McCarthy supports bid to erase Trump’s impeachments.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy Backs Effort to Expunge Trump’s Impeachments

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is supporting a move in the House of Representatives to expunge the two impeachment proceedings against former President Donald Trump.

On Friday, Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) introduced two different resolutions to expunge Trump’s 2019 and 2021 impeachments. The resolutions argue that expungement would nullify the impeachment articles against Trump, as they failed to meet the burden of proving “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” as outlined in the Constitution.

McCarthy expressed his endorsement of the expungement effort in comments to the media on Friday.

“I think it is appropriate, just as I thought before, that you should expunge it because it never should have gone through,” he told The Hill.

The First Impeachment

The first impeachment effort against Trump, led by Democrats, accused him of soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 election through a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The call allegedly involved conditioning aid to Ukraine on a corruption investigation into Joe Biden.

During the call, Trump mentioned allegations that Joe Biden had pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor investigating Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas firm where his son Hunter Biden served on the board.

“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … it sounds horrible to me,” Trump said, according to a transcript of the call.

Biden’s connections to Burisma have recently come under scrutiny, with lawmakers gaining access to an FD-1023 form from an FBI informant. The form alleges that Burisma’s owner paid $5 million each to Hunter Biden and “another Biden” to remove Ukrainian prosecutor-general Viktor Shokin, who was planning to investigate the gas company.

“The FBI had credible evidence of Joe and Hunter Biden’s corrupt dealings, confirming their involvement in a foreign bribery pay-to-play scheme and receipt of over $5 million each,” Greene stated. “All of this information was revealed to Congress by the FD-1023 form from the FBI’s most credible informant. The form vindicates President Trump and exposes the crimes of the Biden family. It’s clear that President Trump’s impeachment was nothing more than a witch hunt that needs to be addressed.”