Biden impeachment: White House calls hearing ‘wild goose chase’

Mr Raskin said that he doesn’t “think you could find a constitutional law professor who would say there is sufficient evidence. Maybe John Eastman but I think he may be detained these days”.

Jamie Raskin said in his closing statement, “Online, everybody’s making fun of this Seinfeld impeachment and impeachment hearing about nothing apparently, two days before the government is about to shut down. But I want to say that all four of these witnesses have done a great service for us, not just the Republicans but for the Democrats too. And I want to thank them for their for their patience, their intellectual honesty and their surprising consensus on the key questions”.

“When I started out as a young assistant attorney general, I went to court I remember my first day of work, and I heard a judge lecture a lawyer by saying, counsel, you have forgotten the very first rule of being a lawyer, which is when you go to court, don’t forget to bring the evidence with you. And I’m afraid the majority forgot to bring the evidence with them today,” he added.

Following her previous use of nude images of Hunter Biden, Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin called for Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene to “be instructed to not introduce any pornography today”.

House Republicans’ first effort to justify the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden demanded by former president Donald Trump and far-right members of the GOP conference ended without a single piece of evidence presented linking Mr Biden to any wrongdoing whatsoever.

The panel’s chairman, Representative James Comer of Kentucky, opened the hearing by claiming that his GOP colleagues had assembled “a mountain of evidence” that will show that the president “abused his public office for his family’s financial gain,” adding later that his committee would “follow the money and the evidence to provide accountability” for Mr Biden’s alleged wrongdoing.

Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the oversight committee’s top Democrat, derided the panel’s efforts as “an impeachment drive based on a long debunked and discredited lie” and said the Republicans “don’t have a shred of evidence against President Biden for an impeachable offence”.

The all-day session before the House Oversight Committee took place just days before the federal government is set to run out of operating funds at the end of the 2023 fiscal year, and focused largely on widely-discredited and long-ago debunked conspiracy theories about Mr Biden and his son, attorney and former lobbyist turned artist Hunter Biden.

The allegations against the 46th president, which centre around the younger Mr Biden’s work on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, were first prolmugated by disgraced former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 2018 and 2019, and formed the basis of Mr Trump’s attempt to extort Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky during a now-infamous July 2019 phone call — an incident which led to the first of Mr Trump’s two impeachment trials.

California Democrat Katie Porter noted that a few years ago, when Mr Trump was being impeached, Speaker Kevin McCarthy was pushing for a vote of the House to begin the proceedings, something he avoided now when launching the Biden probe.

Democrat Jared Moskowitz of Florida mocked the Republicans for using the impeachment process as a form of political revenge.

The Republicans on the panel refused to say if Donald Trump and Hunter Biden should be held accountable for any crimes they may have committed.

Rep Greg Casar of Texas asked: “Will members of the oversight committee raise their hands if you believe both Hunter and Trump should be held accountable for any of indictments if convicted?”

While the Democrats raised their hands, the Republicans remained still.