Republicans are getting ready to pull the impeachment ball back into their court.
Within minutes of Thursday's impeachment hearings closing out two weeks of testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who runs the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a letter. In it, Graham requested a bevvy of documents from the Obama administration, including any that involved Hunter Biden, former Vice President Joe Biden, and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
Hunter Biden's work on the board of the Ukrainian company Burisma indirectly led to this whole impeachment inquiry, as the company was at one time under investigation by Ukraine's prosecutor general Viktor Shokin and Joe Biden later pushed Poroshenko for Shokin's firing. Graham spells this out in his letter, saying that he'd like to "answer questions regarding allegations" that Biden got Shokin fired to "end the investigation" into Burisma. So he's seeking "documents and communications" between Joe Biden and Poroshenko from the days they presumably talked about Shokin — widely viewed as corrupt and ineffective — as well as any documents from a meeting between a business partner of Hunter Biden's and former Secretary of State John Kerry.
Graham's move directly contradicts what he told CNN's Manu Raju a few weeks ago: that investigating Hunter Biden wasn't within his committee's jurisdiction. So what's changed this time around? Well, House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) just wrapped up impeachment hearings with what sounded like an endorsement of proceeding to the final step in the impeachment process: a trial in the Senate.