House committees toil over forthcoming Biden impeachment report

As concerns about President Joe Biden’s fitness for office dominate headlines, House Republicans have been debating behind the scenes how best to wrap up their impeachment inquiry into him.

The House Oversight, Ways and Means, and Judiciary committees, the three panels that have been leading the yearlong effort, are engaged in a tense editing process in coordination with House counsel as they work through disputes about their sweeping final report, according to multiple GOP sources.

One source said a point of contention was that Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) has been pushing for more aggressive language in the report, while another involved with the report said “disagreements are mild” and a standard part of compiling an elaborate and culminating document.

“It’s still going through edits, and obviously given the different jurisdictions, the committees are working on how best to balance the report,” the second person said.

Talk of a final report on the impeachment inquiry comes against the backdrop of Biden’s debate performance plunging the Democratic Party into crisis mode last month. The president, who is 81 years old, stumbled over words, losing his train of thought at times and appearing dazed at others during the event. It marked a breakthrough moment for Democrats, who began raising alarm about Biden’s declining cognitive state as he campaigns against former President Donald Trump for reelection.

Lawmakers involved with the inquiry openly acknowledged in Punchbowl News that it would be unwise to steal the spotlight from Democrats amid their intraparty catastrophe, but multiple sources told the Washington Examiner that is not the cause of the delay of the report’s release.

An Oversight spokesman said in May that the report was expected “soon,” but the back-and-forth over the edits has drawn out the process longer than Comer would have preferred. One source said it will not be completed before the Republican National Convention, which is taking place July 15 to 18.

An Oversight spokeswoman said Thursday her committee’s view is that the president “should be impeached” and that the committee is aiming for a speedy release of the report.

“The Oversight Committee has been prepared for months to begin the process to remove him from his office,” the spokeswoman said in a statement. “The fact that President Biden is declining mentally and Hunter Biden acts as a gatekeeper in the White House shows the need to remove Joe Biden from public office is even more pressing. We will continue to work with the other committees to finalize and release a joint impeachment inquiry report as expeditiously as possible.”

The committees opened the inquiry into Biden last fall to investigate allegations that the president was involved in his son Hunter Biden’s multimillion-dollar dealings in countries including China and Ukraine.

The committees have since uncovered a wealth of evidence showing Hunter Biden, who was grappling with crack cocaine and alcohol addiction at the time, wielded his father’s name to foreign executives to secure lucrative business arrangements with them while Joe Biden was vice president. The committees found evidence that Joe Biden had brief interactions with some of these executives, sometimes described as “winks” and “nods” that signaled his awareness of their business with Hunter Biden and his brother James Biden, but most of the GOP’s impeachment witnesses denied that the president had direct involvement in his family’s work.

One of the sources involved with the impeachment report suggested that Hunter Biden, who has appeared to step into an unofficial advisory role for his father amid Joe Biden’s mounting political crisis, would want his father to stay in office for self-serving reasons.

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The impeachment report contains “over a year of material that catalogues text messages and emails that clearly show the President lied about his involvement in his son’s business. That Hunter has been advising his father on whether to stay in the race is hardly a surprise,” the source said.

While Comer’s team has been insistent that the House should vote to impeach Joe Biden, there has been little appetite to do so among the broader GOP conference. Republicans hold a razor-thin majority in the House, and the vote would fail unless it garnered near full support from the 220 GOP members.