The Republican leader of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, stated on Tuesday that he is in favor of opening an investigation into alleged corruption to remove President Joe Biden from office.
“I’m calling on our House committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden,” he said, claiming the Democratic president “lied” to the American people about his son’s business dealings in outside the country.
Hunter Biden, the 53-year-old son of the president, has become a favorite target of the American right.
They accused him, in particular, of making questionable deals with Ukraine and China while Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president (2009-2017), taking advantage of his father’s contacts and name.
The US Constitution says that Congress can remove the president for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
The opening of an impeachment procedure has been demanded for months by the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party, where McCarthy had to make several compromises to access power in January.
However, many moderate Republican lawmakers oppose this investigation for fear of turning the procedure into a partisan exercise.
Democrats counter that these rights efforts are nothing more than smoke screens used to hide the legal problems that have piled up for Donald Trump, who has been impeached four times in less than six years. month.
The White House responded to McCarthy’s remarks. “The House of Representatives has been investigating the president for nine months and they have found no evidence of wrongdoing,” Ian Sams, government spokesman for oversight and investigations, told X.
The demand for the impeachment process is “extreme politics in its worst version,” he added.
To date, a president has never been removed from office in an impeachment trial in the history of the United States.
Three were indicted: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Trump in 2019 and 2021. But all were ultimately acquitted.
Richard Nixon chose to resign in 1974 to avoid impeachment by Congress due to the Watergate scandal.
