>> we are waiting here for the house oversight committees impeachment inquiry into president biden to get underway. they are looking into the business connections of the biden family. the president's son hunter biden was invited to come testify but he declined. he testified privately last month. you are watching live coverage here on c-span 3 . >> the committee on oversight and accountability will come to order. i want to welcome everyone here this morning. without objection, the chair may declare a recess at any time. without objection, chairman of the ways and means committee, mr. jason smith of missouri,

matt gaetz of florida, and representative eric swalwell from california are waived onto the committee for the purposes of questioning the witnesses at today's committee hearing. for today's hearing, opening statements will be limited to 10 minutes for the chair and 10 mins for the ranking members. the chair also notes that points of order pertaining to the engaging of personalities against the president will not be in order for the duration of today's hearing. giving that this is a hearing regarding today's impeachment inquiry, members must be allowed to speak frankly. the chernow recognizes himself for an opening statement. today, the house committee on oversight will hear from witnesses who have previously provided information during our deposition and interview phase regarding the biden family's business practices in china, ukraine, russia, and other places around the world.

at the start of this commerce, they investigate what progress or service the biden family and their associates were selling that would justify over $24 million in payment. we have reviewed emails, bank records, text messages, suspicious activity reports of treasury, and other evidence normally compiled during an expensive investigation such as this. the oversight committee has found no credible evidence of the biden's providing any work product. the committee has identified no legitimate value or documents or even one single hour of work the bidens have provided their business partners. nothing. what is apparent after over a year of investigation is that the bidens did not work in any traditional sense of the word.

they did not work as consultants or lawyers. or advisers. the bidens don't sell a product or service or set of skills. the bidens so joe biden. that is their business. for months, we have heard democrats desperately proclaiming that witnesses told this committee that joe biden had no involvement in his family's business dealings, but where are those witnesses today? it is telling that democrats have not invited one of these witnesses to today's hearing. that is because they know their testimonies would not withstand public scrutiny. democrats have relied on these witnesses opening statements and have willfully turned a blind eye to the fact that once the witnesses were questioned about our record of evidence, democrats now must rely on bringing in a distraction witness to talk about nonsense.

and you cannot talk about any of the facts brought by today's witnesses who worked with the bidens. now, president biden cannot control his adult son. he cannot control his brother, his sister-in-law, or his nine family members who have received money from these transactions. our president biden can do is control his own actions and that is what we are here today to discuss with the witnesses. because in the course of this investigation, we have learned that joe biden has taken action after action to further his family's plans to get rich. he shows up to meetings, he holds phone calls, he shakes hands and tells people to, quote, look after my family. he goes to dinners with foreign oligarchs and a ukrainian executive paying his son millions of dollars. he gets paid with money from

chinese businessmen who he tells other associates he will see what he can do to help their situations. he writes records of recommendation for foreign business associate children. the scam is simple. the biden family promises they can make a foreign partner's problems go away by engaging the u.s. government. the problems can be anything. ukrainian corruption investigation. moving money into the united states. access for china to american energy sources. joe shows up and shakes a few hands and front of his son and says, quote, take care of my boy or something similar. and the money flows to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. it is done over and over again. the biden family promises joe's power. joe biden shows up and millions of dollars, to the bidens pocket. joe biden is the family palace closer. how could he not be? the bidens are not doing any other work for these foreign

companies that would warrant tens of millions of dollars. there are only two explanations for this. the first is that joe biden knows exactly what he is doing and knows a handshake, a wink, and a smile is enough to maintain as joe biden famously calls it plausible deniability. or joe biden is being led around by his family and has no idea who he is meeting with or what message he is sending and is truly an elderly man with a poor memory. there is no other explanation. either joe biden is complacent or joe biden is incompetent. since becoming chairman of this committee in 2023, i promised that investigation into the biden family peddling would be based on records, testimony, and verifiable facts. after years of democrats using this committee for every conspiracy they can find like the russian collusion hoax, the committee has returned to real

investigation. i will ask them to answer one question. what services did the bidens provide to earn them and their business associates over $24 million? what did they do for the money? democrats have the same bank records that we do and bank records do not lie. the witnesses here today are to talk about joe biden. republicans are here to talk about joe biden. if democrats wish to spend the time with another russian collusion hoax for the sake of protecting president biden, they can do so. that said, i would have invited hunter biden here to share his side of the story. he demanded a public hearing. i have given him one. maybe he will show up. he has said he isn't but he loves saying one thing and doing another. at some point, it begins to reflect poorly on his ability to tell the truth at all but this hearing is not about hunter biden. this investigation is not about hunter biden. it is about joe biden and the

lies he continues to tell the american people. with that i yield to ranking member smith. chairman smith. >> thank you chairman comer and ranking member raskin. from the beginning of this investigation, we have made clear we will follow the facts wherever they lead. the facts of lettuce to two conclusions. one, the biden family has for years traded on joe biden's name in order to rake in millions of dollars. often doing so with his direct knowledge and clear involvement. two. president biden has been continually dishonest with the american people about his knowledge of his family palace business dealings. we have testimony from multiple witnesses that joe biden was the brand. he knew what his son and brother were doing and did nothing to stop it. that alone makes him complicit in a scheme to make money off of his public service. but he was not just complacent. one of today's witnesses has

testified, and enabler of this activity. the evidence of the two irs whistleblowers who came to the committee has been affirmed by volumes of material provided to congress by the testimony of others and even by the department of justice who finally brought charges against hunter biden that mirrors those called for by the irs investigators. the evidence obtained shows that, one, joe biden met with his sons business partners on multiple occasions. he used an alias to exchange dozens of emails with his son's bookkeeper. he took unofficial government action that says basically coincided with those meetings and correspondence. the connection between joe biden and his son's business practices extend even into the 2020 campaign. kevin morris, a hollywood lawyer who met hunter biden at a joe biden campaign

fundraiser, paid off hunter biden's tax liabilities because there was in his words, quote, risk personally and politically. it that matter was not swept under the rug, investigators that were interested in pursuing a potential criminal campaign violation were told to stand down. the biden family relied on the biden brand so much that evidence has rebuilt that hunter biden, quote, believes all this stuff including his legal troubles would all go away when his dad became president. why did he believe that? because for years biden family has benefited from joe biden's petition of power. joe biden new this and did nothing to stop it and he lied about it. i yield to chairman jordan. >> who planted the pipe bombs on january 6th? nobody seems to know. who leaked the dobbs draft

