Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley slammed White House spokesman Ian Sams for "attacking" and "taunting" House Republicans after they extended an invitation to President Biden for him to testify in his own impeachment probe. The constitutional scholar addressed the Biden team's "shocking" response during "The Faulkner Focus" on Friday.
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JONATHAN TURLEY: While the Republicans are not being deterred by any of this, what is really shocking is that Sams is actually with the White House counsel's office. I can't remember an administration that had a White House counsel's office that engaged so directly in taunting and attacking legal inquiries from Congress... This is an impeachment inquiry. It's the most important possible process that a President and Congress are engaged in, and yet you have a member of the legal counsel's office mocking and taunting that effort. The fact is that the president's public statements to the public stand completely contradicted. He lied when he said he had not spoken to business associates. He lied when he said he didn't have knowledge of these business dealings. The point of this letter that is key is that in seven pages, it reduces all of those contradictions to ten simple questions that the president can answer, not engage in taunting, not engaging in the type of attacks by Sams, but to answer the question for the American people. But the reason they're doing this is because they have license to do it. The media has no interest at all in the answers to these ten questions. They bought into this illusion, essentially, that was created by the Biden team, and they've just gone too far. They can't ask any of these questions themselves, and that's what Sams and the... White House know is that there's not going to be any push by the media to answer any of these questions.
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The White House dismissed the ongoing impeachment inquiry against President Biden as "embarrassing" following a chaotic hearing earlier this month.
Republicans' efforts fizzled on Wednesday when an eight-hour hearing failed to produce a clear path forward for the investigation into the Biden family's unclear relationship with foreign business interests.
"That hearing was embarrassing for House Republicans. A total waste of time. It’s time to move on from this sad charade. There are real issues the American people want us to address," said White House spokesperson Ian Sams.
"This is a sad stunt at the end of a dead impeachment," Sams said in a separate statement. "Call it a day, pal."
House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer said at the culmination of the hearing that the committee would need to hear from the president himself.
The president is unlikely to accommodate the committee's desire for him to testify.
Comer has indicated he is likely to abandon plans to draft articles of impeachment against the president and instead submit criminal referrals to the Department of Justice.
Fox News' Timothy H.J. Nerozzi, Patrick Ward, Stepheny Price and Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
