(WASHINGTON) — House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer on Thursday officially invited President Joe Biden to testify before the panel as part of a Republican-led impeachment inquiry into allegations that Biden used his office to participate in and profit from his family’s foreign business dealings — which he has adamantly denied.
The committee proposed April 16 for the hearing, according to a letter from Comer, who claimed in a statement that the “the White House has taken a position hostile to the Committee’s investigation.”
The impeachment probe, launched unilaterally by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and then formalized months later by the House in a party-line vote, has yet to yield concrete evidence against the president.
Comer nonetheless contended in his statement on Thursday that there is a “yawning gap between” what Biden has said publicly and the committee’s work.
“As Chairman of the Committee, in addition to requesting that you answer the questions posed in this letter, I invite you to participate in a public hearing at which you will be afforded the opportunity to explain, under oath, your involvement with your family’s sources of income and the means it has used to generate it,” Comer said, addressing the president.
Speaker Mike Johnson echoed that in a statement of his own, saying, in part, that “there are significant outstanding questions that have emerged from our inquiry that the President can answer.”
The oversight chairman, a Kentucky Republican, said at the end of the most recent impeachment hearing that he planned to ask Biden to testify.
That hearing, earlier this month, focused on well-established allegations of Biden family impropriety by House Republicans, while Democrats sought to cast the probe as a political hit job.
“The Bidens sell Joe Biden. That is their business,” Comer claimed then.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the committee, shot back at that hearing: “With any luck, today marks the end of perhaps the most spectacular failure in the history of congressional investigations: the effort to find a high crime or misdemeanor committed by Joe Biden and then to impeach him for it.”
Asked for comment on Thursday about Comer’s letter, the White House referred back to earlier statements by spokesman Ian Sams, who has repeatedly denounced the impeachment proceedings.
“This is a sad stunt at the end of a dead impeachment,” Sams wrote on social media last week.
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