The NPR Politics Podcast - House Republicans Begin Investigations Into President Biden

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

The House Oversight and Judiciary committees, helmed by Repulican representatives James Comer of Kentucky and Jim Jordan of Ohio, will be the venues for a series of investigations into the President Joe Biden's administration and personal life. The party campaigned on an aggressive use of the legislature's oversight.This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, congressional correspondent Claudia Grisales, and congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh.This episode was produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. It was edited by Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Research and fact-checking by Devin Speak.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Chris snowshoeing through the Italian Alps for his last week of his holiday. This podcast was recorded at 1.42pm on Thursday, February 2nd. Things may have changed by the time you listen, but I'll still be walking down this hill. Enjoy the show. I like the sound of Italy. I'm not sure how I feel about the Alps, to be honest. Yeah, the food, the food. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Claudia Grisales. I cover Congress. And I'm Deirdre Walsh. I also cover Congress. And this week, House Republicans began the first set of hearings of many, many hearings planned into the Biden administration and Democrats. So, Claudia, you have been covering

these investigations and where Republicans would like to take them. So take a step back and give us the big picture here. Right. We have two figures at the center of these probes that Republicans are leading. That's Jim Jordan of Ohio leading the Judiciary Panel and James Comer of Kentucky leading the House Oversight Committee. They're both meeting regularly. I talked to Comer about this on a recent afternoon. He said he and Jordan just had breakfast that morning, and that's the way it's going to be. There's a lot of overlap here. And they concede, for example, that they're going to be covering the same ground. For example, judiciary held a hearing on the southern border this past week. And next week, oversight will jump on the border investigations. This week, oversight was focused more on pandemic

spending and brought in some government officials to talk about that. It's fascinating to me how bold and clear Republicans were even before they won the majority at how they would use this majority to investigate the Biden administration. I mean, investigations by the opposing party have become so inherently political, but they can also be pretty successful political weapons. Deirdre, it seems fair to say that Republicans are hoping these investigations become a powerful political weapon against the president. They are. And Oversight Chairman Jim Comer, who, in addition to dealing with the pandemic and the border, is launching an investigation of what he calls influence peddling by President Biden's family, his brother, his son, Hunter. And he's very clear every time he talks about this investigation saying it's an investigation of Joe Biden, not Hunter, and it's about influence penalty. He is targeting President Biden. And he's next week is bringing in officials from Twitter to talk to them about whether or not they had any role in discussing with government officials coverage of allegations

around potential wrongdoing by the president's son. They are squarely aiming their sights at the president and obviously his policies. The other thing that's notable about the oversight agenda is it's clearly the sort of big overarching theme for House Republicans saying, you know, they're going to hold the administration accountable. But just the wide range of issues they're having hearings on. Yeah. I wonder. I wonder how effective that is as a message to voters, because every week there's a different topic, how they corral that and how they message it into one narrative seems sort of unclear to me at this point.

That's a really good point, because when you think about other partisan sort of investigations, you know, when Democrats were in control, they investigated former President Trump over impeachment, right? But it was a clear line of attack. Similarly, when Republicans under the Obama administration were investigating the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, they focused singularly on this issue. This Congress, they're kind of throwing the spaghetti at the wall. They are talking, looking at so many different topic areas, so many different elements of the administration, from policymaking to family business. It's kind of an exhaustive list.

It really is. I was talking to Deirdre about this earlier. And in some ways, it's like you look at it as a court case in terms of how members present these hearings. And I keep thinking about Jan 6th, the select panel, as I covered that, it was just one singular narrative. And as you're mentioning Benghazi, we saw that as well much of the time. But we look at the tone when we look at these hearings this past week that they set five, six hour hearings that are all over the map. Some Democrats like new freshman Representative Dan Goldman of New York asking the Justice Department inspector general regarding Republican investigations, really changing the subject, if you will. It's hard to follow. And you're oversaturating the jury, overloading the jury, and it gets hard to track. So it's going to be a hard argument for Republicans to make to the American public and keep like a concise, singular message out there. Claudia, how do you get the sense that Democrats are responding to this? Because the minority party tends to take different tactics. And I think most recently and

most notably with the January 6th committee, the Republicans just decided not to participate at all. So how are Democrats approaching these hearings? Yeah, it's really interesting. The Jan 6th example is a really good one because Republicans lost out on having their rebuttals much of the time. And those hearings were held in prime time. They really got their messages across. In this case, you can see it in the hearings in terms of Democrats jumping in here and there, trying to either change the subject or, for example, when we're talking about House oversight, the ranking Democrat on that committee, Jamie Raskin, raising points about the Biden administration jumping in with new oversight efforts when Biden went into office and pointing out a lot of these trillions of dollars of pandemic relief were approved under the Trump administration. So they're really raising those counterpoints. Well, it's true that like partisan oversight tends to be political in nature, but bipartisan oversight is more likely to yield an outcome or policy changes. Deirdre,

are there other areas that you think Democrats might be willing to bite in the areas that Republicans want to look into? I do think on the issue of classified documents, there is bipartisan concern on the oversight committees, on the intelligence committees, about how presidents, top administration officials handle classified materials. Obviously, there's been a lot of stories about the recent discoveries of classified materials in President Biden's home, the office he used when he was vice president, then we heard about former Vice President Mike Pence. So I think there is some bipartisan interest there. But I also think there's some areas of bipartisan cooperation on some policy

issues. A new committee was established in the House. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy created this select committee to address the threat from China. And the new chair, Mike Gallagher from Wisconsin, has been out there talking about the national security issues surrounding TikTok and other issues affecting U.S. diplomatic interests in the region. And Democrats were appointed to this committee. There's a lot of bipartisan enthusiasm for actually working together on this issue and addressing the threat as a bipartisan issue in the House. It's so different from almost all the other committees that we cover where you have this new committee created. And right off the bat, people are talking about substance and issues they want to address

and are confident that they can get bipartisan support for it. There was an overwhelming vote by the House to create this committee. So I'm just sort of really interested to see if that's a place that is more of a sleeper committee that actually gets some stuff done. All right, let's take a quick break. And when we get back, we're going to talk about one lawmaker in particular who's going to be critical to all of these investigations. Hey there, I'm Elena Moore, a producer on the show. One of the biggest stories we've worked on so far this year was the long and messy fight over who would lead Republicans in the House of Representatives. In our recent bonus episode, we talked about what it was like to cover that story.

