WASHINGTON — Kevin McCarthy’s removal as House speaker Tuesday introduced new uncertainty into the impeachment inquiry of President Biden’s alleged involvement in his son and brother’s foreign business dealings — as allies and enemies of the deposed Californian traded blame over his ouster.
The shakeup threatens to undermine the short-term legal standing of the probe as Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) serves as acting speaker indefinitely.
However, proceedings could be turbocharged if hard-charging Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) wins his bid for the gavel.
A source close to Jordan told The Post that the inquiry will proceed “full speed ahead” if he becomes speaker, though other contenders who have been less focused on impeachment, including Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), are expected to enter the contest.
In the meantime, a second source told The Post that staff in the House speaker’s office have “discussed the fact that speaker pro tempore McHenry’s unprecedented position as interim speaker could open his every decision to legal scrutiny, meaning the institution of the House could face litigation.”
McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced the impeachment inquiry Sept. 12 and delegated work to the Oversight, Judiciary and tax-focused Ways and Means committees.
But he didn’t hold a floor vote to affirm the inquiry, putting it on shaky legal ground now that he is no longer in charge.
It isn’t clear if McCarthy’s successor would have to re-declare the impeachment inquiry to affirm its legal grounding and the transition could bolster the case for a floor vote, which wasn’t held last month as a handful of vocal holdouts increased the stakes for legislators in swing districts.
Republican leaders said that the inquiry was needed to strengthen the House’s standing to acquire documents, including from the executive branch and banks. Committees’ power to subpoena records is strengthened in disputes by the constitutional importance of impeachment.
House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) issued subpoenas last week for the bank records of first son Hunter Biden and first brother James Biden in one of the highest-stakes demands to date.
Hunter and James Biden regularly involved Joe Biden in their business relationships in countries such as China and Ukraine and their bank records could show whether Joe Biden received foreign income during his eight-year vice presidency.
Hunter Biden wrote in a message retrieved from his abandoned laptop that he had to give “half” of his income to his father and the Oversight Committee in May traced the flow of foreign income through Biden family associates to nine of the president’s relatives.
The Oversight Committee is also seeking access to Air Force Two flight manifests, nearly 5,400 documents featuring Joe Biden’s use of emails registered to aliases and an array of other records.
A spokesperson for the Oversight Committee said Wednesday that the panel is pushing ahead amid the leadership shuffle.
“The committee is continuing to review documents, records and communications and will take further action in the coming days,” the spokesperson said.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.
McCarthy was elected speaker on Jan. 7 after a dramatic battle with fiscal hawks who demanded concessions such as the right of a single member to bring a motion to vacate, the mechanism used to boot McCarthy Tuesday following the Saturday passage of a 45-day spending bill that didn’t include cuts.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) triggered the motion against McCarthy and argued Republicans had done too little to press forward the inquiry into Biden.
“It is difficult to champion oversight when House Republicans haven’t even sent a subpoena to Hunter Biden. So it’s hard to make the argument that oversight is the reason to continue when it looks like failure theater,” Gaetz said during Tuesday’s House floor debate.
McCarthy and his allies accused Gaetz of leading the charge to oust him due to personal grievances, rather than over the continuing resolution to fund the government.
Gaetz indicated in a months-old text message reviewed by The Post that McCarthy was to blame for an ongoing House Ethics Committee probe of a series of allegations against the Floridian.
In recent weeks, McCarthy publicly attributed Gaetz’s rebellion to the fact that the now ex-speaker wouldn’t step in to squash the ethics investigation. Gaetz said his grievances with McCarthy had nothing to do with the ethics investigation and accused the Californian of misdirection.
The ex-speaker’s foes argue that he sealed his own fate with last week’s continuing resolution.
An anti-McCarthy GOP operative told The Post that fiscal hawks were incensed by the stopgap bill, and even blamed McCarthy’s staff for botching negotiations within the Republican conference between moderates and those demanding steep cuts.
“This tanked the entire appropriations process,” the source said of intra-caucus communication.
The source said that hardliners were irked in particular by Brittan Specht, a deputy chief of staff for McCarthy.
Specht “was instrumental in screwing” fiscal hawks on the debt-ceiling bill that passed in June and for “completely screwing over conservatives even more” by presenting more recent Freedom Caucus demands as red lines, contributing to an impasse, the source said.
“[Specht] wanted to get to jam conservatives and do a CR. Pretty unprecedented that you have a leadership staffer lying [or] at best not doing their job intentionally to make sure we did a CR,” the source charged.
Specht did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
McCarthy’s ouster had “nothing to do with Gaetz,” the anti-McCarthy source added, and “everything to do with the fact that this was the punishment they agreed to [in January] if he betrayed them.”