opinion? you know? the lake that led to an assassination attempt on justice kavanaugh? how about this one? who left cocaine at the white house? the biden administration does not have time to answer these questions. they are too busy investigating school board meetings, labeling catholics extremists, and they are too busy putting together a sweetheart deal for hunter biden. a deal that got laughed out of court. and the guy who got laughed out of court, that is the guide they named special counsel. you know what democrats do have time for? going after president trump. they have been doing it for eight years. they spied on his campaign. then it was the mother investigation. 19 lawyers. 40 agents. $30 million and found nothing. than it was impeachment. then it was rate his home. then it was the 14th amendment. the party of democracy said we are going to keep that guy who

is leading in every single pole. the ranking members said, president trump should be disqualified from even running for office. thank goodness we have a supreme court. they disagreed with the ranking member and the democrats. 9 to 0. not 5-4. not 6-3. not 7- 2. they disagreed. now they say how dare republicans investigate joe biden. how dare they look into the money, the business, and the brand. millions of dollars as the chairman said -- millions of dollars from foreign entities run through 20 different companies for what? i mean, 20 different companies? devon archer told us what it was for. access to the brand, and the brand was joe biden. the brand that played rounds of golf, tended lunches and dinners with hunter biden and

his business partners, the brand that said -- the brand that conditioned $1 billion of american tax money on the firing of the prosecutor pressuring the company hunter biden sat on the board of, and, oh, by the way, was getting paid $100 billion a year. we are going to learn more about that brand and what they call the biden list. we will learn about the plausible deniability that jim biden talk to mr. bob linsky about and we will hear about the statement, the rule and how the business operated around joe biden. the rule that said, say it, forget it, write it, regret it. i want to thank our witnesses for coming here today. they, like the whistleblowers who came to the ways and means committee, are doing it simply because they want the american people to have the truth. i yield back. >> the chair now recognizes the ranking member for 12 minutes for his opening statement. >> mr. chairman, thank you very

kindly. 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 at. in prior hilarious episodes of this long-running madcap series, america got to see the following. one, nearly 20 packed witnesses who cannot 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 palace business ventures. two. three expert witnesses called by the majority itself who said nothing that they have seen in the tens of thousands of pages of documents introduced by the majority, even remotely approach the level of a high crime and misdemeanor. bank records which show exactly what all the witnesses told us.

that joe biden was not involved in his family members' businesses. repeated displays of pornographic images completely irrelevant to any conceivable or investigative purpose. it turned out to be a chinese agent in a chinese arms trafficker on the run from american justice, and the key piece of evidence which launched the entire zany goose chase in which the fbi recorded a completely fictional tip about a $5 million bribe to vice president biden pedal by alex murdaugh, who has been criminally appointed by a trump appointment attorney for billiken counts of consistently lying for constructing a false record about joe biden and now sits in jail in california as a flight

risk while the road studies his long-standing and extensive ties to russian intelligence. today, the good chairman and his ace maga detectives have finally jumped the shark. it comes to an end as more than a dozen biden districts baig for mercy in the hail mary passes three weeks after the super bowl is over. today, we revisit the fruitless testimony of two more star witnesses who have failed to testify to any presidential wrongdoing, much less any evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors. both the majority witnesses would be business partners who try to leverage the biden name with the biden brand as they keep calling it, but they never got any business off the ground for reasons that will become painfully obvious to anyone watching the proceedings today.

even hunter biden laboring at the time under a serious substance abuse addiction could tell these were not the type of people he should be doing business with.'s are rather than representing the biden brand, which was their ardent wish, they now shop today as loyal servants of trump world, each one proudly represented by their own former trump white house attorney. the first is mr. bob linsky, but fairly disappointed want to be hunter biden business partner whose history includes unsuccessfully suing his own dying father palace charity for nearly $1 million. and just last month through cassidy hutchinson through $10 million after reported to mr. bobalinsky wearing a mask which has now been actually backed up with actual documentary photo evidence, something in very short supply in this investigation. mr. bobalinsky made his hazy allegations against the bidens public for the first time at a

press conference choreographed by the trump for president campaign which provided him a gaggle of journalists and even a dress shirt that they went out and bought for him to wear to the event. hours later, mr. bobulinski points to the second 2020 presidential debate as donald trump 's personal guest where he was seated with kid rock and mark meadows. the other star witness who is appearing by zoom today is a surreal fraudster and convicted con man. a term i would surely not use on a witness except it was explicitly bestowed upon him by not one but two different u.s. federal court judges including the one who sentenced him to over 15 years in prison for defrauding union pension funds, a native american tribe, and scores of investors. they were to pay institutions

of nearly $80 million to his victims. that is a lot of money. that is what donald trump was sentenced to pay to e. jean carroll for in that civil litigation. the claims against the biden family appear, check this out, in the clemency petition he sent from prison to president trump. but the key point is this. even if we were to believe every single word uttered by these utterly compromised witnesses, mr. bobulinski, mr. clemons, their allegations do not clarify any wrongdoing much less a teachable and fenced by president biden. with the impeachment running on empty, our geo colleagues are now preparing to stay faced by ending the impeachment sparks with criminal referrals. but criminal referrals require evidence of crime. and the only crimes we have

seen are those of the gop's own star witnesses alike russian asset alex murdaugh, chinese agent so law, devon archer, and jason alanis. the minority witness today, our witness, casts a piercing light on what is really taking place here. and he has reason to note that he too used to be a maga peddling lies and disinformation to smear joe biden. today, he joins a long line of self exiled from trump world who could no longer stomach all the corruption. people like cassidy hutchinson. people like michael cohen. sarah matthews. melissa griffin. general james mattis. the chair of the joint chiefs of staff mark malley. general john kelly. and now vice president mike pence who refuses to endorse

the president, the men he served with. but we do have will stick offense still in the room and i look for to hearing their testimony about how they got sunk into this religious cult. chairman comer and me a remarkable letter on july 23rd 2023. this is the first time i am meeting him today. he was rudy giuliani's right- hand man. his globetrotting business partner and language interpreter in the mission to manufacture ukraine and dirt and smears against joe biden in 2018 and 2019. he spent all his time traveling around the world and trying to stage evidence against joe biden. in his letter, he explains that the desperate search to find evidence of any kind of biden corruption was a complete and total bust.

