Every impeachment begets a new cast of characters on the national political stage, and few people involved in the 2019 investigation of President Donald Trump emerged more clearly than Dan Goldman, the veteran federal prosecutor who served as House Democrats’ lead counsel. Four years later, he’s a congressman representing lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn who sits on the Republican-controlled Oversight Committee leading impeachment hearings into President Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s international business dealings.
Biden’s White House and its allies have consistently dismissed the coming hearings as a political stunt designed to mollify Trump and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s right-wing critics and, now, to distract from the looming government shutdown. (“Impeachment hearing” is now often printed with scare quotes in their communications.) Goldman, who joined Congress in January on the strength of his anti-Trump fame, has become an important part of the Democrats’ effort to discredit the entire endeavor and recently participated in a closed-door interview of a former Hunter Biden business partner, which the congressman argued exposed the lack of direct connection between the president and any of Hunter’s business. I spoke with Goldman on the eve of the first impeachment hearing, in which he is likely to once again play a central role.
Let’s start with the shape of the impeachment process itself. Were you surprised that Speaker McCarthy announced an “impeachment inquiry” without a House vote on it?
I was, because he promised that he would not move forward with a vote and then 11 days later did just that. It’s clear he did that because he knew that he didn’t have enough votes to move forward with an impeachment inquiry, because there are so many Republicans who have publicly called into question this investigation and noted that there is no evidence linking Joe Biden to any intentional wrongdoing or misconduct on behalf of or in coordination with his son Hunter or anyone else.
And yet investigating is one of the duties of Congress, so absent a vote to formalize the process, do you see an actual difference between a normal investigation and this one?
There’s no difference between what they’ve been doing for nine months and what they are trying to do now other than giving it a different name. They don’t have any more authority, as the Trump administration argued in 2019, by announcing an impeachment inquiry. But it’s not a question of whether or not this should be investigated. It’s the fact that it has already been investigated for nine months. They have spoken to a number of witnesses. They have gathered more than 12,000 pages of bank records. They have reviewed 2,000 pages of suspicious activity reports. They’ve gotten documents from the FBI. They’ve gotten a tremendous amount of cooperation from the administration, and there’s no evidence linking anything, any wrongdoing, to Joe Biden.
So that begs the question: Why would you then turn an investigation that has yielded no evidence of wrongdoing against the president into an impeachment inquiry of the president? And the clear-cut reason — the only reason — is because Donald Trump wants them to, just like he wanted President Zelenskyy to do the same investigation back in 2019. Zelenskyy showed quite a backbone by resisting the shakedown of Donald Trump, but unfortunately the House Republicans do not have the same backbone, and they’re more than happy to do the political bidding of Donald Trump.
As you just alluded to, there’s real, substantive overlap between these probes and 2019’s impeachment, which centered on Trump’s pursuit of a conspiracy theory that Vice-President Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, Victor Shokin, to spare Hunter’s business partner, Burisma. As you prepare, are you expecting to go over much of the same material in public once the hearings begin?
Well, unfortunately these House Republicans seem to be the only people on earth who do not accept the fact that the Shokin-Giuliani-Trump conspiracy about Burisma has been thoroughly debunked, and it has been proven to be outright false. The reality is that the allegations that the Republicans are making have been debunked by numerous expert witnesses in the first impeachment, by a bipartisan Senate report; the Senate Republicans had testimony that there was no accuracy to those allegations. And it’s even been debunked by the head of Burisma himself, as well as the former president of Ukraine, who both hired and then orchestrated the firing of Shokin and said that nothing out of his mouth is true.
It shows Joe Biden’s innocence, because the only official action that he has ever taken that is in connection to Hunter Biden’s business interests was bad for Hunter Biden’s business interests, and that was corroborated by their new star witness, Devon Archer, who was also on the Burisma board, who said that it was Burisma’s view that Shokin was “under control.” So this is just bald-faced lies that they are promoting with absolutely no credible evidence to support it. And if they’re going to base an impeachment investigation on these outright lies, they really run the risk of having this backfire significantly.
Still, there’s a real case to be made that the president didn’t do enough to step in the way of his son’s international business dealings. Do you think he didn’t do enough to try and stop his son?
That’s not what they’re alleging. That’s not an impeachable offense. And that’s not what this is based on. What we do know, from witness testimony, is that President Joe Biden had nothing to do with Hunter Biden’s business interests, received no financial benefits from his business interests, took no official action other than the Burisma action, related to Hunter Biden’s business interests. And never even discussed his business with Hunter, according to the only witness they have who says anything about the conversations that Joe Biden had with business associates of Hunter Biden. So they keep moving the goalposts here and trying to manufacture, through innuendo, some wrongdoing. But there’s no high crime and misdemeanor, there’s no low crime and misdemeanor. There isn’t any crime and misdemeanor that they are alleging that they can support here.
Do you have any reason to believe anyone on the Republican side of this investigation has done any work to study how you carried out the 2019 process? Have you yet seen evidence of lessons learned or investigative avenues followed?
I think the best gloss on this investigation would be that they have paid no attention to the first impeachment investigation. The worst gloss is what I suspect to be true, which is they know full well that what they are alleging is patently false, and they don’t care, and they’re pushing forward with it anyway either because Donald Trump wants them to do it, or because they want to show their fealty to Donald Trump and do his political bidding.
But if they did pay attention to the first impeachment, they would know not only that their allegations are false, but also that we only had hearings with fact witnesses. It’s very telling that the first hearing as part of this inquiry is a hearing with no fact witnesses. And that’s important because you will recall that our Intelligence Committee investigation was purely fact-finding. When it got to the Judiciary Committee, they had a legal hearing about impeachment. But this is still in the Oversight hearing, which is about fact. The Oversight Committee is about fact-finding. And yet they’re having some, y’know, legalistic hearing without fact witnesses as their very first hearing.
Some House Republicans have been pretty openly nervous about pursuing this path because of the possible political ramifications. Have you talked to any of them about the wisdom of this impeachment process — especially some of your colleagues in New York who are unsure how this will end up for them?
Look, I think when you combine the fact that the Republicans are trying to shut down the government and at the same time they are initiating a bogus impeachment inquiry of President Biden, you are going to piss off a lot of Americans, and that includes a lot of Americans in Biden districts that have Republican congressmen, several of which are in New York. It is a very dangerous road to go down that is clearly being directed by the puppeteer at Mar-a-Lago who has both demanded that the Republicans shut down the government and demanded that there be an impeachment investigation of Joe Biden. And sadly Marjorie Taylor Greene and the extreme MAGA right, who operate according to the whims of Donald Trump, are doing his bidding. And so we are wasting our time on a sham impeachment while Republicans take us down a terrible pathway toward a shutdown that will have a significant impact on millions of Americans.
So where do you see this all ending? Not the best-case scenario. What do you think is actually going to happen here?
[Pause] That’s a good question, actually. I haven’t really thought of that.
I don’t think they will develop any sufficient evidence to support their conclusions. They have, of course, put their conclusions first and are now trying to fill that in with evidence, which is the inverse of how actual investigations are done, and is the inverse of how we did the 2019 impeachment investigation. So then the question just becomes whether the Republicans who have expressed their misgivings and questions about this impeachment inquiry are going to cave to the far-right once again and are willing to support an impeachment vote of President Biden based on lies. That I cannot answer.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
