Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) floated a possible impeachment inquiry into Attorney General Merrick Garland over alleged political bias and “weaponization” of the Department of Justice, with the push fueled by an IRS whistleblower's claims about tax crime investigations into Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son.

“We need to get to the facts, and that includes reconciling these clear disparities. U.S. Attorney David Weiss must provide answers to the House Judiciary Committee,” McCarthy said in a said in tweet Sunday.

“If the whistleblowers' allegations are true, this will be a significant part of a larger impeachment inquiry into Merrick Garland's weaponization of DOJ.”

McCarthy expressing interest in impeaching Garland is a notable departure from how he has handled calls from Republicans to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and President Biden. McCarthy has previously vowed any impeachment proceedings would not be political, and said he would allow committees to investigate before moving toward impeachment.

Last week, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee released testimony from two IRS whistleblowers — agent Gary Shapley, and another unnamed agent — who were involved in investigating Hunter Biden’s taxes. They alleged that prosecutors slow-walked the case against Hunter Biden.

That investigation, led by Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, resulted in Hunter Biden reaching a deal to plead guilty to two counts of willful failure to pay income tax, and reaching an agreement to enter a pretrial diversion program relating to unlawful possession of a weapon.

The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Garland last week shot down the suggestion that Hunter Biden was treated with a more leniency due to his relation to President Biden.

“As I said from the moment of my appointment as attorney general, I would leave this matter in the hands of the United States attorney — who was appointed by the previous president and assigned to this matter by the previous administration — that he would be given full authority to decide the matter as he decided was appropriate, and that’s what he’s done,” Garland said.

Garland also defended the integrity of the Justice Department more broadly.

“Some have chosen to attack the integrity of the Justice Department … by claiming we do not treat like cases alike. This constitutes an attack on an institution that is essential to American democracy and essential to the safety of the American people,” Garland said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

McCarthy’s interest in impeaching Garland also follows years of GOP claims that the Department of Justice is unfairly targeting conservatives, fueled in part by the special counsel investigation into former President Trump’s campaign and Russian influence in the 2016 election. Republicans set up a select subcommittee in the House Judiciary Committee to probe what they call the “weaponization” of the federal government.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) filed articles of impeachment against Garland in May. The motion had six co-sponsors.

With a two-week holiday break starting next week, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) gathered some of his most vocal conservative critics Friday for a meeting intended to ease the hard-liners’ deficit concerns ahead of the long summer fight over government spending. 

It’s been a rocky few weeks in the House. The Speaker’s conservative critics have been grumbling that he caved too quickly during debt ceiling negotiations with President Biden, and they’re seeking concrete assurances that McCarthy will hold a harder line — and demand deeper cuts — in the upcoming partisan battle over funding the government beyond September.

To mollify those gripes, the Speaker summoned a group of at least eight conservatives to his office in the Capitol on Friday afternoon, seeking to convince the skeptics that Republican leaders share their goals when it comes to spending cuts. Afterward, McCarthy characterized the discussion as a sort of primer on the goals GOP leaders aim to achieve in their appropriations bills.

“You have to think differently. We got to start at the beginning,” McCarthy said. “It's walking people through what's in the approps bills now, and what could be as the other ones get marked up. Greater input, greater conversations. And the more knowledge, the better off we are in the better chance we have at passing.”

With lawmakers leaving for a two-week recess on Friday, McCarthy said he did not want members to “just go away,” and that he is setting up more meetings on the matter over the break.

In an indication of the high stakes, some of the conservatives had delayed flights home in order to join Friday’s meeting, according to Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), who was among them. Higgins acknowledged that GOP leaders face an arduous task in rallying 218 votes behind their spending bills given the party’s slim majority — “The understatement of possibly the decade,” he said — but he also predicted they would meet that goal.

“We're going to find a way to get to 218 on appropriations,” Higgins said. “We are united in that goal.” 

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, also came away from the meeting with an optimistic tone. 

“I think there is a plan of action. I don’t know about a resolution, but a plan of action,” Perry said.

