Party line vote gives the go-ahead for impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden

On Wednesday evening, a party line vote of 221-212 officially escalated an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, which even Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., highlights does not mean that an actual impeachment is inevitable.

“We’re not going to prejudge the outcome of this because we can’t,” Johnson told reporters on Tuesday, ramping up to the vote. “It’s not a political calculation. We’re following the law and we are the rule of law team and I’m going to hold to that.”

As CNN points out, “Since former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy launched the inquiry in September, a trio of committees leading the investigation have interviewed various officials from the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service while also obtaining a mountain of documents and new bank records, including from Biden family members.” This latest escalation comes after the president’s son, Hunter Biden, turned away from Republican investigator’s subpoena for closed-door testimony, saying he’s willing to testify publicly as part of his dad’s investigation.

In a statement from President Biden made shortly after today’s vote was made public, he says, “Instead of doing anything to help make Americans’ lives better, they are focused on attacking me with lies. Instead of doing their job on the urgent work that needs to be done, they are choosing to waste time on this baseless political stunt that even Republicans in Congress admit is not supported by facts.

Republican Rep. Byron Donalds, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, offered a statement of his own on the inquiry, expressing his belief that the evidence of Biden’s alleged wrongdoing will be brought to light.

“I think there’s a there’s plenty of proof there. We’re going to tie all this down. So I think it’s pretty likely that we are moving towards impeachment, but we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. We want the evidence to speak for itself,” Donalds told CNN’s Manu Raju.

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Then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy launched the impeachment inquiry into President Biden back in September in an effort to determine in which ways he may or may not have been involved with Hunter’s foreign business dealings. As CNN highlights in their coverage of this, The House Oversight panel “released a document last week showing payment from Hunter Biden’s business entity, Owasco PC, to Joe Biden when he was not in office — but they omitted evidence that the president’s son was repaying his father for a car.” They are also concerned about two personal checks from the president’s brother, James Biden, which also seem to have simply been loan repayments. None the less, this gave the GOP more than enough to latch on.

“We are very pleased with the vote today. I think that sent a message loud and clear to the White House,” says House Oversight Chair James Comer.