PRESS RELEASE Contact: press@congressionalintegrity.org
For Immediate Release
Date: December 18, 2023
Watch the full briefing here
Washington, DC – Today, former ambassador Norm Eisen, Joshua Matz, constitutional author and counsel in the impeachments of Donald Trump, and Leslie Dach, senior advisor to the Congressional Integrity Project, discussed the bogus impeachment inquiry of President Biden, the wrong priorities of the MAGA GOP, and former Ambassador Eisen and Joshua Matz’s latest bipartisan analysis of the House impeachment process The analysis was published in Just Security and concludes that there is no basis for a Biden impeachment inquiry.
Last week, House Republicans, led by James Comer and Jim Jordan, voted to officially open an impeachment inquiry into President Biden despite not having a shred of evidence that President Biden committed any wrongdoing, let alone anything that warrants an impeachment. This entire year, the GOP House has ignored the important issues that affect Americans, such as increasing access to health care or addressing the cost of living. Instead, at Donald Trump’s direction, they have pursued a partisan political stunt, designed to hurt President Biden ahead of the 2024 election, all to distract from Trump’s 91 criminal indictments and help him return to the White House.
“In our bipartisan report, we reached the conclusion that the Biden impeachment inquiry is illegitimate – as a matter of the legal standards, but also as a matter of the evidence that applies to those legal standards,” said former ambassador Norm Eisen. “It’s very important that impeachments transcend what we have here, which is an admitted effort to abuse this power. As Congressman Troy Nehls has said, it is to, ‘give President Trump ammunition’. Chairman Comer and others have been overt about the partisan nature of giving a hand to Donald Trump and the former president has called for it. Unfortunately, that has led to an impeachment that is completely lacking in legitimacy. If you look at the facts that we detail, the ever-shifting nature of the allegations against President Biden, there has been absolutely no showing that he personally benefited from any wrongdoing of any kind.”
“I guess I hold on to that old-fashioned belief that the law matters and that constitutional law matters. If the constitutional standard for impeachment isn’t met, it is simply wrong and illegitimate to proceed with an impeachment proceeding. Here, none of the familiar legal criteria for impeachment are satisfied,” said Joshua Matz, co-author and counsel in the impeachments of Donald Trump. “The difficulty with throwing around impeachment, when there’s no credible basis for it, is that it traps the country in a massive ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf’ dilemma. The cheapening and trivializing of impeachment that we see from Republicans undermines the separation of powers and weakens our defenses against a president who would actually abuse their office. But the bottom line is that under every definition that you might give to the phrase ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors,’ this impeachment is lawfully out of bounds.”
“Last week, MAGA Republicans in the House approved, on a strict party-line vote, to authorize an impeachment inquiry into President Biden. Make no mistake, in the nearly a year that they have been investigating and searching desperately for any shred of wrongdoing by the President, they have found none. This is an evidence-free impeachment process. They have routinely told the truth out loud, admitting that they are doing this to help reelect Donald Trump and for the sheer politics of that goal,” said Leslie Dach, senior advisor to the Congressional Integrity Project. “They signal loud and clear to the American people that they have no interest in working on the issues that really matter to voters who sent them to Washington. Instead of dealing with issues like the economy or health care, saving Ukraine from Putin, or appropriating money to help Israel, they have instead chosen to spend their time on this no-evidence impeachment. They have the wrong priorities, and the American people know it.”
Watch the full press briefing here.
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