The president’s counsel told Speaker Mike Johnson that it was “obviously time to move on,” citing G.O.P. lawmakers’ own doubts about the impeachment bid.
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President Biden’s advisers want to make clear to the public that House Republicans’ impeachment drive has all but collapsed.
The White House insisted on Friday that House Republicans end their effort to impeach President Biden, declaring that “enough is enough” after their monthslong inquiry failed to turn up promised evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors.
“It is obviously time to move on, Mr. Speaker,” Edward N. Siskel, the White House counsel, wrote in a four-page letter to Speaker Mike Johnson. “This impeachment is over. There is too much important work to be done for the American people to continue wasting time on this charade.”
The letter comes as the Republican impeachment drive has all but collapsed after the indictment of a key witness on charges of making up allegations against Hunter Biden, the president’s son. A number of Republicans have cast doubt on the venture, and even some champions of impeachment have now concluded that they could not muster a majority if they sent articles to the floor charging Mr. Biden.
The White House hopes to capitalize on Republicans’ disarray, in effect calling their bluff and daring them to put up or shut up, although the hard-liners in the G.O.P. conference are unlikely to choose either option. Mr. Biden’s team harbors little hope that Republicans will formally call off the inquiry, much less acknowledge that they have nothing much to show for it, but the president’s advisers want to put a punctuation mark on the Republican setbacks and make clear to the public that impeachment is effectively dead.
It is part of a newly aggressive strategy by the president as he embarks on his re-election campaign in earnest, starting with his confrontational State of the Union address last week and his active schedule of travel in battleground states since. After a period in which allies feared Mr. Biden was being too passive, he hopes to get back on offense as he engages in a rematch with former President Donald J. Trump, whom he defeated in 2020.
House Republicans are not quite ready to give up. They argue that they are still investigating and have scheduled a hearing with Hunter Biden’s former business associates next week. They are also demanding recordings from the investigation of the special counsel Robert K. Hur, who examined Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents, even though that was not among the topics of the impeachment inquiry and Mr. Hur decided no criminal charges were warranted.
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Source: nytimes.com
