The Republican impeachment push against President Joe Biden has always rested on the thinnest of evidentiary ice, but with one of their key informants facing criminal charges for lying to federal investigators, the charade is now on the verge of falling apart.
On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee — one of the three Republican-controlled committees overseeing the Biden impeachment inquiry — held a hearing in an attempt to salvage the effort.
Democrats brought in Lev Parnas, a former Rudy Giuliani crony who was a key figure in the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump’s first impeachment. During his testimony, Parnas declared that he had found “zero evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine” and that “no credible source has ever provided proof of criminal activity […] no respectable Ukrainian official has ever said that the Biden’s did anything illegal.”
“The only information ever pushed on the Biden’s in Ukraine has come from one source, and one source only: Russia and Russian agents,” Parnas said. “The impeachment proceedings that bring us here now are predicated on false information spread by the Kremlin.”
In February, the Department of Justice charged former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov — whose claims Republicans used to bolster allegations of a corrupt bribery scheme involving Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma — with two counts of making false statements to federal authorities.
Prosecutors alleged Smirnov had “falsely claimed” that during two business meetings in 2015 and/or 2016 “executives associated with Burisma, admitted to him that they hired [Hunter Biden] to ‘protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.’”
Shortly after Smirnov’s arrest, he told authorities that he had been in contact with high-level Russian intelligence officials who were “involved in passing [along] a story” about Hunter Biden.
Smirnov’s arrest was a disaster for House Republicans, who scrambled to protect the already brittle reasoning on which they based their accusations of corruption against the Biden family. With Smirnov’s credibility shot, Republicans brought forth Tony Bobulinski as their primary witness on Tuesday.
Bobulinski, a former business associate of Hunter Biden who has since become a critic of the Biden administration, has leveled accusations of corruption against the Biden family with little evidence to back them up. During the hearing, he accused several Democratic members of the committee of lying to the American public on behalf of the Biden administration. It did not go over well.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) called out Bobulinski for lying during a deposition provided to investigators. “Bobulinski’s testimony provided zero evidence of any sort of link between Hunter Biden and the president as far it relates to the business dealings. And so once again we’re back to a hearing where no evidence is being provided of any sort of wrongdoing by POTUS,” he said.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) dismantled the Republican impeachment push during his own remarks to the committee, citing the “nearly 20 fact witnesses who could not identify a single act of wrongdoing by President Biden, much less a high crime and misdemeanor, and who overwhelmingly testified that Biden was not involved in any of his family’s business ventures.”
Needless to say, Republicans did not seem overly enthused at how the hearing played out. At one point, one member of the committee was heard complaining on a hot mic that you “can’t make this stuff up.”
It’s like “Jurassic Park, jeez,” they said.
