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Ordinarily, when people close to President Joe Biden take aim at the House Republicans’ increasingly cringeworthy impeachment inquiry, the pushback comes from the White House’s press office or the Democrat’s re-election campaign.
Now, the White House’s top lawyer is getting involved. The Associated Press reported:
White House counsel Ed Siskel wrote in a Friday letter to Johnson that testimony and records turned over to the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees have failed to establish any wrongdoing and that even Republican witnesses have poured cold water on the impeachment effort. It comes a month after federal prosecutors charged an ex-FBI informant who was the source of some of the most explosive allegations with lying about the Bidens and undisclosed Russian intelligence contacts.
“It is obviously time to move on, Mr. Speaker,” Siskel wrote in his four-page letter. “This impeachment is over. There is too much important work to be done for the American people to continue wasting time on this charade.”
A New York Times report noted that the White House counsel’s letter went on to criticize Republicans for seeking to interview again witnesses who had already testified, “perhaps hoping the facts will be different the second time around,” which he called “just the latest abusive tactic in this investigation.” Republican efforts to seize on former special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation, he added, amounted to searching for “a flotation device for the sinking impeachment effort.”
The correspondence comes two days after Politico reported, “Behind the scenes, Republicans of all ideological persuasions are increasingly admitting that they pulled the trigger on Biden’s impeachment too soon and that the effort has been hobbled by embarrassing setbacks.”
Punchbowl News quoted a House GOP leadership aide who said Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer “are becoming the chairmen who cried wolf, promising there’s a ‘there’ there over and over again and producing nothing anywhere close to an impeachable offense.”
The same report quoted Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California saying, “I do believe we need to bring this to a conclusion” — a point Siskel appears to have echoed, offering some welcome bipartisan symmetry.
Stepping back, it appears that there’s been a shift in the broader political dynamic: For much of the last year, it was congressional Republicans who were on the offensive, as Biden and his Democratic allies scrambled to keep up with allegations. Now, it’s reversed: The White House is suddenly on the offensive, as GOP leaders come to terms with the fact that they’ve obviously failed.
A Politico report this week fleshed out some of the available “Plan B” options for House Republicans — possible criminal referrals, stricter foreign lobbying laws and ethics rules, etc. — but we’re talking about face-saving measures, not an impeachment vote on the floor that would inevitably fail in the face of bipartisan opposition.
Increasingly, the question isn’t whether the GOP will drag out the inevitable, it’s how Republicans will end this fiasco in ways that won’t do real harm to the party.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.