Most GOP Presidential Contenders on Board with Biden Impeachment Inquiry

Most of the GOP presidential field has come out in support of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s newly announced impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden — but there are a couple of holdouts.

During an appearance on MSNBC yesterday, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said he did not see enough evidence to impeach Biden.

“I think we’re cheapening impeachment by doing that kind of thing,” he said, though he did voice support for “an investigation, both by the Congress and by the Department of Justice.”

“I think there should be an inquiry made about what has gone on with the Bidens’ business situations,” Christie said during a SiriusXM town hall at New England College on Tuesday. “But I think they can do that through their oversight function and have the DOJ special counsel that’s been appointed now in the Hunter Biden situation look at that, as well. . . . Because if it got to the point where as vice president, he in any way shared in the money that went along with that, I think that would be a really significant problem.”

If that were the case, Christie said he believed it would be an impeachable offense.

Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson took a similar approach, suggesting the inquiry is “premature.”

“I think what’s important is we should not even have gone down the path of impeachment until we get the facts on the table more completely,” he said during an appearance on CNN. “There’s a lot of smoke there. There’s a lot of concern and a legitimate area of inquiry that we have to get to the bottom of. But let’s wait till we get the facts before we know exactly whether we want to put the label ‘impeachment’ on it or not.”

For months, the House Oversight Committee and House Judiciary Committee have been investigating the Biden family’s alleged influence-peddling schemes. On Tuesday, McCarthy announced an impeachment inquiry as the “logical next step,” which he said would “give our committees the full power to gather all the facts and answers for the American public.”

House Oversight chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) and House Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) have uncovered what they say is evidence of then–vice president Biden’s involvement in his son’s foreign-influence-peddling efforts, particularly in the case of Hunter Biden’s involvement with Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.

Hunter Biden’s former business partner and fellow Burisma board member Devon Archer testified before the Oversight Committee that the elder Biden spoke on the phone and/or met with their business partners 20 times over the course of their decade-long partnership.

Those meetings and calls included chats with Burisma executives who asked Hunter to help shield them from a corruption investigation by Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, whom then–vice president Biden later bragged about having fired. An anonymous FBI informant claims that Hunter and his father received $5 million each for intervening in the investigation.

McCarthy said Tuesday that Hunter has been “offered special treatment by Biden’s own administration,” noting that he has not been charged with acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, among other possible gun and tax charges.

McCarthy did not say whether the full House would vote on the decision to open the impeachment inquiry, a likely indication that even Republicans are divided on the issue.

But, aside from Christie and Hutchinson, the Republican presidential contenders largely remained united on the impeachment front.

“There are more grounds for impeaching Biden than for either of the Trump impeachments,” Larry Elder said in a statement to National Review.

Senator Tim Scott said the “‘big guy’ has some explaining to do, and this inquiry is an important part of getting answers.” The statement is a reference to an email in which one of Hunter Biden’s business associates, James Gilliar, pitched the equity stakes for key players in a firm created for a joint venture with CEFC China Energy Co. in March 2017. It read, “10 held by H for the big guy?” Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski previously identified Joe Biden as the “big guy.”

“The American people deserve the truth about Biden’s corrupt family business dealings,” Scott said. “Just another reason why we need a nominee who will make this election about beating Biden.”

Vivek Ramaswamy campaign spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to National Review: “A Ukrainian state-affiliated company’s multimillion dollar bribe to the Biden family is a likely reason why President Biden is now otherwise inexplicably showering Ukraine with hundreds of billions of US taxpayer dollars. ‘Bribery’ is one of the explicit bases for impeachment specified in Article II, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution.”

Ron DeSantis’s campaign directed National Review to comments the Florida governor made back in July in which he said lawmakers are “absolutely within their rights” to move forward with an impeachment inquiry.

“They impeached Trump for a phone call. Are you trying to tell me Biden’s conduct isn’t as significant as that? It’s way more significant,” DeSantis said during an appearance on Jesse Watters Primetime on July 25.

“There’s no interest in investigating, no zealousness with search warrants or any of this other stuff. So I think that the Republicans are going to have to bring some accountability, because we’re not going to get it from [Attorney General Merrick] Garland, the DOJ, and the Christopher Wray FBI,” he said.

North Dakota governor Doug Burgum wrote in a post on X that it is “important to do what it takes to get to the bottom of the Biden family business dealings.”

Former president Donald Trump vocalized support for an impeachment inquiry in a post on Truth Social last month.

“Biden is a Stone Cold Crook — You don’t need a long INQUIRY to prove it, it’s already proven,” he wrote. “These lowlifes Impeached me TWICE (I WON!), and Indicted me FOUR TIMES – For NOTHING! Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US!”

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley voiced support for an impeachment inquiry as far back as June, when Greg Gutfeld asked her on Fox News: “Why can’t they start impeachment right now?”

