Donald Trump has been in discussions with influential House Republicans over the party’s long-shot attempt to impeach Joe Biden over unproven corruption allegations relating to his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.
Trump was in contact with Elise Stefanik, the third most senior Republican in the House of Representatives, ahead of Tuesday’s announcement of an official impeachment inquiry by the speaker, Kevin McCarthy, Politico reported.
The news outlet said Trump and Stefanik have been speaking weekly, and talked again shortly after the announcement was made.
“I speak to President Trump a lot, I spoke to him today,” Stefanik, from New York, told reporters.
Stefanik has been at the fore in Republican moves to push ahead with impeachment hearings despite the lack of evidence that Biden committed wrongdoing, let alone the “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” required under the US constitution.
The New Yorker has been flagged as a possible vice-presidential running mate for Trump should he win the Republican nomination to face Biden next year.
Trump has also been reaching out to the hard right of the party, which has been waging a fierce pressure campaign to force McCarthy into calling an impeachment inquiry by threatening a government shutdown over federal spending levels.
Politico revealed that the former president dined with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extreme rightwing representative from Georgia, at his New Jersey golf club two nights before McCarthy’s announcement.
Greene told the New York Times she briefed Trump on her vision for an impeachment inquiry. She said she told him she hoped it would be “long and excruciatingly painful for Joe Biden”.
Trump’s behind-the-scenes lobbying of prominent House Republicans tallies with his increasingly shrill public calls for impeachment. The twice impeached former president posted on Truth Social last month: “Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US.”
Trump was impeached first for seeking dirt on opponents in Ukraine, then for inciting the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021. Retaining sufficient Republican support in the Senate, he was acquitted both times.
News of Trump’s interventions is likely to stoke White House complaints that the impeachment inquiry is merely designed to damage Biden’s approval ratings as the 2024 presidential election gets under way. A White House spokesperson denounced the investigation as “extreme politics at its worst”.
McCarthy is also facing blowback over his decision to convene an inquiry without a vote of the full House, in a sharp reversal of his previous public statements.
In 2019 he wrote to the then House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, arguing that if she went ahead with the impeachment inquiry that led to Trump’s first impeachment relating to Ukraine the process would be “completely devoid of any merit or legitimacy”.
McCarthy repeated his pledge to hold a formal impeachment inquiry only in the outcome of a full House vote as recently as this month, in an interview with Breitbart.
McCarthy’s U-turn in his decision to proceed with an investigation without a vote appears to have been motivated by the tight spot he finds himself in.
On the one hand, he is facing an increasingly militant hard-right group including Greene that is holding him hostage over raising the debt ceiling to avoid a government shutdown.
On the other, several House Republicans have spoken publicly about their skepticism over an impeachment inquiry, citing the absence of credible evidence of Biden’s wrongdoing. They include staunch conservatives such as Ken Buck of Colorado, who has called Greene’s intense desire to impeach Biden “absurd”.
“The time for impeachment is the time when there’s evidence linking President Biden, if there’s evidence linking President Biden to a high crime or misdemeanor, that doesn’t exist right now,” Buck told MSNBC on Sunday.
