White House blasts Biden impeachment inquiry: ‘Extreme politics at its worst’

The White House blasted Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) move Tuesday to direct House committees to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Biden, calling it “extreme politics” of the worst kind.

“House Republicans have been investigating the President for 9 months, and they’ve turned up no evidence of wrongdoing,” Ian Sams, White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations, said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“His own GOP members have said so. He vowed to hold a vote to open impeachment, now he flip flopped because he doesn’t have support,” Sams said, referring to McCarthy. “Extreme politics at its worst.”

McCarthy said that the probe into Biden — based on the House GOP’s investigations of his family’s foreign business dealings and the prosecution of his son Hunter Biden — will be led by House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.).

Additionally, Comer will work in coordination with Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.), who have also been investigating the Biden family.

Sams also shared an article Tuesday from The Hill from earlier this month with the headline “McCarthy says he won’t open impeachment inquiry without House vote.”

“Eleven days ago, Speaker McCarthy committed that he wouldn’t open an impeachment inquiry without a House vote,” Sams said on social media.

Additionally, he shared a letter from McCarthy to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) from 2019, during the impeachment proceedings into former President Trump, to highlight that McCarthy pushed back on her moves at the time.

“Today, Kevin McCarthy unilaterally decreed an impeachment inquiry and said there’d be no vote,” Sams said in a post. “In 2019, he said the House must ‘intend to hold a vote of the full House authorizing an impeachment inquiry,’ or it ‘would create a process completely devoid of any merit or legitimacy.’”

McCarthy’s formal endorsement of impeachment comes after weeks of him saying that he thought the House probes would eventually develop into an impeachment inquiry.

The Oversight Committee has been investigating the Biden family’s business dealings, and it has not found that the president directly financially benefited from his son’s business or proved that he made any policy decisions because of them.

The White House has been adamant that the president was not in business with his son, and the president has said himself that he never talked with Hunter Biden about his business dealings.

The administration has also continuously blasted McCarthy and House Republicans for talk of an impeachment inquiry. Earlier this month, Sams said that moving forward with such an inquiry would only be done to throw “red meat” to the right wing of the GOP.

It has also often pointed to remarks from some Republican lawmakers saying they don’t support moving forward with impeachment and bashed comments from others such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has tied funding the government to her demands for impeachment.