Others, though, emphasized the long road ahead in ironing out the details of the spending cuts conservatives are demanding. 

Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) said a big part of the discussion is “making sure that we're all on the same page” with the appropriations figures, and that members are not operating with “different sets of numbers.” 

Conservatives have accused GOP leaders of using a budget “gimmick” — known as rescissions — to claim they’re setting next year’s spending at last year’s levels, while actually allocating much more. And several of them said they’re not yet satisfied with leadership's response. 

“It’s a very much continued and unresolved question,” Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) said. 

“I think the disagreement right now amongst us [and], you know, our colleagues is they’re using that to help bring up the agency spending,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) said of the rescissions after the meeting. “And so my view is no, we shouldn’t be doing that. … The agencies need to justify why they even need the money to begin with. They have not done that.”

The House left Friday for a two-week Independence Day recess after an extended seven-week stretch in session; the debt ceiling legislation forced leaders to cancel a scheduled weeklong recess the week of Memorial Day. 

Tensions flared — and derailed leadership’s hold of the House floor — through the second half of that grueling stretch, forcing McCarthy to stomp out fires.

Eleven members of the House Freedom Caucus and their allies sunk a procedural rule in protest of the proposed cuts in the debt ceiling compromise not being steep enough, shutting down legislative action on the House floor for a week. Moderate Republicans lashed out, with one even proposing working with Democrats to get back control of the floor.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) forced a vote on a resolution to censure Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calf.), which failed last week but then succeeded this week after adjustments in language. And Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) forced action on her resolution to impeach Biden over his handling of the U.S.-Mexico border, angering colleagues and surprising leaders — who then punted on her impeachment articles by working out a vote to send them back to committee.

Conservatives still have major concerns with spending levels in appropriations bills that have started to move through the committee. While they have allowed floor action to continue, they warn that shutting down the floor again remains a possibility.

Yet McCarthy said Friday the House GOP has “been so successful for the last seven weeks.”

As the leaders’ outreach effort ramps up, Republican appropriators have already begun the long process of marking up their 2024 spending bills, with a goal of sending all 12 appropriations bills to the House floor as quickly as possible. 

“I think that what makes the most sense for us strategically is to be able to get these bills, get the numbers as low as we possibly can, and get them out of the House as quick as we can for negotiating purposes,” Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), a close McCarthy ally who was central to debt ceiling negotiations, told reporters after the meeting. “I think that’s what’s most strategic and in our interest.”

Behind Chairwoman Kay Granger (R-Texas), the Appropriations Committee has already marked up roughly half of those spending bills. But Graves emphasized that even those are not set in stone, and GOP leaders are reserving the right to alter those bills as needed to win over potential GOP holdouts — conservatives and moderates alike. 

“The Speaker committed in January to go through regular order. Regular order includes allowing amendments and changes to bills as we move forward,” Graves said. “And look, yeah, Freedom Caucus has ideas on what they want to do. But so do a lot of other people.”

Editor's note: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said a Daily Beast story about her exchange with Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) was "impressively correct." An earlier version of this story contained an incorrect quote.

Tensions between Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) boiled over on the House floor as Greene called Boebert a "little bitch" amid GOP frustration at the Colorado Republican's move to try and force a vote on impeaching President Biden.

During votes Wednesday afternoon, Boebert approached Greene over statements she made earlier in the day for critiquing her move to force an impeachment vote, the Daily Beast reported. 

Greene accused Boebert of copying her own articles of impeachment against Biden, which Greene had previously asked her to co-sponsor, the report said. And Greene also noted that she donated to Boebert and defended her.

At one point, Greene called Boebert a “little bitch.”

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Greene confirmed the exchange, later telling reporters that the Daily Beast’s story — including the name-calling — was “impressively correct.”

Boebert’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the exchange, but she told CNN of the reported exchange, “Like I said, I’m not in middle school.”

Greene expanded on her frustration with Boebert while speaking to reporters at the Capitol.

