File. US President Joe Biden speaks during an economic summit at the College of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas, Nevada, on July 16, 2024.
The Republican-led House committees investigating whether to impeach President Joe Biden released their long-awaited report about their findings Monday morning, arguing that Biden has committed impeachable conduct but deferring to the full House on whether to pursue a formal impeachment.
The nearly 300-page report is a summary of the investigation conducted by the House Oversight, Judiciary and Ways and Means committees over the past year and a half, nearly all of which has already been made public.
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It argues that Biden enriched himself through his family’s business ventures and concealed his mishandling of classified information in office, the subject of the investigation conducted by special counsel Robert Hur, who declined to press charges this year.
In addition, the committees say that the Justice Department mishandled its investigation into his son Hunter Biden’s tax problems and that the White House has withheld key documents and witnesses from the impeachment investigation.
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“The totality of the corrupt conduct uncovered by the Committees is egregious. President Joe Biden conspired to commit influence peddling and grift. In doing so, he abused his office and, by repeatedly lying about his abuse of office, has defrauded the United States to enrich his family,” the report says.
The White House has not yet had the opportunity to comment on this article.
The report itself provides extensive details about the interactions with and payments from foreign companies to Hunter Biden and the president’s brother James Biden and their business associates during the end of his time as vice president and when he was a private citizen.
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The investigators put the total at $27 million, according to the bank records they received. But the investigators failed to turn up evidence that Biden himself received money from those companies or participated in the foreign business deals beyond the occasions when Hunter Biden called him on speakerphone to exchange pleasantries while in the company of foreign business associates or when he saw them at his son’s birthday dinner.
One of the examples the committees cite is the case of Russian businesswoman Yelena Baturina, the wife of former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzkhkov, who invested $3.5 million with Hunter Biden’s business partner Devon Archer through a company that had some ties to Hunter Biden in 2014. The investment was finalized after Hunter Biden’s birthday dinner at Café Milano in Washington, D.C., which Baturina attended and Joe Biden, then the vice president, dropped by. Archer described the conversation in an interview with the Oversight Committee last year as being about “the world, I guess, and the weather, and then everybody — everybody left.”
Later in the year, when another of Hunter Biden’s business partners, Jason Galanis, was seeking further investment from Baturina that would have benefited Hunter Biden through an equity agreement, Hunter Biden called his father and put him on speakerphone, Galanis said. He told the Oversight and Judiciary committees that the short call included some “pleasantries and hellos and safe travels,” after which Joe Biden said, “You be good to my boy,” before the conversation ended. Though the committees present an email from Galanis indicating that Baturina had committed to make an additional investment, it does not indicate it ever happened.
In other parts of the report, the committees provide numerous examples of financial deals between Hunter Biden and Chinese corporations but does not provide direct links to Joe Biden while he was vice president or evidence of specific policies he changed or encouraged during that time. They also point to an example in 2017 when Sara Biden, the wife of the president’s brother James, signed a $40,000 check to Biden designated as “loan repayment” from an account with money that had come into her account through various transfers that originated from Hunter Biden’s dealings with a Chinese energy company.
The committees also point to instances of Hunter Biden’s business associates’ describing a future role in certain business ventures for Joe Biden after his time as vice president ended. In his testimony before the Oversight and Judiciary committees, Hunter Biden denied his father’s involvement or ascribed any references he made to his father to his drug and alcohol use at the time.
In June, the chairmen of the three committees pursuing impeachment sent criminal referrals to the Justice Department recommending that Hunter and James Biden be charged with making false statements to Congress.
Other sections of the report deal with the IRS’ investigation into Hunter Biden’s failure to pay taxes in 2017 and 2018, which began in 2018 during the Trump administration and continued during the Biden administration under the supervision of special counsel David Weiss. Two employees of the IRS came forward as whistleblowers to allege that the Justice Department was purposely slow-walking the investigation. Hunter Biden was offered a plea deal on federal firearms charges that fell apart in court last year, and he was later convicted on those charges at a jury trial this year. He is awaiting trial for his failure to pay taxes later this year.
The report makes no mention of the role of Alexander Smirnov, the possible Russian spy who fed false information about Hunter and Joe Biden to the FBI. Smirnov, who has also been charged with making false reports about the president’s son by Weiss, is scheduled to go on trial in December.
“Although the Committees’ fact-finding is ongoing amid President Biden’s obstruction, the evidence uncovered in the impeachment inquiry to date already amounts to impeachable conduct. The Committees present this information to the House of Representatives for its evaluation and consideration of appropriate next steps,” the report concludes.
The impeachment inquiry was announced in September by Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., then the House speaker, and formally ratified by the House in December in a party-line vote.
It’s unclear that Republican leadership would have enough votes to impeach Biden, and in any event, impeachment would be all but certain to fail to meet the two-thirds bar for conviction in the Senate. Senate Democrats, who hold a 51-49 edge, can vote to dismiss an impeachment inquiry with a simple majority.
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