because there was no evidence to find. he wrote that not only is there no evidence in ukraine that joe biden did anything improper, but more darkly the manic search for a smoking gun against biden became a mission to invent and concoct evidence out of thin air with the active help of russian intelligence assets and agents. again, russia. you have not heard anything yet, mr. chairman. a man who has reckoned with his own descent into trump's world, he is ashamed of what he did to serve the interests of russian propaganda and putin's lies. and he wants america to know the truth. he can explain how the russians stimulated conspiracy theories and lies that he promoted with rudy giuliani live on in the tiresome fabrication spread by alex murdaugh and now repeated by this committee like pavlov's dog. at every turn, my colleagues

cry russia hoax, even in the face of repeated warnings from donald trump's own treasury secretary and secretary of state. for the intelligence community. from robert mueller. most recently from special counsel white to his name to office by donald trump. as secretary mnuchin stated, quote, russian disinformation campaigns targeting american citizens are a threat to our democracy. secretary mnuchin, someone that you guys usually defend but my gop colleagues continue to cry russia hoax like cult member selling flowers at the airport. our college are the ones literally amplifying the actual russian hoax. not the russia hoax. the russian hoax. the ones that giuliani and trump and smirnoff have eagerly adopted from putin and his agents. they participate in this hoax while they shamefully block $60

billion in military assistance to president zelensky and the besieged ukrainian people five years after trump and giuliani tried to shake present zelenskyy down for counterfeit dirt on joe biden. and while they continue to pair it with these transparent russian eyes, vladimir putin wages his bloody aggressive war in ukraine filled with atrocities like the mass kidnapping of children and the rape and slaughter of civilians. the maga right adopted of this russian hoax and the sellout of the people by the right is a historic betrayal of democracy, right, and the rule of law. the defense of democracy begins with the truth and the oversight democrats, america's truth squad, against this disinformation is here today to set the record straight. i yield back to you, mr. chairman. >> i would now like to

introduce our witnesses. mr. tony bobulinski. he was a business partner of hunter biden and a joint venture energy the efc. he sat with the committee on fairbury 13th, 2024. mr. lev pariness. he was not a associate of the biden family. he is a associate of political activists and an author. and mr. jason galanous. he stood for a transcribed interview with this committee operate 23rd 2024. we asked the bureau to make him available in person today. they would only provide mr. galanous for virtual testimony. notably, mr. galanous went for a approval process on june

9th 2023. on june 12, 2023, i issued a subpoena to devon archer for testimony put on the following day, mr. galanis's approval was reversed after a department of justice intervention. so mr. galanis has remained in a federal prison facility. he is currently in montgomery, alabama. mr. galanis, can you please state who else is in the room with you? >> my counsel and mark and nicholas. >> thank you. pursuant to committee role 9g, the witnesses will soon rise and raise their hands. do you solemnly swear and affirm that the testimony you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? so help you god? let the records show that the witnesses all answered in the affirmative. thank you. you may now all be seated.

we appreciate you all being here today and look forward to your testimony. let me remind the witnesses we have read your statements and they will appear. please limit your oral statements you five minutes. as a reminder, please press the buttons on the microphone in front of you so it is on and members can hear you. when you begin to speak, the light in front of you will turn green then it will turn yellow and when the red light comes on your five minutes is expired and we will ask that you please wrap it up as quickly as possible. i will now ask mr. bobulinski for his opening statement. >> should i allow hunter to give his opening statement first? >> we will laugh. it does not appear that hunter biden has appeared for the public hearing so thank you. >> ranking members and members of congress, good morning. thank you for this opportunity to speak with you and present

my truthful testimony to the american people. i sit here under oath for one reason and one reason only. the american people deserve to hear the truth. the truth involving the deep corruption of the biden family including the malfeasance of the president of the united states may be raw and i'm present but the can people must hear it. they must hear two narratives. a false one pushed by joe biden, a serial liar under this investigation for public corruption. his brother, jim biden, a 75- year-old man who cannot keep his lies straight, including under oath, and his son, hunter biden, a chronic drug addict basing 12 counts. you also have before you the truth confirmed by multiple biden family business partners over the years and backed up by text messages, emails, documents, recordings. i am the only biden family business partner with an impeccable military record. i am grateful that this company has given me the success to be

independent. i've taken several businesses public and sold multiple businesses to some of the world's best private equity firms. in fact, my business success is what they have sought me out four. i am here today because i am a patriot and i am a truth teller. we keep hearing from certain corners that our democracy is at risk and our democracy is on the ballot in '24. yet the certain people preaching this mantra no better. they continue to lie directly to the american people without hesitation and remorse. then goldman and jamie raskin, both lawyers, and mr. goldman, a former prosecutor from new york, will continue to lie today in this hearing then go straight to the media to tell more lies. hunter biden's defense attorney weapon iced his letters to congress to type two spear my name -- >> mr. chairman? mr. chairman? >> to save his powerfully connected friends. made those claims so he can be

held accountable for his lies. hunter biden of the united states so and the technology officer. >> i apologize for the disruption. am i supposed to say? but, please, mr. bobulinski, please , come to order. mr. bobulinski. mr. bobulinski. please proceed. please proceed. i apologize for the disruption from the minority. >> mr. chairman, he called members of this committee liars and i want to know whether the order and decorum garments of house rule 11 apply to witnesses appearing before the committee. doesn't apply or does it not? >> should i address? i don't know?

there is decorum from the members. there is decorum from the members. we have asked for that. thank you. make sure we didn't. i just want to restate -- make sure the american people here all these acts. he will his letters to congress to try to smear my name and misstate the cold hard facts in an attempt to state his powerfully connected client and his father. i challenged mr. noll to make those claims a national television so he can be held accountable for his lies. prior to my successful business career, i was an officer for over six years in the united states navy's elite naval

nuclear training command is a decorated master training specialist. he later served as the commander's chief technology officer right held a security clearance from the department of energy and the nsa. when i left nuclear power training command, i was the number one ranked direct officer in the entire command and then i jumped into the business world and public markets. i have made a few contributions over the years, but why do democrats such as representative ro khanna -- i don't see him but i hope he shows up today. he sits on the democratic side of the oversight committee. i am not a political person. i come from a family of long service in our nation's military put in my father, both of my grandfathers, and my brother, all of whom were willing to sacrifice their lives for this great country. my sister has served the military for two decades at the veterans administration. we have lived our life as a family and service to this great country. i hope the american people will pay close attention to this hearing. i also hope that some members of this committee will engage

in absurd attacks and efforts to try to deflect attention from the facts, and i will present today by questioning my integrity and my patriotic duty. you may see me speak passionately at this hearing but for good reason. not only was i willing to die for this country, but every single male member of my immediate family was willing to die for this country. i went to be crystal clear. from my direct personal x-rays and what i've subsequently come to learn, it is clear to me that joe biden was a brand being sold by the biden family. his family's foreign influence peddling operation from china to ukraine and elsewhere sold out to foreign actors were seeking to gain influence and access to joe biden and the united states government. joe biden was more than a participant and beneficiary of his family business. he was an active, aware and able to met with business associates such as myself to

