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The House Oversight Committee’s latest attempt to hold an impeachment hearing on President Joe Biden took a bizarre turn on Wednesday when one of the three witnesses who gave evidence before the Republican-led panel began revealing unflattering information on former president Donald Trump’s disgraced ex-personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani.
Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-American businessman who served time in prison for violating federal campaign finance laws and fraud charges, told committee members that he’d been a “key participant” in a scheme to dig up dirt on Mr Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.
He said Mr Giuliani had “tasked” him with “finding dirt on the Bidens so that an array of networks could spread misinformation about them” so Mr Trump and his allies could “damage the Bidens’ reputations and secure the 2020 election for Trump”.
But Parnas, who admitted to being on supervised release after serving prison time for his offences, told the panel that the allegations against the Bidens being peddled by the Republican majority were false.
“I have never wavered from saying that there was no evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine – because there truly was none,” he said in an opening statement.
Continuing, Parnas said the theories on which Republicans have based their impeachment inquiry into Mr Biden are actually “predicated on a bunch of false information that is being spread by the Kremlin” and have no basis in fact.
“Throughout this entire situation, no credible source has ever provided proof of Joe or Hunter Biden’s alleged corruption in Ukraine … no respectable Ukrainian official has ever said that the Bidens did anything illegal,” he said as he rattled off a list of Ukrainian officials and nations who have publicly said that the president and his son were not implicated in any criminal activity.
Parnas added that the CEO of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company which employed Hunter Biden as a board member, had rejected a deal on criminal charges he faced “in exchange for information on the Bidens” but turned over no such information.
“The only information ever pushed about the Bidens and Ukraine has come from Russia and Russian agents, which everyone sitting here today knows,” he said, pointing to the recent indictment of ex-FBI informant Alexander Smirnov on charges of fabricating the derogatory information about the Bidens which figured prominently in a FBI form made public by the Republican majority.
“In my travels, I found precisely zero proof of the Bidens’ criminality. Instead, what I learned in that timeframe was the true nature of the conspiracy that the Kremlin was forcing 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,” he said.
Parnas, who first came to public attention when he was arrested during the House’s first of two impeachment inquiries into Mr Trump, was just one of two convicted felons to give evidence before the Republican-led panel at a hearing that uncovered no new evidence but was heavy on unsubstantiated accusations by partisans with axes to grind.
One of the Republican witnesses, James Galanis, testified by a remote video hookup from a federal prison in Alabama, where he is known as inmate 80739-198.
In a transcribed interview last month, Galanis — a former business partner of Hunter Biden — told investigators that President Biden never held any role with any business entity connected to his son. He also said under oath that he had “no knowledge” of Mr Biden undertaking “any official action” to benefit the business venture in which he, Archer and Hunter Biden were involved.
But the convicted fraudster, who is part of a crime family whose head, his father, was prosecuted by Mr Giuliani in the 1980s, told the panel on Wednesday that the president had been slated to be involved in one of the companies after leaving the vice presidency in 2017, even though he never had any documented involvement in the venture at issue.
The other Republican witness was Tony Bobulinski, an ex-naval officer and ally of Mr Trump who first came into the public eye when he appeared at a Trump-sponsored press conference ahead of one of the ex-president’s 2020 debates with Mr Biden.
Mr Bobulinski repeatedly engaged in theatrics throughout his testimony, displaying visible contempt for Democrats on the panel while personally attacking two Democratic members, Ranking Member Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Representative Daniel Goldman of New York, in his opening statement by accusing them — without offering evidence — of lying about him.
But one Democrat on the panel, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, left the former US Navy officer filibustering and attempting to shout over her when she pressed him, repeatedly, to say what, if any crime he was alleging President Biden to have committed.
Asked several times by the New York congresswoman, Mr Bobulinski could not say with any specificity which laws he was accusing Mr Biden of violating.
The hearing was just the latest in a series of shambolic public sessions which House Republicans have used in an effort to further tan investigation that has uncovered no evidence of wrongdoing by the president after more than a year of work under the GOP majority.
A spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office, Ian Sams, told The Independent that Wednesday’s proceedings were “embarrassing for House Republicans”.
“They need to move on from this sad charade. There are real issues that the American people want them to address,” he said.
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