Analysis | The House impeachment probe enters its end game, far from impeachment (2024)

To observers who had been paying attention, though, the announcement was somewhat less compelling. McCarthy’s predicates for the probe were overstated and unproven — and not for lack of trying to prove them. The announcement of the inquiry trailed the actual effort to dig up incriminating information on President Biden for months if not more than a year, with House Republicans having nothing of substance to show for it.

Over the months that followed, they had no more luck. Efforts to bolster allegations that Biden was intimately involved with and benefited from his son’s and brother’s business endeavors came up dry. When House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) recently made the case for this allegation in an interview on Fox Business, his arguments were generally identical to ones that he would have made before the impeachment inquiry even began.

Those months of effort produced nothing of substance by the end of 2023, leading Comer and his colleagues to repeatedly attempt to exaggerate the importance of demonstrably nonsignificant findings. Most embarrassingly, claims that Biden and his son Hunter had taken a bribe from a Ukrainian businessman exploded in spectacular fashion, with the individual claiming to have been told about the bribe now facing criminal charges for having allegedly made it up.

By February, Republicans were in a bind. They made no progress in linking Joe Biden to his family’s business efforts, much less in showing that Biden leveraged his office on behalf of his brother James’s or Hunter’s business partners. Comer pivoted, arguing that the culmination of the probe would be referrals to the Justice Department for criminal charges against those who had been the subjects of his committee’s investigations.

This had a few advantages. First, it sidestepped the awkward reticence of Republicans to want to chase his wild impeachment goose. Second, referrals have the benefit of sounding serious while requiring a low bar for implementation. And third, Comer could position the referrals as an argument for one of his party’s primary aims: Voters needed to elect Donald Trump in November to get an attorney general who, unlike Biden’s appointee, would be far more likely to seek indictments.

For months, Comer and his colleagues had been hinting that the impeachment inquiry was reaching its end stages, with Comer more recently suggesting that referrals would be the end product. And at long last, the referrals were sent to the Justice Department on Wednesday, indicating that the end had arrived.

By the standard of McCarthy’s original predicates for the probe, the end product is — at least so far — remarkably thin.

What the three committee chairmen — Comer, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason T. Smith (R-Mo.) — suggest is that criminal charges are warranted against Hunter Biden and James Biden not for their work with Joe Biden or even their work in general but, instead, for allegedly making false claims to impeachment investigators. The referrals are essentially recommendations, a suggestion to the Justice Department that it take action.

It’s unlikely that the Justice Department will. The allegations in the referrals are fairly in the weeds, centered on whether Hunter Biden had control over a particular bank account and whether Joe Biden attended a particular meeting. The assertion made in the referral is that alleged discrepancies between the testimony of Hunter and James Biden and records or testimony from other individuals were a function of willful dishonesty warranting criminal sanction. It is useful here to note that Comer and Jordan in particular have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to make obviously false claims and repeat debunked claims, so the assertions in the referral should not be taken at face value.

More importantly, though, the referral insists that these falsehoods are evidence that Republicans were right about Joe Biden all along.

“Hunter Biden and James Biden made materially false statements to the Oversight Committee and the Judiciary Committee, as demonstrated by the evidence presented in the attached referral,” it reads. “The nature of these false statements is not lost on the Committees: every instance implicates Joe Biden’s knowledge of and role in his family’s influence peddling.”

This is the central allegation of the impeachment inquiry, though: that everything is evidence of Joe Biden being involved in his family’s business. His son got a lot of money? Well, that seems pretty suspicious for Joe Biden! So because the president’s brother might have misremembered whether Joe Biden met a business partner at one point — even though investigators have been unable to demonstrate any significance to other such meetings — this is presented as more evidence of a coverup.

Comer told Fox News that he’s not done yet.

“This is not the end of our efforts to hold the Bidens accountable; it’s only the beginning,” he said in a statement. That statement seems to portend that additional referrals could lay ahead, potentially as the calendar ticks closer to November’s election.

But it also suggests that the investigation is done. That the effort to prove Joe Biden did things warranting impeachment has concluded, without proving that Biden did things warranting impeachment. There may be more referrals, maybe even ones targeting Biden that a Trump-appointed attorney general might do something with next year. But as has been obvious for some time, there won’t be an impeachment.

From September to March, Fox News mentioned Biden and impeachment more than 1,500 times. Since April, though, they’ve mentioned it fewer than 100 times. When even Comer’s most fervent media allies in the effort to take down the president have lost interest? Time to wrap things up, wringing out whatever political profit you can before you do.