further the business despite being buffered by a complex scheme to maintain plausible deniability. i asked this big question. if there is no evidence of corruption here today, joe's conduct and the conduct of his family were fully legal and proper, then why are they so dishonest about it? not just light misrepresentations of fact, but deep untruths about the entire corrupt enterprise. hunter biden gave his transcribed interview on fairbury 28th and lied throughout his testimony. his is one egregious example of hunter's perjury. he lied to the committee on important details concerning his money demands and threats to cfc and text messages on july 30th and 31st, 2017. he leveraged his father's present next to him in the infamous text to strong-arm cmc to paying hunter immediately. jim biden also lied extensively throughout his transcribed interview on through 21st and perjured himself. an example of that, on page 100 of his transcript, jim was

asked specifically do you recall having a meeting with hunter biden, tony bobulinski, and joe biden? jim's response absolutely not . the committee was so shocked by his perjury that they asked him the same question multiple times, and each time he denied meeting with me and joe biden. after the committee showed him text messages confirming that i met with joe biden, hunter biden, and jim biden at the beverly hilton in may 2017, jim biden with a former u.s. attorney lawyer sitting next to him still denied that meeting took place. hunter biden in his own transcribed interview confirmed that that meeting took place. hunter confirmed his uncle perjured himself in front of this committee. i am simply here to tell the truth to the american people, and i hope each and every one of you, congressmen and women,

give you the opportunity to do that instead of focusing on russia or sparing my family's name while focusing on facts that are relevant today. i yield back. >> thank you, mr. chairman. two points. one is that i believe that mr. bobulinski went over 2:14 -- >> we will give mr. parnas equal time. >> second, we have a witness appeared remotely. i thought we were appearing -- we have a new practice with respect to that real? i know that members on our side were denied the ability to participate in hearings that were conducted in florida and mississippi and alabama. we wanted to participate by zoom. >> and i will enter that. requires to be able to testify remotely it requires a letter from me and approval from the majority leader which we have. i will enter that. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i hope you extend the same

courtesy to members of this committee when they cannot get to a hearing as in mississippi or florida. thank you very much. >> state your point. >> mr. chairman, mr. bobulinski just referred to text messages. i believe he is referring to photos of a blackberry. >> what is your parliamentary inquiry? state your parliamentary inquiry because we have a very important hearing here and we do not have time for stunts. what is your parliamentary inquiry? >> it is not a stunt. >> you don't have a parliamentary inquiry? >> the chair now recognizes mr. parnas. >> mr. chairman? >> mr. parnas? >> does the committee have the text messages? >> mr. chairman, we don't have times for games by democrats today. >> we have important witnesses here. this is credible. >> you asked for a parliamentary inquiry. you will have five minutes

whenever jamie raskin tells me it is your time to speak. mr. parnas, the chair recognizes you for equal time that mr. bobulinski has, which was seven minutes. >> thank you. hello. honorable members of congress, chairman comer, ranking member raskin, and members of the oversight committee, i am humbled and thankful be for you to show up before you today. i came to the nine states for ukraine from 1976 most of the former soviet union. my mother, father, and sister and i but the soviet union escaping anti-semitism and persecution. while in rome on route to issue, my sister and i won the most important opportunity we have ever been given. we won a u.s. green card lottery. my family came here with literally no more than the shorts on our back in hoax of rebuilding our lives in the land of freedom. i say this to you because i love this country.

from shortly after my arrest on october 9th, 2019, to now, i have been trying to share the irrefutable truth with you. the american people have been lied to by donald trump, rudy giuliani, and various cohorts of individuals in government and media position. h curated falsehoods to serve their own interest knowing it would undermine the strength of our nation. from november 2018 to october 2019, i was a key participant and witness to numerous efforts to prove that joe and hunter biden were linked to corruption in ukraine. rudy giuliani on behalf of them present donald trump test me with a mission to travel the globe finding dirt on the bidens and thus securing the 2020 election for donald j. trump. ironically, when i was arrested, my original indictment let me to the unindicted co-conspirator. we now know this individual to be pete sessions who sits on this very committee today.

today i ask you to consider the following. in nearly a year traveling the world and interviewing officials in different countries, i found precisely 0 evidence of the bidens corruption in ukraine. no credible sources ever provided proof of criminal activity. not the fbi, cia, or the nsa. respectable ukrainian official ever said that the bidens did anything illegal, including former president coach tinkle and former prosecutor general. he was offered a deal by rudy giuliani in exchange for information on the bidens. he provided none because there is none. the only information ever pushed on the bidens in ukraine has come from one source and one source only. russia and russian agents. impeachment proceedings that bring us here now are predicated on false information spread by the kremlin. everyone involved knew that they were sharing lies, from trump and giuliani saddle

diplomacy through my missions to ukraine and elsewhere, to members of a team convened for the sole purpose of investigating and damaging the bidens. everything was for the ultimate benefit of donald trump and thereby vladimir putin. i was designated the point person in every matter they pursued. i know the stories were untrue then and unto now. congressman pete sessions and then congressman devin nunes, senator ron johnson, and many others understood they were pushing a false narrative. the same goes for john solomon, sean hannity, and the media personnel particularly at fox news who used this narrative to manipulate the public ahead of the 2020 elections. sadly, they are still doing

this today as we approach the 2024 elections. we cannot separate this conspiracy from the russia ukraine were because trump has no intention to keep aiding ukraine. without the support of the united states and nato, millions in ukraine will suffer and die. if we allow russia to defeat ukraine, eventually that suffering will reach american shores. today, i admit my own wrongdoings. i have been a convicted federal election campaign and fraud crimes and serve my sentence. i will not hide that from reality that is part of my truth. despite rigorous attempts by those in power to silence me, i will be silenced no longer. thank you to the committee for allowing me to speak. i look for to answering any and all of your questions. >> thank you. the china recognizes mr. galanis for his opening statement. >> my name is jason galanis. i was a business partner of hunter biden. during the years 2014, 2015.

our business included the acquisition of a lost three firm, the $1.5 billion surviving position. our objective was to build the first five platform that would be anchored by a globally known wall street brand with apolitical name, biden. our goal that is hunter biden, devon archer, and me, was to make billions, not millions. the entire value of hunter biden's business was his family name as access to his father, vice president joe biden. in 2014, we believe that the burden enterprise would be significantly enhanced by forming a partnership with a 200 million dollars kinase financial service company. was contacted with the harvest

chairman. he was interested in this partnership because of the game- changing value of the biden family, including joe biden, who is to be a member of the burton-harvest team post vice presidency. my lawyers drafted an email for 2014 drafted from hunter biden there reflects this understanding. it states, and i quote, please also remind henry of our conversation about a board seat for a circulation of mine. we golfed without relation earlier this week and we discussed this very idea. and, as always, he remains very, very keen on the opportunity, end quote. i am certain that this phrase served a relation of mine with vice president biden. told me about this golf course conversation shortly after it happened. ultimately, hunter was following the general oath on

business deals, say it, forget it, write it, regret it. pertinent to that my recording with hunter biden and devon archer at the peninsula bar in new york were hunter took a call from his father told him things were going well and that he might need a little help getting across the finish line. it was not the only time that he spoke with his father for business reasons. i was present when hunter called his father may 4th, 2014, but did not speak. did not say hello. he was speaking with a russian oligarch and an investor and her husband, the former mayor of moscow. devon archer was also there. hunter said, quote, i am here with friends. i told you we were coming to town and we wanted to say hello. the vice president said hello, some present trees, and that he hoped they had safe travels and then said, quote, okay.

