The Republican-run House of Representatives should begin an impeachment investigation of President Joe Biden for mishandling classified documents. And not just because Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) says so.
On Monday, it emerged that ten documents with classified markings were found in Biden’s old office — no, not the one he shared with a corrupt Chinese energy company with close ties to China’s military and intelligence hierarchy, but rather the one he kept at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. Former Vice President Biden had no authority to possess these documents or even to declassify them while in office.
The irony was not lost — even on CNN: Biden now appears to have done what he, and others, accused former President Donald Trump of doing.
One difference: Biden’s documents might actually have been important to national security, unlike Trump’s documents, which were falsely billed as relating to nuclear weapons and were likely comprised of memorabilia from Trump’s time in office that he seems to have thought belonged to him.
House Republicans on oversight and intelligence committees have already announced that they will investigate Biden. But they may need to go much further than mere oversight: it is time to launch an impeachment inquiry.
There are three reasons to do so.
First, it appears that Biden has committed a crime — certainly by the standard the Department of Justice applied to former President Trump in conducting the raid on his private residence at Mar-a-Lago. And while then-FBI director James Comey let Hillary Clinton off the hook, he did so by reading an “intent” requirement into the relevant statute that isn’t there.
But Biden is not a private citizen at the moment, and he cannot be prosecuted while in office. Moreover, as Andrew McCarthy observed on Fox News Tuesday, there is a five-year statute of limitations that would likely expire this year (the center was founded in 2018).
So the only way to hold Biden accountable is through Congress — and breaking the laws on classified information clearly fits the definition of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” — the Constitution’s standard for impeachment.
Second, ordinary congressional committees have limited subpoena powers, but impeachment investigations can dig deeper and wider.
That became clear during the endless fights between the Democrat-run House of Representatives and the Trump White House, in which Trump’s lawyers argued that they did not have to comply with document requests that were not part of a valid impeachment investigation.
The litigation ended in a settlement, but reinforced the idea that during an impeachment inquiry, the executive branch has fewer grounds to resist demands for documents and testimony than it does during an ordinary investigation.
An impeachment inquiry could look not only at the mishandling of classified documents, but also at broader questions about what Biden and his family have been doing, both during and between his terms in office.
Third, Republicans need to pursue the principle of reciprocity. Democrats must endure, measure for measure, every abuse of power and precedent that they imposed on Republicans. They impeached Trump in 2019 without any legitimate basis.
Now that Republicans have a real reason to open an impeachment investigation of Biden, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) on the Judiciary Committee, they should not waste the opportunity.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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