On the eve of what House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said will be a vote to formalize an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, Johnson was confronted on Fox News with comments he made four years ago in which he warned of a “single-party impeachment.”
On Fox News’ Special Report, anchor Bret Baier showed a 2019 clip of Johnson speaking amid then-President Donald Trump’s first impeachment for withholding military aid to Ukraine in order to get its government to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden, and thereby harm Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy.
“The founders of this country warned against a single-party impeachment for good reason. They feared that it would bitterly and perhaps irreparably divide our nation,” Johnson said exactly four years ago.
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“As the next election in 2020 is drawing so close now, and their candidates for president are so terribly weak, they obviously met somewhere at liberal high command about 75 days ago and convinced Nancy Pelosi, they had to pull the trigger,” he claimed. “I hope and pray that future congresses can and will exercise greater restraint.”
Baier, noting that 17 Republicans in the GOP’s three-seat majority represent districts that Biden won in 2020, asked Johnson: “So, the moderates in your caucus would say, ‘Why not exercise greater restraint now?'”
Johnson, unsurprisingly, argued that the current situation is different.
“Well, we’ve shown great restraint,” he said. “I mean, there are a lot of people who are frustrated that this hasn’t moved faster. But there’s a big distinction. I stand by every word I said in that video. There’s a big distinction between what’s happening now and what the Democrats do. Those were rushed, sham impeachments.”
Johnson insisted that the work undertaken by three House committees—including the House Oversight Committee, led by Rep. James Comer (R-KY)—has “gone methodically [and] carefully, as the Constitution requires of us.”
Comer’s findings have thus far not lived up to what many Republicans have hoped for: substantive evidence of Joe Biden profiting from the business dealings of his son.
