The flailing effort by House Republicans to impeach President Joe Biden was confirmed to be flailing by CNN’s Melanie Zanona and Annie Grayer.
In a new report out Friday, Zanona and Grayer spoke to several House Republicans who painted a picture of the evidence-free push to impeach Biden as “a jumbled mess,” according to one of those Republicans who was not named. But some of them did speak on the record and offered little to no support for the effort.
Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), who serves on the House Oversight Committee and supports impeachment told CNN: “While I think that it’s pretty clear, I don’t know that the case has been made adequately to the American people.”
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) also had a diplomatic view of the issue: “Let the American people decide in November if they want to take this country in a different direction. I think that’s probably most likely, considering the politics of the Senate.”
Malliotakis is referring to the Democratic majority in the Senate which would likely not find Biden guilty, even if the Republican-led House voted to impeach him. This is also something Rep. James Comer (R-KY), the chair of the House Oversight Committee who is leading the impeachment charge, admitted last month: “I would vote to impeach him, but I’m not going to lose any sleep whether he gets impeached or not because we know the Senate’s not going to convict.”
That may be why several House Republicans — at least 20 of them, according to Zanona and Grayer — are less than enthusiastic about the investigation that was opened in December:
GOP Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, who is not on any of the committees conducting the probe, told CNN, “I have seen nothing. I really see nothing. I know what people say. And I watch the news,” when asked if any evidence uncovered by the committees rose to the level of impeachment.
GOP Rep. David Schweikert, who represents an Arizona district Biden won in 2020, said, “When the report is done, I’ll read it.”
Another swing district Republican, Rep. Mike Garcia of California, who is waiting to see what the committees produce before making a final judgment, told CNN that when the committee chairs leading the investigation presented to a subsection of the conference this week they each gave updates on their work, but none said explicitly they had evidence of an impeachable offense. …
“Nobody is talking about that,” said GOP Rep. Dan Newhouse of Washington state, when asked for his thoughts on the Biden impeachment inquiry.
Another swing district Republican, Rep. David Valadao of California, said: “I spend zero time on this.”
CNN anchor Dana Bash covered the report on Friday, kicking the segment off by quoting the unnamed Republican who called the impeachment push “a jumbled mess.” That source also told CNN: “You’d be hard-pressed to say it’s going well.”
Watch the video above via CNN.
The post House GOP Members Tell CNN Effort to Impeach Biden Is a ‘Jumbled Mess’: ‘I Spend Zero Time on This’ first appeared on Mediaite.