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House Republicans’ Biden Impeachment Hearings: the Flop that keeps on Flopping

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You’ve heard of the gift that keeps on giving? The House Republicans’ hearings to try and impeach President Joe Biden have become the flop that keeps on flopping.

New Coke and the movie version of Cats were more successful. If anything, for House Republicans, the hearings have become a humiliation-o-rama. But for months that seemed not to matter since the hearings were covered gavel to gavel on Fox. At the last hearing, Fox News cut away after a short bit of coverage and didn’t go back to it. However, X, TikTok and news reports carried the humiliation in full.

It wasn’t pretty:

Lacking support and evidence, the GOP-led impeachment inquiry against President Biden continued to sputter out, even as House Republicans on Wednesday held a hearing that featured witnesses who reiterated thin allegations that members of the Biden family capitalized financially on their father’s name.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) commenced the investigation into Biden last year with allegations of high crimes and misdemeanors that Republicans have since struggled to support. Fifteen months later, no evidence or testimony obtained by congressional Republicans has showed that Joe Biden was a direct participant in or beneficiary of his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings. And while some of Hunter Biden’s close associates have placed his father in proximity to those involved with some of the deals — undermining the president’s claims he was unaware of Hunter’s activities — none of the allegations have met Republican claims that Hunter Biden’s business activities fueled an influence-peddling operation that enriched Joe Biden and his family.

With a threadbare majority, House Republicans need near unanimity to approve articles of impeachment against the president, which they do not have. Instead, skepticism among rank-and-file Republicans has only grown since an FBI informant was charged with lying about the Bidens, an implosion of what had been presented as a major piece of evidence.

In the absence of those votes, Comer and other members of the investigating committees have pivoted to the possibility of criminal referrals. Comer has threatened to make “multiple” criminal referrals, but it remains unclear whether lawmakers will formally accuse President Biden of a crime and what crimes they allege may have been committed.

If you watched it, it was like watching a car get into a horrendous crash and windup up as an accordion made up of compressed car and bloody body parts:

Tony Bobulinski, a onetime business associate of Hunter Biden’s, and Jason Galanis, who is serving a nearly 16-year federal prison sentence in Montgomery, Ala., for multiple fraud schemes, both testified at the hearing Wednesday at the behest of House Republicans. They both made claims that Joe Biden was involved in his family members’ business activities before offering details of limited interactions with Joe Biden to flesh out the allegations. Bobulinski has pointed to a meeting he had with Joe Biden in May 2017, arranged by Hunter Biden and the president’s brother James, as proof Joe Biden was aware of his son’s business dealings with foreign entities. But when Bobulinski was asked about the meeting Wednesday, he made no specific mention of their pursuit of a deal with CEFC, a Chinese energy conglomerate, as he described the 45-minute meeting in Los Angeles.

“We talked about my background, my family’s military background, the different business ventures I had done around the world, the family I worked with — Joe spent time talking about his family, some of the tragedies that they had lived through,” Bobulinski said, describing the discussion with Joe Biden, who was not in office at the time.

Galanis, who testified via Zoom from prison, also described a “relatively short discussion” with then-Vice President Biden in May 2014 after Hunter Biden, at a party, pulled aside Galanis and a small group of people — including Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, Yury Luzkhkov, and Hunter Biden’s ex-business associate Devon Archer — and called Joe Biden on speakerphone. Galanis claimed that the discussion was about Baturina and Luzkhkov’s upcoming visit to Washington and “they talked about being good to his boy.” Pressed on whether this call was about Hunter Biden displaying “access to the Biden brand” to prospective investors, Galanis stated it was.

But the biggest “bombshell” wasn’t one that provided damning info on the Bidens. It was damning info on Republcans.

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.

And then came the knock out punch:

“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 an 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.

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