“I have defended her when she's been attacked. She and I have virtually the same voting record. We're both members of the House Freedom Caucus. We should be natural allies,” Greene said. “But for some reason, she has a great skill and talent for making most people here not like her. And so, it’s her issue.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speaks during a press conference held by the Republican Study Committee announcing their Fiscal Year 2024 Budget at the Capitol on Wednesday, June 14, 2023.

Greene said that she supported Boebert’s impeachment articles because she also wants to impeach Biden, but she critiqued her approach. Boebert's move to force a vote surprised and angered many of her colleagues.

“She didn't talk to anyone about it. She didn’t come to the conference [meeting]. She didn't address it with anybody. She copied my articles of impeachment, refused to cosponsor mine,” Greene said.

The Trump-supporting firebrands both arrived in Congress in 2020, and due to their ideological and stylistic similarities, were often lumped together. But the two have diverged in their tactical approaches over the last year or so, and they have made clear they do not get along with each other.

One House GOP member told The Hill that Boebert and Greene have never liked each other and sit at opposite ends of the table during House Freedom Caucus meetings.

The tension between the two has burst into public view in the past — particularly around the time Boebert and other conservatives blocked Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) from immediately becoming Speaker, while Greene was a staunch supporter of McCarthy.

During the drawn-out Speaker’s fight in January, Greene and Boebert got into a confrontation in the women’s bathroom, the Daily Beast reported.

“You were OK taking millions of dollars from McCarthy, but you refuse to vote for him for Speaker, Lauren?” Greene reportedly said.

Boebert later recounted the exchange to conservative commentator Dana Loesch. 

“When she started going after me, I looked at her and said, ‘Don’t be ugly,’” Boebert said.

Amanda Andrade-Rhoades, J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

And in a December interview with conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, Boebert lamented being “accused of believing a lot of the things that [Greene] believes in.” 

“I don’t believe in this, just like I don’t believe in Russian space lasers — Jewish space lasers and all of this,” Boebert said, in reference to a 2018 Facebook post from Greene in which she floated that a “laser beam or light beam” from “space solar generators” could be to blame for wildfires in California, also mentioning the “Rothschild Inc.” Greene later said she did not know the Rothschilds have long been at the center of antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Greene shot back on Twitter.

“She gladly takes our $$$ but when she’s been asked: Lauren refuses to endorse President Trump, she refuses to support Kevin McCarthy, and she childishly threw me under the bus for a cheap sound bite,” Greene said of Boebert.

House Republican leaders moved to defang an effort from Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) to impeach President Biden, after the unexpected fight exposed sharp divisions within the GOP over how aggressively to confront their adversary in the White House.

The House Rules Committee met on Wednesday evening to craft a rule that will refer Boebert’s resolution to impeach Biden to the House Homeland Security and Judiciary committees. Boebert’s resolution cited Biden’s handling of the U.S.-Mexico border and immigration as grounds for impeachment.

“Speaker McCarthy and House Republicans are committed to fulfilling regular order and undertaking investigations prior to taking up the serious constitutional duty of impeachment,” House Rules Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said in the hearing.

A formal vote on the rule to re-refer Boebert’s resolution will occur on Thursday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said.

Before GOP leadership moved to craft the new rule, House Democrats had planned to make a motion to table the resolution, essentially killing it. Such a motion would not be in order for the rule, stripping Democrats of the opportunity to defend Biden amid an impeachment threat.

It also protects Republicans from taking a potentially politically tricky vote. Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) said earlier on Wednesday that Republicans who voted to table the impeachment articles could face attacks based on that vote in primaries.

Boebert’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the rule to refer her resolution to the committees.

Boebert’s privileged motion on Tuesday, forcing action on her impeachment resolution this week, caught GOP leaders by surprise and sparked rare public pushback from Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), as well as immediate rebukes from scores of fellow Republicans. 

The critics warned that the formal move to oust Biden is wildly premature, harming the Republicans’ ongoing efforts to investigate the president on a range of issues — from public policy to personal finances — while undermining potential impeachment efforts in the future.

At a closed-door meeting of the House GOP conference on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, McCarthy took the remarkable step of urging his troops to oppose the impeachment resolution when it hits the floor later in the week, a House Republican told The Hill.

