Sparks flew on Capitol Hill on March 20 as Hunter Biden’s ex-business associates clashed with House Democrats seeking to discredit their testimony.
The Republican-led impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden alleges that he and his son Hunter Biden were involved in selling the family name and influence in exchange for lucrative foreign business deals and monetary payouts that were purportedly funneled into LLCs tied to Biden family members.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, delivered the opening remarks.
He said the committee “is investigating what product or service the Biden family and their associates were selling that would justify over $24 million in payments.”
Throughout the 15-month impeachment inquiry, Mr. Comer said the committee reviewed emails, bank records, text messages, and “suspicious activity reports to Treasury and other evidence,” allegedly linking the Biden family to corrupt foreign business deals.
“What is apparent ... the Bidens sell Joe Biden; that is their business,” he said.
Called to testify by Republicans were two key witnesses who claimed that they were directly involved in corrupt business schemes with Mr. Biden to sell his father’s influence.
Tony Bobulinksi testified in person at the hearing, while Jason Galanis, who is currently incarcerated, appeared via a video call.
Democrats Dismiss Impeachment Allegations
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking Democratic member of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, pulled no punches on March 20 when he called the GOP impeachment proceedings into President Biden a “spectacular failure.”“With any luck, today marks the end of perhaps the most spectacular failure in the history of congressional investigations: the effort to find a high crime or misdemeanor committed by Joe Biden and then to impeach him for it,” he said.
Mr. Raskin questioned the credibility of the witnesses Republicans called to testify against the president and his son for allegedly leveraging the family’s name and influence in foreign countries.
He said they “failed to testify to any presidential wrongdoing, much less evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Specifically, Mr. Raskin called Mr. Bobulinski a “bitterly disappointed, wannabe Hunter business partner” and accused the man of “unsuccessfully suing his own dying father’s charity for nearly a million dollars.”
Mr. Raskin also called out Mr. Bobulinski for being former President Donald Trump’s special guest at the second 2020 presidential debate, which Mr. Bobulinski confirmed in his testimony.
The congressman also dismissed the other GOP witness, Jason Galanis, who appeared remotely from prison via a video call.
Mr. Raskin called Mr. Galanis a “serial fraudster and convicted con man” who was found guilty of “defrauding union pension funds, a Native American tribe, and scores of innocent investors.”
For these reasons, Mr. Raskin questioned whether their testimonies against the Biden family were credible, despite that Republicans leveled the same criticism against Lev Parnas, the witness called by Democrats to testify against the impeachment allegations.
Mr. Parnas, who has claimed that he coordinated with Rudy Giuliani to “dig up dirt” on President Biden, was convicted in 2022 on campaign finance charges.
But Mr. Raskin did not stop there. He also took issue with Republicans’ using screenshots of text messages from Mr. Bobulinski’s cellphone that were allegedly sent to him by Mr. Biden and asked whether the phone’s data could be subpoenaed.
The committee inevitably voted to table Mr. Raskin’s motion to subpoena Mr. Bobulinski’s phone and then continued with the hearing.
Parnas Testimony
The Democrats’ lead witness, Mr. Parnas, claimed that he was enlisted by Mr. Giuliani and President Trump to find “dirt” on President Biden.“The American people have been lied to by Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and various cohorts of individuals in government and media positions. They create a false sense of their own interests [that] normally would undermine the strength of our nation,” Mr. Parnas said.
He said he “was a key participant and a witness to numerous efforts to prove that Joe and Hunter Biden were linked to corruption in Ukraine.”
“Rudy Giuliani, on behalf of then-President Donald Trump, tasked me with a mission to travel the globe, finding dirt on the Bidens so then an array of networks could spread misinformation about them, thus securing the 2020 election for Donald J. Trump,” Mr. Parnas said.
He claimed to have found “zero evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine” in “nearly a year traveling the world” and said “no credible sources ever provided proof of criminal activity—not the FBI, CIA or the NSA.”
Democrats Spar With Bobulinski
Mr. Bobulinksi, the lead GOP witness, was also grilled by several other Democrats.Rep. Daniel Goldman (R-N.Y.) questioned Mr. Bobulinski about his alleged business dealings with Mr. Biden through a company called Oneida Holdings LLC.
Mr. Goldman asked whether the joint partnership in the business deal divided equal shares among five partners, but Mr. Bobulinksi expressed confusion over the question.
“It’s not complicated,” Mr. Goldman responded, prodding Mr. Bobulinksi to give a clear answer.
The congressman then accused the witness of “filibustering” by responding with clarifying questions instead of direct answers.
Mr. Goldman said, “There were five partners [in Oneida Holdings]: Hunter Biden, and [Jim] Biden, Rob Walker, James Kelly, and you ... each owns 20 percent.”
Mr. Bobulinski said the portions were owned by the respective men’s LLCs instead of directly by the men.
“Do you see Joe Biden or an LLC related to Joe Biden on this?” Mr. Goldman asked.
“I don’t know if Joe Biden owns any of Jim Biden’s LLC or Hunter Biden’s LLC; I’ll leave that up to the committee,” Mr. Bobulinski replied.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) also sparred with Mr. Bobulinski during her questioning, asking him whether he witnessed President Biden commit an impeachable crime or offense.
“Mr. Bobulinski ... I have a quick question,“ Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. ”Is it your testimony today that you personally witnessed President Joe Biden commit a crime?”
In response, Mr. Bobulinski alleged that President Biden committed a RICO violation and was guilty of financial corruption within his son’s foreign business dealings.
