Biden jokes he’d ‘love’ to be impeached — for lowering inflation

WASHINGTON — President Biden joked Friday that House Republicans threatening to impeach him for alleged corruption involving foreign business dealings may as well add lowering inflation to the charges.

“Earlier this week, the Washington Post suggested Republicans may have to find something else to criticize me for now that inflation is coming down,” Biden said during an economic speech in Maine.

“Maybe they’ll decide to impeach me because it’s coming down,” he joked.

“I don’t know, I’d love that one. But anyway, that’s another story,” he added, in his first oral response to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s threat this week to launch an impeachment inquiry into Biden’s role in his family’s dealings in countries including China and Ukraine.

Annual inflation fell to 3% last month after peaking at 9.1% one year prior. Although Biden says he deserves credit for the reduction, his critics accuse him of causing the surge in inflation through large spending bills in his first two years in office.

McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Monday that investigations of Biden’s role in his son Hunter and brother James Biden’s dealings “is rising to the level of impeachment inquiry, which provides Congress the strongest power to get the rest of the knowledge and information needed.”

Biden, 80, has not answered any questions from reporters in 10 days — including about the stunning collapse on Wednesday of his 53-year-old son’s probation-only plea deal under scrutiny by US District Judge Maryellen Noreika in Delaware.

A prosecutor, assistant US attorney Leo Wise, repeatedly conceded to Noreika that he knew of no precedent for such a plea deal — in which Hunter had been set to agree to two misdemeanors for evading about $2.2 million in taxes and a gun-charge felony in exchange for two years on probation.

Court documents released after the hearing revealed that the Justice Department had been poised to grant Hunter broad immunity for past crimes — despite Wise telling the judge that authorities reserved the right to charge him with additional crimes, such as working as an unregistered lobbyist in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Congressional Republicans are investigating a variety of foreign business relationships involving the Biden family, as well as an alleged coverup in the criminal investigation of Hunter featuring preferential treatment and alleged interference by Biden-appointed officials.

IRS agents Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler testified publicly this month to the House Oversight Committee that standard investigative steps were blocked by prosecutors and that Biden-appointed US attorneys in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, refused to allow more serious charges.

The tax agency investigators said that prosecutors tipped off Hunter’s legal team to a planned search, blocked interviews with Biden family members and barred them from investigating Joe Biden’s role in foreign dealings — despite communications directly implicating him, including a threatening July 30, 2017, WhatsApp message in which Hunter wrote to a Chinese government-linked businessman that he was “sitting here with my father” and threatened retribution if a business commitment was not fulfilled, immediately preceding the transfer of about $5 million to Biden-linked accounts.

The Oversight Committee is preparing to release corroborating testimony from a former FBI supervisory agent who worked on the case.

The panel also is scheduled to interview on Monday one of Hunter’s closest US business associates, Devon Archer, who is expected to say that the first son regularly put his father on speakerphone during business with foreign partners, including from Ukrainian gas company Burisma, which paid Hunter up to $1 million per year to serve on its board, beginning in early 2014 when then-Vice President Biden began to lead US policy toward Ukraine.

In 2015, Joe Biden met with Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi in Washington — contradicting his public claims he “never” spoke with his son or brother about their international dealings.

Congressional Republicans are investigating an FBI informant’s June 2020 tipoff that Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky claimed he was “coerced” into paying $10 million in bribes to Joe and Hunter Biden to influence US policy. The then-vice president pushed US support for Ukraine’s natural gas industry and used $1 billion in US foreign aid in 2016 as leverage to force Kyiv to remove Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, who had investigated Burisma.

Biden has tried to laugh off the bribery allegation, telling The Post last month that the account was “malarkey” and asking, “Where’s the money?”

Republicans are investigating whether the Biden family kept overseas bank accounts. Communications on Hunter’s laptop refer to Burisma opening a Maltese bank account for the first son in 2016.

The FBI informant file quotes Zlochevsky as referring to Joe Biden as the “big guy” — a term also used in an email recovered from Hunter’s abandoned laptop to refer to the elder Biden’s proposed 10% cut as part of a deal involving Hunter and James Biden and Chinese-government-linked CEFC China Energy. Joe Biden allegedly met with US associates of his relatives in the CEFC ventures, including Tony Bobulinski, who has identified the president as the “big guy.”

The Justice Department criminally charged US citizen Gal Luft this month with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act by working with CEFC, even though he allegedly earned far less money than the Biden family through his partnership. Luft said he provided the FBI information on the Biden family’s work with CEFC, which was part of Beijing’s foreign-influence “Belt and Road” initiative.

The president has repeatedly been hit with questions about the appearance of conflicts of interest involving his official role and family business ventures.

Two Russian billionaires yet to face Biden administration sanctions over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine — Vladimir Yevtushenkov, who formerly controlled arms contracting companies, and former first lady of Moscow Yelena Baturina — sought out US real estate with Hunter and an eyewitness and emailed guest list place Baturina at an April 2015 dinner with Joe Biden.

A former associate of Yevtushenkov’s told The Post that the oligarch specifically targeted Hunter with the expectation of influencing American policy.

The extent of Hunter’s possible financial benefit from his relationships with Yevtushenkov and Baturina remains unclear.

Among the instances of personal and business ventures blurring, Hunter flew aboard Air Force Two on an official trip to Beijing in 2013 as he was cofounding Chinese state-backed investment fund BHR Partners, in which he held a 10% stake through at least late 2021. He introduced his father to BHR CEO Jonathan Li in China’s capital and Joe Biden later wrote college recommendation letters for Li’s children.

Hunter later brought Mexican business associates in 2015 to meet with his father and longtime Biden family business associate Jeff Cooper at the official vice president’s residence in Washington. The following year, Hunter and Cooper joined Joe Biden on a taxpayer-funded trip to Mexico, with Hunter apparently emailing a Mexican associate from Air Force Two complaining about the lack of reciprocal business favors after “I have brought every single person you have ever asked me to bring to the F’ing White House and the Vice President’s house and the inauguration.”

Many of the details of the Biden family’s dealings remain murky. For example, Hunter wrote in communications on his former laptop that he had to give “half” of his income to his father, but congressional investigators have not yet asked banks to hand over bank records for either Biden.

Subpoenaed bank records from Hunter Biden associate Rob Walker indicate that Hunter Biden and the president’s daughter-in-law Hallie Biden received $1 million from 2015 to 2017 from Romanian businessman Gabriel Popoviciu, who was battling corruption allegations, of which he was convicted in 2016.

On at least two occasions, Hunter spoke with his father — who visited Romania in 2014 to campaign against corruption and hosted Romania’s president in DC in 2015 — shortly after meeting with Popoviciu or his reps.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) in May described nine Biden family members who received foreign income in exchange for unknown services.