hunter responded by saying, everything is good and we are moving ahead. the vice president said something about being helpful, and hunter ended the call by saying he was going to call his father later. before that call, i heard him speaking on business matters generally. a few days after this may fourth party, and email my letter provided to this committee show that devon had confirmed that they were committed to a hard line of $10 million-$20 million in the investment banking client. in an effort to build this financial platform, engaged in lawful conduct. i saw our companies were engaged with $11 million of pension fund money whose trust i could trade. i pleaded guilty. i have had eight years in federal custody reflect on my actions. i am profoundly sorry for committing these crimes. nevertheless, as i said before, i believe the prosecutors did

not indict hunter biden on the same deal for political reasons, to spite then available documentation that partners were involved in decision-making that involved illegal self-dealing and that all of us have financially benefited from these schemes. in fact, hunter biden devon archer's company, i received $50 million of bonds from a scheme to be invested. i have offered the slightest information to the government about hunter biden's crimes, but the prosecutors have been uninterested. and my request for comment filed on december 2020 did provide information on hunter's the lability. it is pursuant to the carriers act. i applied on february fourth, 2023 and it was improved on june 9th. on june 12, this committee showed a subpoena for devon archer and that the approval on june 13th strongly objecting to

my release. i am appealing this reversal and with each stage they had a reason for my denial being changed. during this period, the period beginning in january, 2023, i was sexually assaulted by a prison stuff. he persisted in sexually harassing me for many months thereafter. i hope to be removed from danger. i felt for not being able to prevent the attacks. i was well aware that the bureau had a horrible record on these matters and i believe my disclosure had made things worse for me. unfortunately, the harassment continued until early august when everything became more threatening. i feared for my safety. i decided to seek counseling the next day on august 10th, 2023. they were upset with the events and asked to bring a

investigation, which is a reference to the prison-rape elevation act by congress. is merely escorted by a vehicle and escorted by staff to montgomery in a separate facility. i'm grateful the committee was open to these matters and i appreciate chairman jordan and comer and the signed letter. i believe a victim who had no retribution by the department of justice. i believe in putting myself in great risks for providing information on these matters concerning the president and his son. i have been treated professionally at montgomery and i want to think the coordinator anthony barnes for the help of facilitating access to my attorney prior to this interviewer. >> thank you, mr. galanis.

i want to thank all the witnesses again for being here today. we will now begin the questions . i want to remind members of both sides of the aisle, each member has five minutes. i am going to adhere to that and hit the gavel. if the question has been asked, then we will allow the witnesses time to respond but we are going to try to get in a lot of questions from a lot of members and i will begin the questioning followed by ranking member askins. again, mr. bobulinski, thank you to your service to our country. we appreciate you being here. during the 118th congress the committee has investigated joe biden's influence and peddling schemes around the world so let's start with that. mr. bobulinski, was joe biden involved with any of your business dealings with hunter biden? was he involved in his family's attempts to sell access to him? you sent out -- you set out to

form a legitimate business with the bidens and did you come to find out that the biden family had no interest in doing a business? >> i did. >> mr. galanis, are you aware of any time hunter biden used joe biden with joe biden's knowledge to benefit their business associates? >> yes. >> which business associates? >> the russian oligarch we talked about the chinese and a chinese fund manager and the ukrainian oligarch. >> now that we have established joe biden was involved in his family's business dealings let's turn to the financial records. one major point my democrat downplay is how much money they accumulated from foreign

business ventures in such a short period and we have over $24 million to the biden family and their business associates from 2014 while joe biden was vice president to 2019 and there came a time when you are attempting to raise $10 million from the chinese to pursue an actual business deal and a real one but it wouldn't be correct to say this is a $10 million deal. what did the bidens perceive the chinese business still becoming? >> they were committed to deploying billions of dollars in infrastructure projects here in the united states as well as around the world. >> what was the financial goal that you set out to achieve and was it millions or billions? >> billions. yes. billions. >> i want to turn to some of the statements joe biden made during the findings of this investigation and joe biden has

said he never interacted with his family's business associates and did he meet with you? >> he did. >> he did multiple times. >> are you aware he met with others as well? >> i am generally aware of that. >> mr. galanis, as you discussed earlier regarding yelena baturina, the russian oligarch, you were present for hunter biden with her present? correct? >> that is right. >> you also present for hunter biden's conversation with his father about a board seat on a chinese company board, correct? >> as best as i recall those discussed, yes.

>> isn't it true that when joe biden said he didn't interact with his family's business associates, that isn't true? >> i believe it would be misleading to the point of being a non-truth. >> i want to touch on the fact about the absence and hunter biden chose not to attend today's proceedings and we have given him exactly what he asked for and it is clear that hunter biden knows his testimony wouldn't withstand public scrutiny and joe biden hasn't been truthful about his participation in schemes to sell access and influence and today's witnesses will show the american people a side of the story that the president and his allies on this side of the aisle are eager to hide. mr. bobulinski, can you tell us about your meeting at the beverly hilton with joe biden ? >> the short or long version? >> long version within a minute.

