Joe Biden shrugs off impeachment inquiry, saying ‘I have a job to do’ – US politics live | US politics

The White House sent a letter on Wednesday to US news outlets, urging them to “scrutinize House Republicans’ demonstrably false claims” surrounding their impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden.

The memo, which was sent by Ian Sams, the White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations, and addressed to editorial leadership at media organizations, came after House speaker Kevin McCarthy announced the Biden impeachment inquiry on Tuesday. The memo reads:

It’s time for the media to ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies.

The inquiry has no supporting evidence, which “should set off alarm bells for news organizations”, Sams said. Republicans have sought to directly connect Hunter Biden’s financial dealings to his father, but have so far failed to produce evidence that the president directly participated in his son’s work.

In the modern media environment, where every day liars and hucksters peddle disinformation and lies everywhere from Facebook to Fox, process stories that fail to unpack the illegitimacy of the claims on which House Republicans are basing all their actions only serve to generate confusion, put false premises in people’s feeds, and obscure the truth.

For now, the White House views the situation from a communications standpoint rather than as a legal issue, according to CNN. The principal objective is to counter what many Democrats fear could become an ingrained narrative, with one source telling the outlet:

If you don’t answer it, it can sink into the voter psyche. They’re walking that line.

Joe Biden’s first public remarks on the House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry are a clear sign of the president’s broader reelection pitch: the idea that if he simply does his job and governs, Americans will see the results and reward him with four more years, according to AP.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, at a briefing yesterday, dismissed the inquiry as a “political stunt” and deflected questions about the details to the White House counsel’s office. She said:

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.

She added Republicans have turned up no evidence that Biden did anything wrong “because the president didn’t do anything wrong”.

The AP report writes:

The White House impeachment playbook so far has been: Dismiss. Compartmentalize. Scold. That is, shrug off the charges as baseless, stay focused on policy, leave the impeachment question to the lawyers and chide those who give too much credence to it all.

Joe Biden, speaking at a Democratic fundraiser in Virginia on Wednesday night, made reference to the far-right Georgia congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a close ally of Donald Trump. Biden said:

The first day she was elected, the first thing she wanted to do was impeach Biden.

The White House has blamed Taylor Greene into pressuring the speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, to order an impeachment inquiry into the president over unproven corruption allegations relating to his family’s business dealings.

According to the New York Times, Trump dined with Taylor Greene at his private golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Sunday night, just two days before McCarthy announced his decision to order a formal impeachment inquiry.

Greene confirmed to the paper that the pair discussed the inquiry, and that she had laid out her impeachment strategy at the dinner, telling Trump she wanted the inquiry to be “long and excruciatingly painful for Joe Biden”.

Biden brushes off impeachment inquiry: ‘I have a job to do’