“They absolutely should,” she said.

Former vice president Mike Pence expressed support for an impeachment inquiry earlier this month.

“There are so many questions about Joe Biden’s involvement and connection to his son’s businesses when he was vice president of the United States,” he told Fox News. The “very idea that these things were happening is something the American people deserve to get to the bottom of.”

According to a Wall Street Journal poll conducted late last month, 52 percent of voters oppose impeaching Biden, with 41 percent in favor of impeaching him.

In the poll, 34 percent of registered voters said they’d be less likely to support President Biden because of the Hunter Biden allegations, while 57 percent said it would have no impact.

Christie, meanwhile, definitively called the Trump family corrupt during his New Hampshire town hall on Tuesday.

“It’s readily apparent when you pay your son’s girlfriend 60 grand out of campaign money to give a three-minute speech,” Christie said. “That money was donated by people who wanted to fund him to fight a stolen election. When they donated that money they didn’t think 60 grand was going to Kimberly Guilfoyle to give a three-minute speech.”

Guilfoyle, who is Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, received $60,000 for speaking at the “stop the steal” rally in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, according to reports.

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Several Republican presidential candidates are set to appear at the 23rd Annual Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition Fall Banquet in Des Moines this weekend.

Ahead of his trip to Iowa, Scott launched two new ads in the Hawkeye State on Wednesday:

“Underdog” and “Parental Consent.”

“The Radical left acts like your kids are their kids,” Scott says in the new ad on parental consent.

“In schools today, rogue adults are changing kids’ genders behind parents’ backs. Planned Parenthood is performing abortions on teenage girls in secret, and Big Tech is addicting children to social media. Two powerful words can stop the radical left dead in their tracks: Parental consent.”

“As President, I’ll put moms and dads back in charge,” he says.

Around NR

• DeSantis’s campaign has a strange outlook on the importance of winning Iowa, Zach Kessel says, after a “top DeSantis campaign official” told Politico the campaign would be happy with a “strong second-place showing” in the state.

Earlier this year, Rich Lowry wrote that if Trump wins Iowa, “the fight for the nomination might be all but over,” but if he doesn’t, “at the very least it’s going to be a long fight.” . . . Hewing to Rich’s assumption that a Trump win in the year’s first caucus would sew up the nomination for the former president, those in DeSantis’s orbit should be concerned about, not content with, the prospect of coming in second in Iowa.

• As pundits work to figure out whether a likely Trump vs. Biden rematch would look more like 2016 or 2020, Jim Geraghty suggests that a recent NBC News report about the Biden campaign’s slow-to-start fundraising is “one more piece of evidence” that a “Trump-friendly scenario comes our way.”

Democrats will believe, or try to convince themselves, that it’s more like last cycle — the same two guys, the same two strengths and weaknesses, in an environment without an ongoing pandemic. Or . . . it’s a Democratic incumbent again, Trump represents change again, and the aging Biden just isn’t the same guy he was in the 2020 cycle.

• Charles C. W. Cooke offers a refutation of the talking point that “Joe Biden is most certainly not too old to be president, that voters need to understand that fact, and that the press should stop saying otherwise lest it do the same thing that it did with Hillary’s emails (i.e., tell the truth about something real).” Instead, he writes, “Old Joe ‘Old’ Biden (Old) Is Too Old to Be President (He’s Old).”

Joe Biden’s brain isn’t working fine. He doesn’t respond to questions in an appropriate fashion. His words aren’t diplomatically chosen. His thoughts don’t follow in logical order. And, no, he doesn’t remember what he’s just said — or even where he was on 9/11. The reason that “73 percent are seriously concerned that his physical and mental health might not be adequate for another term” is that his physical and mental health are not adequate for another term. He’s ancient, superannuated, fossilized, geriatric, enfeebled.

• Michael Brendan Dougherty weighs in on Mike Pence’s populism vs. conservatism speech from the perspective of a populist.

I don’t think Mike Pence thinks very deeply about populism, what it is, or sometimes, he doesn’t think that deeply about conservatism, given the way he contrasted the two in this speech. . . . He basically defines populism as something that’s long been a left-wing phenomenon, and there’s some truth to that. But for him, populism is surrendering limited government and American leadership in the geopolitical sphere, eroding our constitutional norms, and casting in time-honored principles for passing public opinion.

Populism is not a full-spectrum political doctrine. It is much more a rhetorical style.

• Philip Klein writes that he’d normally dismiss the odds of a third-party challenger, but in a hypothetical Trump–Biden rematch, he’s not so sure.

I would still give low odds to a legitimate third-party challenge forming. But the election of Trump has taught me to be a bit more open to the idea of things happening in politics that I would never have thought possible. And the Trump vs. Biden race would be unprecedented, because we’ve never had two candidates who would both be going into the general election while being so extremely unpopular and facing such severe headwinds.

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