House investigators Wednesday threatened to subpoena the White House to obtain drafts and revisions of a 2015 speech delivered by President Biden to the Ukrainian parliament while he was serving as vice president.
The National Archives and Records Administration has the speech, given in December 2015, and all drafts and associated documents. But the agency will not release the material because Mr. Biden hasn’t authorized it.
Lawmakers want to review the speech, its drafts and all documents related to changes made to the speech as part of their impeachment inquiry into whether Mr. Biden participated in his son Hunter’s foreign business deals.
“This request comes as part of the House’s inquiry into whether sufficient grounds exist to impeach President Biden,” lawmakers wrote.
Mr. Biden delivered the speech before the Ukrainian Rada while his son was serving on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.
In the speech, Mr. Biden strongly suggested that Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin should be fired to help the country change its reputation for corruption.
Mr. Shokin had been criticized by some government officials for corruption and ineptitude, but there is evidence he was investigating Burisma for corruption and may have been pushed out because of it.
According to witnesses, Burisma executives sought Hunter Biden’s help in getting his father to shake off Mr. Shokin’s probe. Burisma was paying the younger Biden’s firm $1 million per year.
Lawmakers accuse Mr. Biden of changing his Rada address while flying to Ukraine aboard Air Force Two to incorporate a call for Mr. Shokin’s ouster.
“The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform,” Mr. Biden said in the speech. “The judiciary should be overhauled. The energy sector needs to be competitive, ruled by market principles — not sweetheart deals.”
House lawmakers called for the Rada speech and related documents more than five months ago. In their letter to White House Counsel Edward Siskel on Wednesday, they accused the White House of “dilatory tactics” to delay their release.
“If the White House does not permit the production of these documents, the Oversight Committee will consider the use of compulsory process to require the White House’s production of the speeches,” lawmakers wrote.
The letter was signed by Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer, Kentucky Republican, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, Missouri Republican.
House lawmakers will privately depose Hunter Biden on Feb. 28 and they’ll interview the president’s brother James Biden behind closed doors on Feb. 21 as part of the impeachment inquiry.
Mr. Biden publicly acknowledged playing a major role in Mr. Shokin’s ouster.
He bragged about it while participating in a January 2018 Council of Foreign Relations forum. Mr. Biden said he traveled to Kyiv and threatened then-President Petro Poroshenko that he would withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if Mr. Shokin was not removed.
“If the prosecutor is not fired, you are not getting the money,” Mr. Biden said he told Mr. Poroshenko.
Nearly two months before Mr. Shokin’s firing, according to Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, Mr. Shokin’s office “announced the seizure of property from … Burisma Holding’s founder, Mykola Zlochevsky.”