“Excuse me, sir. RICO is not a crime. It is a category,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said.
The two began to argue and interrupted each other, with Mr. Bobulinski maintaining that President Biden is guilty of RICO violations, which Ms. Ocasio-Cortez rejected again on the basis that RICO is a category, not a specific criminal allegation.
She dismissed the hearing and the entire effort to impeach President Biden as a “Republican majority lost in the desert.”
“Impeachment 101: Majority party or whoever is raising impeachment must accuse the president of a high crime, a specific high crime, or misdemeanor,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said.
She and the rest of the Democratic coalition have said that if the committee cannot do so, the impeachment inquiry is without merit.
“This resolution does not outline a high crime or misdemeanor. It’s not here,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said.
‘The Bidens Sell Joe Biden’
The Republicans leading the impeachment probe have long held that President Biden and his family members were engaged in shady business dealings.“What is apparent after over a year of investigation is that the Bidens do not work in any traditional sense of the word,” Mr. Comer said in opening the hearing.
“They do not work as consultants or lawyers or advisers. The Bidens don’t sell a product or service or a set of skills. The Bidens sell Joe Biden. That is their business.”
That has been the Republican investigators’ theory from the start of the impeachment inquiry. And during the March 20 hearing, their invited witnesses backed it up.
“From my direct personal experience and what I’ve subsequently come to learn, it is clear to me that Joe Biden was the brand being sold by the Biden family,” Mr. Bobulinski testified.
“His family’s foreign influence-peddling operation, from China to Ukraine and elsewhere, sold out to foreign actors who were seeking to gain influence and access to Joe Biden and the U.S. government.”
The president was an “active, aware enabler” of his family members’ business endeavors, meeting with associates like him to advance their goals “despite being buffered by a complex scheme to maintain plausible deniability,” he said.
Mr. Bobulinski served as the CEO of Sinohawk, the Bidens’ now-defunct partnership with CEFC China Energy, in 2017. He claimed to have attended a May 2017 business meeting at The Beverly Hilton Hotel with not only the president’s son but also the president himself and his brother Jim Biden.
During his Feb. 28 deposition before the committee, Mr. Biden confirmed that the meeting took place. However, his uncle denied it in his transcribed interview on Feb. 21—a contradiction that Mr. Bobulinski noted.
“Hunter confirmed his uncle perjured himself in front of this committee,” he charged.
Mr. Galanis, testifying remotely from prison, said the only value Mr. Biden brought to their business relationship was his father’s influence, or “the Biden lift.”
“Our objective was to build a diversified private equity platform which would be anchored by globally known Wall Street brands together with a globally known political name: Biden,” Mr. Galanis told the committee.
Republicans Challenge Democrats’ Narrative
Some Republican members used their time during the hearing to rehash the evidence that their investigation had turned over of President Biden’s involvement in his family’s business schemes.Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) said bank records appeared to show that money sourced from CEFC China Energy made its way through various Biden family bank accounts until it reached President Biden.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) focused her line of questioning on pointing out the discrepancies between Mr. Biden’s testimony and what his recovered text messages show.
Ms. Greene noted that in one exchange with Mr. Bobulinski, Mr. Biden referred to “my Chairman”—a label that appeared to confuse some of his associates. Rob Walker, another one of those partners, later explained in another exchange that Mr. Biden was referring to “his dad.” But that answer contradicts Mr. Biden’s testimony before investigators.
“In CEFC, there were two people that we regularly referred to as ‘chairman,’” Mr. Biden told the committees. “One was Chairman Ye [Jianming], who was the titular chairman of the company, and the other was Mr. [Jianjun] Zang. Chairman Zang, also when you would meet with him, you would refer to him as Chairman Zang.”
Mr. Zang, he said, was the person he was referring to at the time.
But Mr. Bobulinski refuted that claim.
“That’s a lie,” he said. “I’ve never heard Zang referenced as ‘chairman.’ And I had direct communications with Director Zang over WeChat, met him in Romania, met him in Moscow, met him around the world in New York, trying to develop this business, and he was never referred to as the chairman.”
As for the Democrats’ treatment of the GOP’s witnesses, Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) said it was vastly different from how they had treated Mr. Biden. She accused her Democrat colleagues of treating Mr. Biden as a “golden boy.”
“I think most Americans are taught at a very young age that you are who you surround yourself with,” Ms. McClain said.
“[Mr. Biden’s] associates, such as Jason Galanis and Devon Archer, are felons convicted of fraud, yet he is the golden child.”
She asked Mr. Bobulinski why he thought his former business associate skipped the hearing.
He replied: “I don’t think he wanted to sit next to me because, obviously, I’ve emphatically stated he perjured himself in his transcribed interview with the committee, as did his uncle, Jim Biden. And for every fact he claims or wants to say, ‘I was high on drugs,’ or obfuscate, I can show a document, a text message, a recording that has ... confirmed that he’s lying.”
‘Constitutional Interpretation’ of Impeachment
But beyond the growing allegations against Mr. Biden, questions remain, such as whether there is irrefutable evidence that he was selling his father’s name in exchange for foreign business deals and payouts.Alan Dershowitz, a former Harvard Law professor who defended President Trump during his impeachment trial, wrote in a June 2023 Op-Ed in The Hill that if the allegations against the Bidens are confirmed, it will raise another question, namely “whether a president can be impeached and removed for a high crime committed before he assumed the presidency.”
