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White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the
inquiry a "political stunt" and said no evidence has been
produced by Republicans against Biden as they investigate the
business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden.
The inquiry is centered around whether Biden benefited from
Hunter Biden's business dealings.
Biden said that when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a
far-right Republican lawmaker and staunch ally of former
President Donald Trump, was first elected to the U.S. Congress,
she said the first thing she wanted to do was impeach him.
"I don't know quite why, but they just knew they wanted to
impeach me," Biden told donors at a fundraiser in Virginia.
"Now, the best I can tell, they want to impeach me because they
want to shut down the government."
Biden said he does not focus on the impeachment inquiry. "I get
up every day, not a joke, not focused on impeachment. I've got a
job to do," he said.
The White House has blamed Taylor Greene into pressuring House
of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in
Washington, to order the impeachment inquiry.
McCarthy's move sets the stage for months of divisive House
hearings that could distract from lawmakers' efforts to pass
spending bills and avoid a government shutdown and could
supercharge the 2024 presidential race, in which Trump hopes to
avenge his 2020 election loss to Biden and win back the White
House.
"This is an entire exercise of how to do this in an illegitimate
way. ... It is going after the president politically, not about
the truth," Jean-Pierre said.
She said Republicans have turned up no evidence that Biden did
anything wrong "because the president didn’t do anything wrong."
(Reporting by Jeff Mason, Nandita Bose and Steve Holland;
editing by Jonathan Oatis, Diane Craft and Leslie Adler)
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