Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is incensed at the progression of the ostensible impeachment inquiry targeting President Joe Biden that’s been spearheaded by Republican members of that panel. Repeatedly, their investigative efforts have been sweeping up data on entirely private and personal financial transactions — and nowhere in any of this have Republicans conclusively ensnared the president in corruption.
The latest subpoenas announced from Republicans include demands for a decade of financial records covering individuals including Hunter Biden, a son to the president. (Also targeted were the president’s brother James Biden and Eric Schwerin.) “Your decision to issue a blanket demand for “all financial records” from 2014 to the present, without any effort to define or tailor the request, makes obvious that these subpoenas are nothing but a fishing expedition many miles away from the legislative shore and thus an egregious abuse of this Committee’s authority,” Raskin wrote in a letter to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the current chairman of the House Oversight Committee.
GOP plans for the subpoenas emerged around the time of a recent hearing in the claimed impeachment investigation… a hearing where one of the GOP-aligned witnesses explicitly stated he did not believe the factual record, as established, supported moving forward with an impeachment of the president.
Raskin notes in his extensive letter that, predictably, there have previously been complaints from the Republican side about (repeatedly legally upheld) Democratic investigations supposedly venturing too far into the personal life of former President Trump. That didn’t stop Republicans now. How would knowing what Hunter Biden was spending on restaurants in 2015 help with… anything, exactly?
The path forward at this stage for Republicans’ hyped up impeachment inquiry is not clear. Comer reportedly recently questioned whether he’d even pursue any more hearings as part of the impeachment idea, though even in that scenario, other Republicans in Congress could keep things moving.
