Donald Trump wants to see President Joe Biden impeached, and the former president’s allies in Congress, and his 2024 GOP presidential rivals are willing to join that fight as his own legal challenges soar.
Trump’s chief opponent, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, this week told the House Republicans “are absolutely within their rights” to consider an impeachment inquiry against Biden.
Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, also running for president, said Republicans would be “justified to do it.” And House GOP leaders aligned with Trump are foreshadowing what’s ahead.
This week, the prospect of impeaching Biden over the business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden, emerged from the far corners of the GOP’s right flank to the mainstream in the Republican Party.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced on Fox News that the House may open an impeachment inquiry into Biden, and expanded on his plans at a Tuesday press event at the Capitol.
Behind closed doors Wednesday, however, the Republican speaker told GOP colleagues it’s early in the impeachment process, and McCarthy acknowledged there’s still much that is unknown about Joe Biden and whether he had any awareness or involvement in his son’s business deals that would arise to an impeachable offense.
By putting Biden on notice that the House is considering an inquiry, the Republicans are elevating a once rare congressional check on executive power — the formal impeachment charges over high crimes and misdemeanors — into yet another tool being wielded in party politics.
It’s a political escalation, urged on by Trump, after his own two impeachments. The prospect of a Biden impeachment inquiry also comes as Trump faces mounting legal cases, including a potential federal indictment in the investigation led by Special Counsel Jack Smith over his efforts to overturn the election in the run-up to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
Trump is the only president in U.S. history that has been twice impeached first in 2019 over his phone call urging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to dig up dirt on the Bidens or risk losing U.S. military aid, and again in 2021 in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters trying to overturn Biden’s election.
