This week’s vote along party lines by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to formally launch an impeachment inquiry into President Biden immediately affected the president’s 2024 re-election campaign.
A fundraising email sent hours later by Vice President Kamala Harris immediately caught fire.
A source familiar with the thinking of the Biden re-election team told Fox News that the email was the most profitable it had sent so far this month.
“This is the best-performing fundraising email the vice president has signed this cycle,” the source added.
HOUSE VOTES TO AUTHORIZE BIDEN IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY
President Joe Biden speaks at a campaign rally at the Mayflower Hotel on June 23, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The impeachment vote formalized an inquiry that began in September to investigate whether the president benefited financially from some of his family’s businesses.
POLL: SUPPORT GROWS FOR BIDEN IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY
The three Republican-led House committees are looking into business connections between the president and his son Hunter Biden from 2014-2017, during the elder Biden’s last three years as vice president, and after he left office.
Hunter Biden reiterated this week that his father was not involved in his dealings as a board member of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, or in his partnership with a Chinese private businessman.
Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, speaks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2023. Hunter Biden criticized Republican investigators digging into his business dealings, which insisted outside the Capitol that he would only testify before a congressional committee in public. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
So far, Republican investigators have found no hard evidence that Biden personally benefited, but they argue that there is more to uncover.
While the vote to formalize the inquiry obviously boosts Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign, it could also pay dividends in other ways.
It could energize a party’s base that polls suggest is anything but energized by the president’s re-election campaign.
Biden’s campaign launched a broadside against House Republicans earlier this week, ahead of Wednesday’s vote, accusing them of doing the bidding of Biden’s likely GOP challenger next November — former Pres. Donald Trump, the leading front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination.
“The only truth in this entire sham impeachment exercise is a bare-bones transparent ploy by House MAGA Republicans to boost Donald Trump’s presidential campaign,” Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler charged in a memo.
Former President Donald Trump leaves the stage at a campaign rally on Saturday, Nov. 11, 2023, in Claremont, NH (AP Photo/Reba Saldanha)
The memo highlights a quote that went viral from Republican Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas, who said the impeachment inquiry would give the former president “some ammunition to fire again.”
But the impeachment inquiry also presents many downsides for Biden’s re-election bid.
Republicans for years have viewed Hunter Biden’s controversies as a political liability for his father. And now, a formal impeachment inquiry — with public hearings — could give the Biden campaign plenty of headaches.
“It keeps the negative story about his family in the news,” longtime Republican strategist and broadcaster Ryan Williams told Fox News. “The impeachment inquiry highlights potential wrongdoing on the part of the president’s son and brother and attempts to link it directly to him.”
Republicans may also use the impeachment proceedings — as well as Hunter Biden’s legal cases — to divert attention from Trump’s very serious court cases.
Trump made history earlier this year as the first former or current president to be indicted for a crime, but his four indictments — including in federal court in Washington, DC, and in Fulton County court in Georgia — on charges that he tried to reverse his 2020 presidential election loss.
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“It’s trying to distract from the serious legal issues that Trump is facing and basically at the end of the day,” said Ryan, a veteran of multiple GOP presidential campaigns.
He emphasized that the inquiry “shows voters that both candidates are facing investigations. It muddies the waters. It tries to make things dark even though the criminal proceedings that President Trump is facing are very different.” different than the Republican-led inquiry in the House.”
Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who is the primary challenger to President Biden, spoke to voters in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Dec. 3, 2023 (Fox News – Paul Steinhauser)
Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who is running a long-shot Democratic primary challenge against the president, made a similar argument.
“I don’t see the evidence of this, but yes, when your own son and your own brother are clearly, at least unethical and at worst, doing illegal things — my goodness, of course the country pays attention to it,” said said Phillips in an interview with the news website Semafor. “People believe that he may not be elected – somehow, it brings him together with the indecisions of the Trump family.”
But Democratic strategist Chris Moyer, who has served on several presidential campaigns, disagreed.
“No one is Donald Trump when it comes to corruption, breaking the law, and violating his oath of office,” he argued, when asked if the inquiry lessens the sting of Trump’s own legal controversies.
Biden became the second president in a row to face an impeachment inquiry while his re-election is underway, following Trump.
Veteran political scientist Wayne Lesperance emphasized that “perhaps the biggest casualty of the recent vote is the impeachment process itself. Long gone are the days when impeachment was a last resort for exhausted members of Congress all other options for holding the President accountable.”
Lesperance, the president of New England College based in New Hampshire, said that “the frequency with which impeachment has occurred in recent years has reduced the process to another partisan tool for whichever party is in power. The real losers in these processes have become the American people, who continue to lose confidence in their troubled system of government.”
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