>> okay. hunter biden, gym biden and joe biden were in los angeles for a variety of business discussions and joe was there to speak at a conference in may 2017. i had lunch with hunter biden at the chbteau marmont and he asked with me to meet with his father that night and set up a meeting at the beverly hilton where they hold the conference and i got there a bit early and sat with gym biden, hunter biden and we were just talking about what we were doing with the chinese and the legal documents i was working through. they coached me before joe showed up to listen and said we would keep things at a high level and not getting into a lot of details at this meeting. i do just remember that discussion generally because it struck me as odd honestly and they were sort of framing it that way and he wasn't in the white house yet and he showed up through the lobby of the beverly hilton hotel and i stood up to shake his hand. we sat down and spent 45

minutes to one hour going through my background. >> you met with him that long? >> yes. this wasn't a handshake or to death -- to second discussion about the weather but we talked about a lot of stuff. >> very good. we recognize chairman raskin. >> thank you and for the record i want to be very clear that the testimony of mr. bobulinski, he has provided zero evidence of any sort of link between hunter biden and the president as far as it relates to the business dealings. once again we are back to a hearing where no evidence is provided of any wrongdoing by the president. but it's my time, sir. i want to go back to the private deposition that you had and i was one of a handful of democrats and that private --

on the record under oath conversation he had in during that deposition i did ask you a question of which you gave a false answer and they will go back to that. i asked you specifically who got you into the presidential debate that was attended by you and others. and that was, of course, a huge moment in that campaign, and you couldn't recall and you said, "i don't recall who got me into the debate." do you remember that, sir? >> you asked me as a somebody called me directly and gave me a ticket. >> sir, i will reclaim my time, sir. what i said was and i recall my time. do you recall who actually got you into the presidential debate and you said i don't recall and you didn't remember who got you into the debate between president biden, joe biden and donald trump. >> that is not a true statement. >> you quoted, "i don't recall

who got me into the debate." it is page 102 of the transcript. i will reclaim my time and i am not asking your question right now. here, as we are shown we know that you are in the debate actually sitting adjacent and next to trump officials and when we were confronted again on this same question, if you are a guest of mr. trump at the debate, mr. bobulinski, and you quoted once the wall street journal called you out, "is the wall street journal god or something." as if this were some sort of back and you refuse to confirm you are a guest of mr. trump. i will ask you one more time if you are a gust of mr. trump at the presidential debate? >> those want the questions you asked me in my transcribed interview. >> answer the question. were you a guest of donald trump? >> it was obvious to everyone in the world.

you are asking me semantics. >> thank you. you were a guest and you answer the question. at the time you said under oath i don't recall who got me into the debate. just to be clear. i want to keep going. you also say you are not a political person yet you went to a presidential debate on the behalf of donald trump and i want to make it clear that you made numerous claims and allegations and you made them today and before. even though you are not a political person, this is also another photograph of you and you actually chose to show up at a press conference for donald trump prior to the debate because you are not a political person and did you show up for a press conference for donald trump before the debate? >> i can't qualify whether it was for donald trump. >> who invited you to the debate, donald trump you said and who invited you to the press conference? >> my lawyers coordinated things and i showed up. >> it was jason miller who it is been very clear and reported and you worked on with part of

the campaign for donald trump and here you are at a donald trump press conference and you can't remember how you got to the press conference and refused to answer how you got into the donald trump debate with joe biden and you remember speaking at the press conference? >> i do. very clearly. >> you do. do you know who jason miller? >> i do know of him. >> do you know he was a trump campaign staffer? >> you keep asking me semantical questions and you underestimate that i had three lawyers around me coordinating my travel. >> i reclaim my time. it is interesting because you show up to a pre-debate press conference in short a presidential debate invited by the person running for the presidency of the united states and you know the stakes are high but you don't know how you got to the press conference or you don't member how you got to the debate. here you are speaking at a press conference of which the

national media and how did you get to the press conference? >> i flew on a plane. >> who invited you? >> are we going in circles? >> who invited you to the press conference? >> my lawyers told me i was invited to go to tennessee and i was trying to get the truth of the facts out to the american people. at that moment in time, i recall 80 million people watched that debate. >> thank you, sir. i reclaim my time. i think it has been very clear for somebody who can't remember how we got to a donald trump debate a press conference that you are an incredible witness. thank you. i yield back. >> the chair recognize chairman of the house ways and means committee jason smith for five minutes. >> thank you. we have previously heard from two irs whistleblowers that joe biden was the brand being sold by his family members and one such example of this could be seen in a june 6 2017 message were hunter biden told a business associate that he

wasn't willing to "sign over my family's brand." or give them "the keys to my family's only asset." can you confirm, mr. bobulinski, president biden is the brand being sold by his family members? >> -- >> during his deposition, hunter biden repeatedly testified under oath that his father wasn't involved and his business in any capacity and there wasn't even a connection between his father and businesses. here is one example. "i just state for the record one more time under oath and under penalty of perjury, my father has never been involved in my business. i have never asked my father to be involved in my business. my father has never benefited from my business. i have never asked anyone or my father to do anyone or anything

for the benefit of anyone i have ever done business for." yet the ways and minis committee released a message that was provided by the irs whistleblowers showing hunter biden road on july 30 of 27, "i am sitting here with my father. and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. i am sitting here waiting for the call with my father. moreover, you testified that hunter wasn't shy about his ability to get his father on the phone. and devon archer testified there were multiple instances in which hunter placed his dad on speakerphone. and was hunter biden telling the truth when he testified under oath that his father was never involved in any of his business dealings? >> no he was not.

those are all blatant lies. >> we continue to hear claims that president biden wasn't involved in his family's business dealings and he didn't benefit from illicit business deals. however, irs special agent joe zigler provided documents 327 e- mails, many of which involve hunter biden and hunter biden's business associates. do you have any personal experience that leads you to believe that joe biden was involved with hunter biden's as soon as associates in business dealings? >> yes you do. -- yes i do. >> do you want to mention some? >> to outline how he was involved? >> yes. >> he used the word involved. if joe biden was in involved, why would he take 45 minutes out of his night and it wasn't a

10:00 a.m. meeting and it was 10:40 in the evening and he is an elderly man and flew across the country to sit with me for 45 minutes to an hour to discuss my background and the business we did with the chinese and his family's background. >> speaking of the business with the chinese. in october 2020 joe biden asserted his family had not earned money through that with the chinese and in october 2020 joe biden mentioned that. however, irs whistleblowers shared

>> basically, he wanted to go from his fraud guarantee to guaranteeing a fraud on the american people. after turning over every stone and going down every rabbit hole including interviewing him and did you ever find the smoking gun or evidence that donald trump was looking for to paste on joe biden? >> on the contrary. not only did we keep hitting that wall and not finding the smoking gun that we kept running into sources of information that was coming out of russia. >> in fact joe biden was part of a global campaign including by the united states to oppose

corruption and go after the corrupt forces in ukraine? >> yes, sir. >> what point the campaign to dig up dirt on joe biden become a campaign to spread disinformation and lies about president biden? >> at some point when we hit a few brick walls, all of a sudden i saw the shift between the blt group which included john solomon, the media personality and rudy giuliani and other trump lawyers to try to start to push narratives that weren't validated and we had no way to validate them and, basically, a letter would come over from somebody in ukraine and i would handed over to john solomon and the next thing you know he was on fox tv a few hours later was sean hannity. >> at what point did mr. giuliani work directly with russian agents and russian assets, individuals who would later become sanctioned by

