House Republicans appear poised to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who called an impeachment inquiry a “natural step forward” during a Fox News appearance late last month, is reportedly strategizing with other top Republicans about how to open one by the end of September, which would likely focus on the business dealings of Biden’s son Hunter during the Obama administration.
House congressional probes of the subject have generated plenty of content for right-wing outlets. But even members of the GOP caucus acknowledge it has uncovered little to no evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden. As one House Republican (anonymously) put it: “There’s no evidence that Joe Biden got money, or that Joe Biden, you know, agreed to do something so that Hunter could get money. There’s just no evidence of that. And they can’t impeach without that evidence. And I don’t I don’t think the evidence exists.” Absent that proof, political commentators rightfully warn, moving forward with impeachment “would carry considerable risk for the Republican Party.”
McCarthy’s folly is a sign of the hammerlock Fox News has on the Republican Party. The right-wing propaganda network’s stars have long demanded a Biden impeachment as both retaliation and political cover for Donald Trump’s various impeachments and criminal indictments. Since those Fox commentators wield more power within the GOP than most of its putative leaders do, a Biden impeachment inquiry has seemed inevitable, with the only question being what they’d end up backfilling as its rationale. And somehow, they’ve settled on taking a shot with the Hunter Biden minutiae they’ve all spent years feverishly rehashing (but that no one can parse without a PhD in Sean Hannity Studies).
Fox’s stars began calling for Biden’s impeachment before he was elected — or even nominated. Nearly four years ago, as House Judiciary Committee Democrats prepared to approve articles of impeachment against then-President Donald Trump over his corrupt abuse of power in attempting to coerce the Ukrainian government into opening a criminal investigation into Joe Biden, Fox host Mark Levin demanded that the GOP prepare to retaliate in kind.
“The next Democrat president of the United States must be impeached!” Levin bellowed during a heated December 12, 2019, appearance. “Not to get even, not because we are at their low level, because the Republicans can't live under one Constitution when the Democrats live under another Constitution and it's the only way we're going to stop them!”
Impeachment talk returned to the network’s airwaves in the waning days of the 2020 presidential election, as Fox and other outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch tried to help Trump to victory by calling attention to Hunter Biden’s business dealings. Their allegations were factually dubious, Trump and his family members had far worse conflicts of interest through their own businesses, and the effort ultimately failed to gain traction. But even then, Fox hosts were setting a predicate to impeach Joe Biden if he were elected.
Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery claimed during a late October segment on The Five that because Democrats had supposedly “lower[ed] the bar” by impeaching Trump, a Joe Biden impeachment over Hunter Biden’s business dealings would be fair game. “Why wouldn’t you, if you are using the same threshold and the same standard, why would you not impeach Joe Biden?” she asked.
Fellow co-host Greg Gutfeld likewise suggested that Republicans could “start preemptive impeachment on Joe Biden, in case he wins.”
And Fox host Jeanine Pirro similarly called for Biden’s impeachment based on the bogus conspiracy theory that he had pushed out a Ukrainian prosecutor to benefit his son’s business while serving as vice president, saying, “They can impeach him for what he did in the Ukraine.”
Fox’s Sean Hannity offered the same analysis as Kennedy had, arguing to his radio audience in December 2020, at a time when Trump was seeking to subvert the election he had lost to Biden: “What are you going to do if -- you know, all these people that impeached Trump, how do you not impeach if it's Joe Biden one day? How do you not do it? It's a foreign -- it's a family foreign crime syndicate.”
Republicans were unable to carry out Hannity’s impeachment dream for the next two years, with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress. But just weeks after Republicans won a slim House majority in the 2022 midterm elections, he predicted that an impeachment over Hunter Biden’s business dealings was inevitable.