The late nights, the lip reading, and the votes. The chamber went silent. All 15 of them. And in our Slack channel inside NPR, they're like, what's happening? And I'm like, guys, they're going to vote again. I think that he has it. That episode is available now if you're an NPR Politics Podcast Plus supporter. And if you're not, you could be. You can hear regular bonus episodes. You can hear our regular show without sponsor messages. And most importantly, you can keep NPR going. Sign up on

our show page in Apple Podcasts or visit the link in our episode notes, which is plus.npr.org. And we're back. And we mentioned him in the first half, but Jim Jordan, Ohio lawmaker, is running the Judiciary Committee. And Deirdre, he has had a fascinating evolution inside the House because he started as a firebrand, but he's sort of proof that if you stick around long enough, you'll always become the establishment. He has. Like me, you've covered him for a while. Jordan was elected in 2007. And when he came to Congress, he really fashioned himself as a small government conservative, very focused on slashing federal spending. He got a reputation as sort of an aggressive critic of some of his own Republican leaders and was elected to chair this propel themselves into leadership positions. Mike Pence chaired that group at one point. But Jordan really got a lot of attention for openly defying his leadership,

openly criticizing his leadership. And he was part of this group of Republican rabble-rousers, essentially, who created a group called the House Freedom Caucus in 2015, directly focused on challenging House Speaker John Boehner. They didn't like the way he ran the House. They disagreed with his negotiations with President Obama. And that group was part of the reason why Boehner ended up stepping down. And Boehner, you know, his deputy at the time was then Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. And you cut to, you know, just a few weeks ago, Jim Jordan was a critical player in helping get the votes to elect McCarthy speaker and sort of go all in with the party leadership. Right. I mean, you had part of this group of 20 House

conservatives opposed to McCarthy nominating Jim Jordan. And then you had Jim Jordan getting up and nominating McCarthy saying, look, guys, Kevin is the right guy. I disagree with him some of the time, but we're all on the same team, and he's the guy to lead us. And he clearly was rewarded for his help. And he developed a much closer relationship with McCarthy over the last few years. And that sort of helped him get this key role. And McCarthy is largely deferring to him to lead these investigations out of the Judiciary Committee. He's using Jordan's support for him as a way to reach out to the conservative base, which sometimes doesn't agree with Kevin McCarthy.

I think it's interesting that Jordan has been considered such a Trump guy, if you will. But Deirdre, you got such interesting remarks from Mick Mulvaney, who was part of the Trump administration about Jordan and how he operates. focused on government accountability, government investigations. He's not a guy who's really focused on passing legislation. The House Judiciary Committee is a place that has passed legislation. There has been bipartisan criminal justice reform out of that committee. There's been other bipartisan issues. But in recent comments over the past couple of days leading up to this border security hearing this week, Jordan himself is sort of already saying, I don't necessarily see this as a place to do immigration legislation. So it's clear his agenda is not on trying to get a consensus around legislation. It's about drawing attention

to policies he disagrees with from the Biden administration. I am really fascinated to see how Jordan disciplines or doesn't himself in the course of these investigations, because the speaker has given him a tremendous amount of power and deference to run this committee the way he sees fit and go where he needs to go. But I think it's fair to say Jordan is not someone who I would necessarily describe as someone who feeds into conspiracy theories. But he walks pretty close up to the line. And a lot of the things that he says he wants to investigate, things like the origin of the coronavirus in China, he often can use the sort of phrasing or framing that is, I would say, sometimes dog whistly to conspiracy theorists. And I think

that he has to be really careful. You know, he comes from like a very hard right worldview. He comes from a very hard right district. But they also want to win elections. And I think the last election showed us that like you can overplay your hand on some of this stuff. And if you seem too far right or too out of the mainstream, they might inadvertently be giving their opponents some ammunition of their own to say, look at these people. They don't know how to run your government. Yeah, I thought he illustrated a lot of discipline during McCarthy's fight for the Speaker's gavel because they were voting for Jordan because he does speak to these hardline conservatives who are buying into some of these conspiracy theory type stories or lanes that they're trying to get in. And so, but Jordan, you know, did it. I was very curious to watch his posture and all that.

And he didn't jump in and say, hey, let's run away with this thing right now. We could do it maybe. But rather he stood back and he let McCarthy pull it off in the end. He's already facing political pressure from a lot of conservative colleagues to impeach President Biden, to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas. Mulvaney said to me when I talked to him, and he served in the House with Jordan, was one of the founding members of the Freedom Caucus, that Jordan has great credibility with the base, with what he called like the Fox News audience. And he has growing credibility across the Republican

conference. But there is a danger for him if he does go too far in terms of agreeing to move ahead with impeachment before there's sort of solid evidence. And so far, Jordan has repeatedly said he's not there yet, and that the decision to impeach a secretary or a president is up to the speaker and the entire Republican conference. All right, that is it for us today. We will be back in your feeds tomorrow for the Friday Roundup. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Claudia Grisales. I cover Congress. And I'm Deirdre Walsh. I also cover Congress. And thanks for listening to the