donald trump's own treasury department for spreading propaganda and disinformation against joe biden? >> it was sometime maybe may or june of 2008. >> was mr. giuliani aware that he was basically doing the bidding of vladimir putin? >> absolutely. >> so we had no hesitation about spreading lies that were concocted by russian agents? >> as long as it fit the narrative, absolutely not. >> how are you and rudy giuliani able to take these false allegations peddled by corrupt officials and russian agents and promote and amplify them here in the united states in our political system? warned media groups skeptical of your claims? >> most media groups, i would probably say all except for fox and a few other right wing media groups didn't want to take any of that information and that aggravated rudy giuliani and john solomon and

other players and the main one that pushed it through was fox with sean hannity and other media personnel. but there were other people doing the bidding for the russians like senator ron johnson in congress or pete sessions who sits are now who was with me from the very beginning on this journey and finding out to dig up dirt on joe biden. >> is putin's war in ukraine, which has cost hundreds of thousands of people's lives is that part of the russia hoax? >> absolutely not. >> is it real? >> yes. absolutely. >> i will ask you a personal question if i might because in my several years living through this extraordinary period of american history, mr. parnas, i have tried to ask people like cassidy hutchinson and michael cohen and i wondered people like general kelly and general millie, why did you break with all of the deceit and corruption in the lives of donald trump? how did you get out of that culture? >> i mean, it was very

difficult and i had to hit a brick wall myself and get arrested to be able to get out of that cult because when you're in that cult and around them, you have blinders on and you are only able to see a certain of information and see that. you are not allowed to go out on the outside of that circle and if you do, then you are not in the circle. eventually, you brainwash yourselves to believing certain things that aren't true and when i was arrested i was able to have some time to reflect and understand what was going on and i started realizing looking back and thinking back to moments in time where i started thinking to myself that this can't be true and we are doing something wrong. >> thank you for telling the truth and helping america to end this nightmare. >> the chair recognizes the chairman of the house judiciary committee jen jordan. >> the ranking member just said that joe biden was opposed to corruption. really? so opposed to the leveraged $1

billion of american tax money to fire the prosecutor in ukraine who was investigating the company hunter biden sat on the board of. wow and the one who replaced him that he represents guess what he did. he took him off the wanted list and dropped the charges and he is really opposed to corruption. who is the big guy? are you sure because -- >> i am 1000% sure. >> when hunter biden did his deposition under if he said i don't know who it is even though he was copied on an email that said it will hold for the big guy and are you sure the big guy is joe biden? >> 1000%. there are other messages that back that up and that they have produced and not from my blackberry i took screenshots from but they took them from subpoenas directly from apples icloud that backup the fact

that hunter knew the big guy was joe biden. >> the big guy is the brand in the lift and the one who set up the golf outings and took phone calls and meetings and lunches and dinners and hunter biden and his business associates? is that right? >> correct. >> you referenced in your opening statement that may 4, 2014 your at a party at a restaurant in brooklyn and can you tell me who else was there? >> yes. it was a birthday party so more than 100 people there but among them was devon archer, myself, the host, yelena baturina and her husband and -- >> i think you referenced a phone call that took place but tell the committee what happened with that phone call. who was involved in that phone call? >> as i testified it was yelena

baturina , her husband, myself and hunter initiating it, joe biden on the speakerphone and devon archer. >> there was a little pull aside but that group of people you described and hunter biden called his father the vice president? is that accurate? >> it is accurate. >> tell me what was discussed on that call. >> it was roughly a short discussion but allegedly they came to town and as they testified they talked about being good to his boy and -- >> let me ask you this. did you get the impression that joe biden was expecting the call? >> yes. to me was set up and it was an arranged call. >> this was correlated.

hunter biden calls his father, then vice president, and in your deposition he said this, "i am here with my friends that i told you were coming to town." so it is our friends and told you is going to happen so that would suggest it was coordinated? is that accurate? >> it is accurate. yes. >> to the -- tell the committee who yelena baturina is . >> a russian billionaire and wife of the former mayor of moscow who served as over 20 years. >> she is the wealthiest woman in russia and she had already given money to hunter biden and his business before this meeting in may and subsequent to that she committed to give more money and is that accurate? >> it is accurate. >> subsequent to the arranged call hunter biden had with the vice president of the united states and the wealthiest woman

in russia commits to give millions of dollars more to hunter biden's business and is that all accurate? >> that is accurate. >> again, this was a pull aside done at this meeting and you do know it was coordinated. is this what they call access to the brand? access to the biden lift? is that what you would describe it as, mr. galanis? >> i don't think there was any doubt that was the intent of the call, the objective. >> it followed the statement that you all agreed to to say it, forget it, write it, regret it and this wasn't put in writing but it was a phone call on a speaker and there is no writing about this and it was all done this way and that was how the business operated? is that correct? >> yes. >> i yield back. >> the gentleman yields back in the chair recognizes mr. lunch

from massachusetts for five minutes. >> i want to make an observation. i have been on this investigating committee for over 20 years and as an attorney before that i had sufficient training and experience to say that with high confidence that 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 then you have in so much and laying a glove on president biden and we hear about the biden family and when you hear somebody say the biden family, that translates into we have no evidence on the presidents so we will use the biden family to try to implicate president biden. but by the constant bumbling and continually shifting arguments here, you have done nothing more than exonerate president biden. we heard initially for months, we heard about the hunter biden

laptop. and there were absolutely some embarrassing photographs on that and some awful information about hunter biden's personal life. i will admit that. and then you bring in your own witnesses and your own legal experts before this committee and have them testify. what they said was amazing. they said it was no evidence to even suggest that there was support for articles of impeachment against the president and that was your legal experts, the republican legal experts that said that. and then we have statements by mr. jordan saying that mr. smirnoff was the most corroborating witnesses -- witness that the republicans had, the strongest witness that they had. of course, after that, we find

out through the trump appointed prosecutor that all of the information that mr. smirnoff had provided was fabricated, false and submitted by the inducement of russian agents. going after president biden and trying to undermine our democratic system. and now we come to a point where since that witness blew up now we are going to prison and we are reaching out to witnesses who have been convicted and sentenced to prison for stealing $80 million from the pensions of innocent workers. we can't get any lower at this point. that is your star witness.

