Speaker of the House Mike Johnson says he expects House Republicans will soon come to a decision on impeaching President Joe Biden, and praised Oversight Chairman Jim Comer’s “methodical” investigation he characterized as “outside the scope of politics,” while attacking both impeachments of then-President Donald Trump as a “sham.”
While claiming he has not “predetermined” if President Biden should be impeached, before becoming Speaker, Johnson had strongly suggested impeachment of the President was required by the Constitution in a House floor speech:
Contrary to Speaker Johnson’s remarks on Thursday at his first official weekly press conference, Chairman Comer’s investigation has been seen, even by Fox News, as lacking any actual substance or proof of any criminal or impeachable offense, while Democrats impeached Donald Trump for at least one action which he was later indicted on.
Earlier this year “Fox & Friends” host Steve Doocy slammed Chairman Comer live on-air.
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“I know the Republicans said that the smoking gun were these financial records that you were able to subpoena and got your hands on,” Doocy said May 11, as HuffPost reported. “But that’s just your suggestion ― you actually don’t have any facts to that point. You’ve got some circumstantial evidence.”
“And the other thing is, of all those names, the one person who didn’t profit is ― there is no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegally.”
HuffPost also reported Geraldo Rivera had written “that the committee’s ‘angry allegations are vague and general and do not point to specific crimes.'”
“And former Donald Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka said he was ‘not impressed’ by Comer’s allegations because he hasn’t found a ‘smoking gun’ example of the money actually influencing an official act by Biden.”
But on Thursday, Speaker Johnson declared Republicans have been working as the founders intended.
“So, many of you know my background, I’m a constitutional law attorney,” Johnson told reporters. “I believe this is a very serious matter. I was called upon to serve on the impeachment defense team in the House twice under President Trump when the Democrats used it for raw partisan political purposes, and I decried that at each step of the way.”
Trump’s first impeachment was for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The second impeachment of Donald Trump was for incitement of insurrection.
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Insisting impeachment “cannot be wielded for political purposes,” Johnson, Speaker for less than two weeks, said he has “been very consistent, intellectually consistent in this and and persistent that we have to follow due process and we have to follow the law,” which he said means “doing appropriate investigations in the right way at the right pace, so that the evidence comes in and we follow the evidence where it leads, we follow the truth where it leads.”
He declared he was “not predetermined” on a decision to impeach President Biden, nor did he offer what the charges might be, “but I do believe that very soon we are coming to a point of decision on it.”
He claimed that “a lot of American people are anxious about this, many Republicans across the country are anxious to get to the end point on this. And I think some Democrats want to know how it ends as well. What you’re seeing right now is a deliberate, constitutional process that was envisioned by the founders, the framers of the Constitution.”
Despite what critics have charged is a clear lack of evidence of wrongdoing, Johnson insisted, “this is how” America’s founders “envisioned this to go – not the way the Democrats did it, snap impeachment, sham impeachment and all the rest.”
“So I know that I know that people are anxious about it, but I will say, Chairman Comer, Chairman Jordan in Judiciary, Chairman Smith in Ways And Means, they’ve done an extraordinary job, very methodically, and I would say outside the scope of politics, they’ve been taking in the evidence as it goes, so we’re going to follow the evidence where it leads and we’ll see. I’m not going to predetermine it this morning.”
Responding to Johnson’s remarks on Thursday, HuffPost’s senior politics reporter Jennifer Bendery said: “Mike Johnson, the architect of the GOP’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, says Dems impeached Trump twice for ‘raw, partisan, political purposes’ but commits to ‘follow the evidence where it leads’ in the GOP’s baseless impeachment inquiry into Biden.”
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