“This is one of the most serious things you can do as a member of Congress. I think you've got to go through the process. You've got to have the investigation,” McCarthy later said. “And throwing something on the floor actually harms the investigation that we're doing right now.”

McCarthy told reporters he called Boebert on Tuesday and asked her to address the issue at Wednesday’s conference meeting before moving to force a vote. Boebert told McCarthy she would think about it, according to the Speaker, but then she went ahead and made the privileged motion on Tuesday anyway.

At Wednesday’s meeting, the Colorado Republican did not show up.

Boebert instead appeared on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s show Wednesday morning, defending her move to force a vote on impeachment despite the opposition from her leadership.

“I would love for committees to do the work, but I haven’t seen the work be done on this particular subject,” Boebert said. She later said there are not enough GOP votes to pass impeachment articles out of committee.

“This, I’m hoping, generates enthusiasm with the base to contact their members of Congress and say, ‘We want something done while you have the majority,’” Boebert said.

Boebert’s move derailed the GOP focus on other Biden-focused criticism. Lawmakers had been eager to keep the spotlight on the president’s son Hunter Biden agreeing to a plea deal involving federal tax and gun charges.

And her GOP critics, while no fans of the president, said the move fractures the GOP at a crucial political moment while jumping ahead of the various probes into Biden’s White House. 

“It's a person thinking about themselves instead of the team,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who emphasized the importance of conducting hearings before voting on something as momentous as ousting a sitting president. Bacon represents a district Biden carried in 2020.

Republicans spent years hammering Democrats for what they said were a pair of thinly-argued impeachments of Trump, and many warned that Boebert’s impeachment effort — which sidesteps all committee action — follows in the same flawed mold.

“I feel like it was cheapened in the last Congress; we shouldn't follow the same footprints,” Bacon said. 

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said he prefers to see any impeachment effort later go through the House Judiciary Committee, as his panel probes a swath of issues — from Biden’s handling of the U.S.-Mexico border to the foreign business dealings by the president’s family members.

“In five months, I think we've produced a lot of information,” Comer said “This is gonna take, you know, many more months, unfortunately. The FBI is fighting us, the DOJ is fighting us, big money lawyers are fighting us. I think we're going as fast as we can.”

When it comes to border issues, Comer said he is more in favor of starting with building a case against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas first.

Most House Republicans hungry for retribution over the U.S.-Mexico border have focused on Mayorkas rather than Biden. Last week, the House GOP launched an investigation that could serve as the basis of an eventual Mayorkas impeachment.

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) also said he would prefer impeachments to go through his committee, though was not necessarily opposed to impeaching Biden.

"I think there's a better way to do it,” Jordan said.

Democrats plan to make a motion to table Boebert's impeachment resolution, essentially killing it. And many Republicans said they’re ready to support the Democratic measure.

Boebert is one of four members who have led articles of impeachment against Biden this year, with each one pointing to Biden’s handling of the border and immigration issues.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has had public dust-ups with Boebert in the past, accused Boebert of copying her impeachment push.

“I had already introduced articles of impeachment on Joe Biden for the border, asked her to co-sponsor mine, she didn’t. She basically copied my articles and then introduced them and then changed them to a privileged resolution,” Greene said. “So of course I support 'em because they’re identical to mine.”

“They’re basically a copycat,” she added.

Greene added that GOP members were mad at Boebert because her privileged motion “came out of nowhere.”

More privileged resolutions on impeachment could be coming. Greene said she will convert all her impeachment articles against Biden and top figures in his administration into privileged resolutions to use “when I feel it’s necessary.”

Amid the pushback, some conservatives defended Boebert’s strategy, even though it would circumvent the conventional committee process they demanded of GOP leaders this year. 

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) — the chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus who was one of several Republicans to push for regular order during the drawn-out Speaker’s race in January — argued that lawmakers were not trying to circumvent the process by bringing up privileged resolutions.

“Regular order also includes individual members being able to represent their districts,” Perry said. “[It] might not be what I do, but if that’s what they see as necessary, then that’s their prerogative.”