House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Monday said that allegations stemming from Republican probes into the business dealings of family members of President Joe Biden are “rising to the level of impeachment inquiry.”
The allegations include that Biden family members received payments from foreign companies and that the Justice Department, according to IRS whistleblowers, has treated the Biden family “differently” in an investigation into Hunter Biden, McCarthy noted in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday night.
“When Biden was running for office, he told the public he has never talked about business. He said his family has never received a dollar from China, which we now prove is not true,” McCarthy alleged.
“If you’re sitting in our position today, we would know none of this if Republicans had not taken the majority,” he continued. “We only followed where the information has taken us. But this is rising to the level of impeachment inquiry, which provides Congress the strongest power to get the rest of the knowledge and information needed.”
The White House and Democrats swiftly criticized McCarthy’s comments. White House spokesperson Ian Sams tweeted that the GOP’s “eagerness to go after” Biden “regardless of the truth is seemingly bottomless.”
“Instead of focusing on the real issues Americans want us to address like continuing to lower inflation or create jobs, this is what the @HouseGOP wants to prioritize,” Sams tweeted.
Jaime Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, dismissed McCarthy’s remarks in a statement Tuesday as a “political stunt intended to help” former President Donald Trump.
“It’s clear that Donald Trump is the real Speaker of the House,” Harrison said. “He has made sure the House majority is little more than an arm of his 2024 campaign, and Kevin McCarthy is happy to do his bidding — promising to expunge Trump’s own bipartisan impeachments, and now threatening President Biden with a baseless impeachment to distract from their lack of any meaningful agenda and Trump’s own significant challenges.
“This is another political stunt intended to help Trump, which House Republicans have already admitted,” he added.
McCarthy’s remarks are the strongest he has made thus far on a potential impeachment inquiry. He sent out a fundraising message to supporters Tuesday afternoon, highlighting his impeachment comments along with a link to donate to his re-election campaign.
His comments come after Republicans last month decided to forgo an immediate vote on a Biden impeachment resolution led by Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., by sending it to the Homeland Security and Judiciary committees amid escalating internal GOP tensions.
The move came after McCarthy urged rank-and-file Republicans at a closed-door meeting to oppose Boebert’s resolution, arguing that such an important issue should go through the committee process, three GOP sources who heard the comments confirmed.
In early May, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said a whistleblower had informed them that the FBI had a document known as an FD-1023 that included an unverified allegation from a human source who said Joe Biden, when he was vice president, was involved in a bribery scheme involving a foreign government. Grassley released a redacted version of the FBI informant document last week.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
