Biden laughs off impeachment threat after McCarthy teases inquiry

President Joe Biden on Tuesday responded to a reporter’s query about House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s claim that the GOP could soon open an impeachment inquiry into the president by laughing as he exited a White House event.

Mr Biden was caught cracking a smile and chucking on his way out of the East Room after delivering remarks on his administration’s efforts to increase the availability of mental health treatment.

Earlier in the day, Mr McCarthy had said that an impeachment probe would provide the House with “the strongest power to get the rest of the knowledge and information needed” before they can attempt to oust Mr Biden, which many in his conference have been pushing to do since before he took office.

It’s not known whether the House will actually initiate an impeachment inquiry into Mr Biden, but multiple prominent Republicans have become increasingly vocal in their promotion of conspiracy theories and false claims about alleged criminality on the part of the president.

Mr McCarthy told Fox News host Sean Hannity late Tuesday that the House Oversight Committee’s widely panned probe into Mr Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was “rising to the level of an impeachment inquiry” even though the younger Mr Biden does not hold and has never held public office.

Republicans have spent years alleging that Hunter Biden’s work for a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, was the reason Mr Biden carried out Obama administration policy as vice president when he pushed Ukraine’s then-president, Petro Poroshenko, to oust a prosecutor whose firing had been demanded by the US, EU, IMF and other entities that were backing financial aid for Ukraine.

The false allegations were what motivated then-president Donald Trump to attempt to blackmail Mr Poroshenko’s successor, Volodymyr Zelensky, into announcing sham investigations into the Bidens, leading to Mr Trump’s first of two impeachment trials.