Biden won't testify at Republican-led impeachment hearing this week, White House says

The White House informed Chairman James Comer on Monday that President Joe Biden has declined the House Oversight Committee's invitation to testify in their ongoing impeachment probe, in which Biden denies wrongdoing.

"Your Committee's purported 'impeachment inquiry' has succeeded only in turning up abundant evidence that, in fact, the President has done nothing wrong," the president's attorney Richard Sauber wrote in the letter, obtained by ABC News.

Comer had made the long shot invite to Biden to testify following an impeachment inquiry hearing in March.

He extended his invitation officially later in the month, calling on Biden to give testimony as part of a Republican-led impeachment inquiry into allegations that Biden used his office to participate in and profit from his family's foreign business dealings -- which he has adamantly denied.

The committee proposed Tuesday for the hearing, according to a letter from Comer, who had claimed in a statement last month that the "the White House has taken a position hostile to the Committee's investigation."

The impeachment probe, launched unilaterally by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and then formalized months later by the House in a party-line vote, has yet to yield concrete evidence against the president.

Comer nonetheless has contended that there is a "yawning gap between" what Biden has said publicly and the committee's work.

"As Chairman of the Committee, in addition to requesting that you answer the questions posed in this letter, I invite you to participate in a public hearing at which you will be afforded the opportunity to explain, under oath, your involvement with your family's sources of income and the means it has used to generate it," Comer said last month, addressing the president.

Speaker Mike Johnson echoed that in a statement of his own, saying in March, in part, that "there are significant outstanding questions that have emerged from our inquiry that the President can answer."

The most recent impeachment hearing focused on well-established allegations of Biden family impropriety by House Republicans, while Democrats sought to cast the probe as a political hit job.

"The Bidens sell Joe Biden. That is their business," Comer claimed then.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the committee, shot back at that hearing: "With any luck, today marks the end of perhaps the most spectacular failure in the history of congressional investigations: the effort to find a high crime or misdemeanor committed by Joe Biden and then to impeach him for it."

Asked for comment about Comer's letter originally seeking Biden's testimony, the White House referred back to earlier statements by spokesman Ian Sams, who has repeatedly denounced the impeachment proceedings.

"This is a sad stunt at the end of a dead impeachment," Sams wrote on social media in March.