HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 21, 2024

While Republicans on the House Oversight Committee continue to insist that President Joe Biden has committed crimes, testimony today by a former associate of Trump’s disgraced ex-lawyer Rudolph Giuliani was so damning not for Biden but for Republicans that Representative Stephen Lynch (D-MA) told his colleagues: “When you review the entire record of evidence of these hearings going back over a year, you've actually provided more evidence to impeach Donald Trump for a third time than you have in so much as laying a glove on Joe Biden.”

The effort to impeach Biden has faltered as Oversight chair James Comer (R-KY), other Republican members of the committee, and their colleagues have repeatedly told right-wing media that Biden was involved in corrupt business deals with foreign countries in the face of actual testimony and evidence that has not supported those allegations. Republican lawmakers and even right-wing media figures have begun to suggest that the investigation has turned up nothing and the effort should be abandoned.

But House extremists have promised their base that they will impeach Biden, and Comer has steadfastly refused to back down. In a public hearing today, Republicans called as witnesses Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of President Biden’s son Hunter, and another business associate, Jason Galanis.

Bobulinski is a Trump ally. Democrats called out inconsistencies in Bobulinski’s first testimony before the committee, and in his opening statement today, Bobulinski relied on his military record to prove his honesty. Then he called Hunter Biden and President Biden’s brother James Biden, both of whom testified under oath, liars. He also called Hunter Biden’s defense attorney a liar, and President Joe Biden “a serial liar and a fabulist.” Bobulinski went on: “Representatives Dan Goldman [D-NY] and Jamie Raskin [D-MD], both lawyers…, will continue to lie today in this hearing and then go straight to the media to tell more lies.”

Earlier this month, Bobulinski sued former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson for $10 million, calling her “a liar and a fraud” for her claim that Bobulinski had worn a ski mask when he met quietly with Hutchinson’s boss, Trump’s then chief of staff, Mark Meadows, at a campaign rally in Georgia. Hutchinson produced a photograph supporting her claim.

In his opening statement, Bobulinski claimed that “the Chinese Communist Party…successfully sought to infiltrate and compromise Joe Biden and the Obama-Biden White House.” He has insisted that Biden profited from Hunter Biden’s business deals, but his claims have never been verified, and other witnesses have testified that Biden was never involved in his son’s businesses.

Galanis is serving a 14-year sentence for defrauding a Native American tribe and numerous pension fund investors of tens of millions of dollars. He joined the proceedings virtually from federal prison.

While Bobulinski and Galanis continued to insist, without evidence, that Biden is corrupt, the eye-popping testimony today came from the witness called by the Democrats: Lev Parnas.

Parnas is a Ukrainian-born former associate of one-time Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. He was deeply involved in the attempt to smear Hunter Biden before the 2020 presidential election. This attempt included then-president Trump’s 2019 phone call to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to force him to announce he was opening an investigation into the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Trump suggested he would not release the money Congress had appropriated to enable Ukraine to resist Russian incursions into Crimea until Zelensky agreed to such an announcement.

That call eventually led to Trump’s first impeachment, in December 2019.

During that impeachment and ever since, Parnas said, “I have never wavered from saying that there was no evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine—because there truly was none. On the contrary, by setting up a search for false criminality, every individual majorly involved in this plan was disguising their own criminal activity. That persists to this very day: The impeachment proceedings that bring us here now are predicated on a bunch of false information that is being spread by the Kremlin.”

Parnas said, “My mission for Giuliani and Trump would come to encompass nearly a year of traveling across the globe to find damaging information on the Bidens. This included trips to Ukraine, Poland, Spain, Vienna, London, and other locations…. In my travels, I found precisely zero proof of the Bidens’ criminality.”

What he did find, Parnas said, was that “the Kremlin was forcing [disinformation] through Russian, Ukrainian, American, and other channels to interfere in our elections. Ultimately this was meant to benefit Trump’s re-election, which would in turn benefit Vladimir Putin.”

Every person pushing “the Biden corruption rumors” knew they were “baseless,” Parnas said. And then he named names: “Then-Congressman Devin Nunes [R-CA, who at the time chaired the House Intelligence Committee], Senator Ron Johnson [R-WI], then chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee], and many other individuals understood that they were pushing a false narrative. The same goes for John Solomon [of The Hill], Sean Hannity, and media personnel, particularly at FOX News, who used that narrative to manipulate the public ahead of the 2020 election. They are still doing this today, as we approach the 2024 election.”

In 2022, Parnas was convicted of wire fraud, false statements, and breaking campaign finance laws by funneling money illegally to Trump and other Republican lawmakers (including then–California representative Kevin McCarthy, as longtime members of this community will remember).

In his testimony, Parnas noted: “When I was arrested, my original indictment linked me to an individual referred to as unindicted co-conspirator 1. We now know this individual to be Congressman Pete Sessions [R-TX], who sits on this very committee today.” Parnas also called out Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr, who he says knew about the attempt to smear the Bidens from the day he took office, and said that Trump personally encouraged Giuliani to interfere in Ukrainian politics.

As Justin Rohrlich of The Daily Beast put it, “Comer…stepped on rake after rake during the hearing, consistently undermining his own conference’s case.” Finally, after Democrats had pointed out the many missteps of the committee’s Republicans, Bobulinski told Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) that “the American people are well aware of the Bidens’ corruption.” “Perfect!” Moskowitz replied. He told Bobulinski to ask Comer why he hadn’t asked for an impeachment vote. Moskowitz even offered to help the Republicans out by making a motion to impeach President Biden, urging Comer to second it. Comer declined.

Moskowitz said he wanted “to show the American people that they’re never going to impeach Joe Biden. It’s never going to happen because they don’t have the evidence. Okay, this is a show. It’s all fake. They just want to do these hearings. It’s not leading to impeachment. They’re lying to their base on Newsmax and Fox leading these people to believe that they’re going to eventually impeach the president. It’s not going to happen. At all. Ever. Period.”

While today might well be the day the Republicans’ impeachment effort sputtered to a dismal end, Parnas’s testimony points forward. “We cannot divorce the impact of this conspiracy from the Russia-Ukraine war,” Parnas said, “because Trump has no intention to keep aiding Ukraine. I told him in 2018, and I am telling all of you now, that without the support of the United States and NATO, Ukraine will not be able to withstand the barrage from the Russian Army.”

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), a Trump loyalist, continues to refuse to bring to a vote the national security supplemental bill passed by the Senate more than a month ago containing $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, although it is expected to pass if he does. Last week the administration announced a $300 million arms package made possible by Pentagon cost savings, and tonight, national security advisor Jake Sullivan is in Kyiv to reassure the Ukrainians that aid is coming. But while Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out as much as 11% of Russia’s oil-refining capacity, lack of supplies has meant Ukraine’s troops have lost ground to Russian advances.

Those trying to get aid to Ukraine believe its defense is central to U.S. national security. Today the Institute for the Study of War, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research group, assessed that “several Russian financial, economic, and military indicators suggest that Russia is preparing for a large-scale conventional conflict with NATO, not imminently but likely on a shorter timeline than what some Western analysts have initially posited,” within a matter of years.