidence that it's taken them so long to get. And they've had to be very aggressive.

They had to, I think, they threatened to hold the FBI head in contempt to get this document. That's now one of the key pieces of evidence. And there's been a lot of debate over if there is evidence at all. And I think we can get into that. But what this is going to do is going to set up a committee that has more power and a lot of backing from the top of Republican leadership to go after and get to the bottom of this and pull up some things. It'll probably be pretty damning, a steady stream of damning documents, which could impact the election going into next year. Let me get into that a little bit when you say damning documents, Casey. It's been interesting to follow national media's coverage of McCarthy's, you know, announcing that.

he was launching this impeachment inquiry. The Associated Press, for example, I just want to read a passage from their story on it. And this is a direct quote from their story. Since gaining the House majority in January, House Republicans have aggressively investigated Biden and his son, claiming without evidence that they engaged in an influence peddling scheme. The allegations echo those that,

former President Donald Trump has made for years against Biden and his family. Without citing anything, the Associated Press says that this impeachment inquiry was launched without evidence, and then they tried to tie it to President Donald Trump's past claims. And, of course, President Trump has made some outrageous claims in the past. So by doing that, they're trying, they're really, the associated press is really saying that this is a bogus impeachment inquiry. You've been covering this story for months, Casey. Is there is, is that true? Is there no evidence against President Biden? Yeah, I was really, I saw that too and I was really surprised to see it because there definitely is evidence. It's pretty unquestionable that there is evidence. Now, that without evidence phrase really dates back to when president, former president,

Trump was claiming the election was stolen. And a lot of media outlets were wrestling with how do we report about his claims, but if we don't agree with them. And so they started using this claim, like Trump claimed without evidence, the election was stolen. So that without evidence thing became a way that many mainstream media outlets would say, you know, this is what people were saying, but it's actually not true. And so that now that, you know, I get relitiating all the, you know, January 2020 stuff, that's where that came from, I think. And now here we are. are with the Biden. Two things are happening with this impeachment. One, they're taking that label and putting it on here, I think, to discredit the impeachment. And then they're trying to do guilt by

association by saying, hey, well, Trump claim this. And they're saying, so since, you know, in our minds, Trump is not credible and he agrees with this impeachment, therefore the impeachment must be uncredible. And so I think it's kind of guilt by association. And we can get into evidence, but that's kind of what's happening behind the scene. Just briefly, what, tell us what evidence, you know, I know there's this has been going on for months. There's plenty of evidence. Just briefly summarize what some of that evidence is. Sure.

This is now this is from the House Oversight Committee for the most part. I'll just let read, you know, lay out some of these things. Honestly, there's more evidence that I can go through. And I just say that just because we're saying there's evidence doesn't mean we're making a ruling. You know, you can find a piece of DNA evidence at a crime scene. It's not saying that someone's guilty, but there is evidence, you know, whether or not they're guilty is. Smoke as opposed to a fire, let's just. Exactly. And there's definitely a lot of smoke. So for instance, there's Devin Archer, who was a longtime business associate of Hunter Biden for many, many years and worked with him on all these deals. He testified to the House Oversight Committee. And he said a lot of things. He said that, you know, Joe Biden was the brand and used these signals. He testified that he was aware of at least 20 times when Biden, when he was vice president during the Obama administration, at least 20 times when he spoke on speakerphone with Hunter Biden's foreign business associate.

Okay. Now, that is really contradicting what the president previously said about, you know, whether he, where he said that he didn't know anything about this. He never talked to anybody. So that would be, you know, him either lying or Devin Archer's lying. But this is, you know, testimony from a seemingly credible source. In February of 2014, you know, Biden dined. He had dinner with oligarchs from Russian and Kazakhstan, who gave millions of dollars. to Hunter Biden and his associate. So he didn't only have these speakerphone conversations. He actually personally met with them, right, in 2014, according to this testimony. He also met with them Burisma executives in 2015. And then there's all this stuff with how, you know, on the record,

Biden is on video saying that he kind of interfered in this prosecution into Burisma after he met, you know, he met with these guys, right? So that's another thing that was testified. We have the, the Treasury Department, I think they have 150 suspicious activity reports related to the Biden family and their about 20 shell companies. 150 Treasury Department suspicious activity reports. So this is not just a Republican investigative committee. This is a federal agency, right, that has all these reports of suspicious activity, 150 of them of basically bank transfers. The way money is moved around, the Treasury Department keeps notes. note of that. And banks reported it as suspicious activities. There's bank records too. So there is evidence,

despite what the Associated Press is reporting. Not saying there's evidence that he's guilty of anything, but there's enough evidence there to move forward with the investigation. Right. And as well, I'll just warn more odd really quickly as an FBI informant who called it outright a bribe. A trusted FBI informant just said it was a bribe. So those are three good examples. The Devin Archer, the bank records, and then this FBI informant. Separately, and we don't have a lot of time, Casey. Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden's son on Thursday, September 14th, was indicted on federal gun-related charges.

Just briefly bring our listeners up to speed on that. Yeah, so Hunter Biden, he previously made a plea deal earlier this summer and then it fell apart because there were questions over, did he give him broad immunity to future charges and there was kind of a discrepancy about this. But now, so he was facing a trial date. And now special counsel, David Weiss has, you know, he's been indicted in this connection with the gun that he bought in 2018. This is the first time this ever happened to the child of a sitting president, which has been reported. So this is very interesting.

His plea deal collapse. Now this is probably going to have a big trial for the president's son going into 2024. One more thing to make an already crazy, hectic election year, even more intense. And there's certainly, yeah, I mean, this campaign season is just going to be bonkers. Of course, the former President Trump, who's the frontrunner in the GOP primary at this point, facing his own felony charges, four separate indictments. Don't have the time to get into all of that, Casey, because we are out of time. This is a story that's not going away, and listeners can keep up with it at theCensuer.com.

For Casey Harper, I'm Dan McAulb. Please subscribe. and thank you for listening.