i want to remind people that he is sitting in prison. that is why he can't be here today. he is sitting in prison for scamming workers pensions. i mean, how low can you get? and then it is the republicans idea that this is the best guy they can get to testify. this is against the president. this is the best guy they can get. a guy sitting in prison and can't even be here. mr. parnas, you have talked about your own direct involvement with mr. giuliani. you said your mission was to dig up dirt on president biden. can you talk to us about the coordination between yourself and mr. giuliani. thank you for being here. >> thank you. basically, it was a shadow diplomacy run by trump and giuliani where he was the secretary of state and i was

his right hand and basically the point person in ukraine to not only dig up, validate, search or whatever needed to be done to try to find some corruption against joe or hunter biden to be able to present. once i would receive whatever information i received, i would then meet with him, john solomon and other members of the team like pete sessions and carvey and other people there to discuss what we found and then at that point giuliani would go to the white house and share with the president and that was the line of communication. >> you said also with your testimony that members of this committee and republican leadership should've known before mr. smirnov was indicted that this information was fabricated about president biden and can you talk about that. >> not that they should've known but they did know and they know exactly what was going on and they knew the evidence was not vetted and this information was just coming in anywhere from left to right field and being pushed straight to the halls of

congress without zero vetting. >> chairman, my time is expired and i yield back. >> before recognize mr. palmer, i want to enter into the record of the testimony of tony bobulinski with the committee on february 13 of 2024 which corrects the record of representative garcias who didn't provide the entire testimony and on page 147 you told the committee about your understanding of who invited you to the events referenced by mr. garcia. without objection, i want to enter into the record the entire transcribed interview of tony bobulinski. >> i want to enter an article from the daily beast . >> okay.

without objection. the chair recognizes mr. palmer from alabama for five minutes. >> i do have very limited time, mr. bobulinski and wants to get through a lot of information so please answer these questions with a yes or no if you don't mind. you have met joe biden? >> correct. >> you had a meeting with joe biden? is that correct? >> two of them. >> one of them was before a conference in la in may 2017? >> it was during that conference. >> you provided a great deal of documentation to that committee and i want to show you messages between you and hunter biden in may 2017 before you first had a meeting with joe biden. these are messages between you and hunter biden dated may 2 of 2017 and do you recognize these? >> i do. >> at the bottom hunter biden wrote dad not in now and let's meet at 10 at the beverly hilton where we are staying and gym is james biden, president biden's brother? >> correct. >> the next set if you put this on the screen is between another business associate and his name is james and you recognize that? >> i do. >> at the type you right about

to meet hunter, gym and i guess joe at the beverly hilton and joe is now president and is that correct? >> correct. >> this chat between you and gym biden, joe biden's brother, you write to gym great to meet you and spend some time together and please thank joe for this time and it was great to talk. thanks, tony. you met with joe biden, gym biden and hunter biden the night before that conference in 2017? >> i did and gym biden perjured himself by trying to deny that. >> that was at the beverly hilton, correct? >> correct. >> you can provide more details around that and what was the purpose of that meeting? >> i didn't ask for the meeting so i wish hunter biden was sitting next to me. he could under oath describe it. the only reason why i met with joe biden. and the only reason i was there is because i was the ceo of the enterprise that they were

putting together of the chinese company cfc. >> can you give me a little bit more detail about what was discussed? >> as i said earlier before joe biden showed up hunter and gym biden coached me and outlined that you wouldn't go into a lot of details. so through that 45 to 60 meeting -- minute meeting i had at about 10:40 p.m. after he flew across the country, we talked about my background and my family's military background in the different business ventures i did around the world and the family i worked with. joe spent time talking about his family and tragedies they have lived through. and then, at a high level, hunter actually introduced me to joe. before joe came and sat down with us, hunter said, give me 9:55 minutes and i need to read my father in on it. >> when you reference joe and hunter's father, you are referencing joe biden? >> i am. >> these four images -- in this message you sent, you said you

spent more time with joe and gym this morning -- jim and that's his brother and also last night these images show a pretty clear record of your meeting with joe biden in may 2017, mr. bobulinski and hunter biden testified that the meeting did in fact take place and after being asked did mr. bobulinski meet with your father during the trip and hunter said he met with them in the lobby at the hotel and when asked who attended he replied he and myself. but when asked whether the meeting at the beverly hilton between joe biden, gym biden he testified absolutely not and these stories don't match up. jim biden said he didn't meet the chinese businessmen and rob walker said the opposite. so, it appears to me there are

material inconsistencies between the witness's testimony. and the witnesses statements appear to me to be irreconcilable and in short, sir chairman, somebody appears to be lying to the committee and the inconsistent testimony seems to come from jim biden the presidents brother and lying to congress is a serious offense and criminal in fact and if the biden's or anybody else have come before this committee and lied, i strongly encourage the committee to pursue criminal referrals to the department of justice and one last thing that i will ask. and, mr. bobulinski or mr. galanis, have you heard for an offer of a pardon or anybody involved with this? >> i am sorry. >> have you heard of anyone being suggested that a pardon may be in order for anybody associated with this enterprise? >> i have not. >> thank you both. i yield back.

>> i have a parliamentary inquiry. >> we heard for months now and we have seen the photo of the black very with the cracked screen and is the committee have in the possession the data from the phone of mr. bobulinski from which he has allegedly taken these pictures ? i think we need the data they are referring to and maybe he can just turn it over to us or we can subpoena it today. >> we have the images we have shared with you. >> i saw the picture of the cracked blackberry but do we have the underlying texts that are being referred to by our friend, mr. palmer? >> mr. bobulinski happily said he would turn over his phone. >> we have pictures of all of the screenshots we provided with everybody on the committee. >> okay. of course, he is giving us the ones he has selected. i am wondering whether we could get all of those text messages and i move the committee would

subpoena his blackberry phone on which messages with hunter biden and the holding partners are saved and he stated he is willing to provide it to the committee so it should be simple. >> mr. chairman? >> there is a motion to subpoena the blackberry of mr. bobulinski. >> second. >> the chair recognizes mr. jordan. >> there is a motion to table -- the motion to table is not debatable. they may signify by saying aye and all of those opposed you can signify by saying no. >> in my opinion the aye have it. >> we are tabling evidence on which this is relied on. >> a recorded vote is ordered.

we will suspend for a moment and this is a committee hearing and we don't have a clerk in will somebody go find the clerk. >> did he say under oath? >> mr. speaker. mr. chairman. mr. minority leader, do you think it is possible witness would voluntarily just give it? >> i understood that mr. bobulinski volunteered when he was asked about this and it would simplify things if he just turned over the blackberry. >> he did very clearly say he is happy to turn over his blackberry to the committee and we then asked for it at the deposition and he didn't and we asked the majority --

>> you are out of order. we are in suspension here waiting for the clerk to come so we can take the vote that your side of the aisle requested. >> you can't make this stuff up. >> you can't. >> this is jurassic park. >> mr. ranking member. >> you are out of order and you can come back here and talk to him if you want. >> mr. chairman? mr. chairman? >> yes.

>> you will have to come up and you will as well. sorry.

>> mr. chairman, just an invitation of regular order and we have clerks faithful to the rule of law and can do this if you are waiting for clerk's and we are are all here to watch and if you want to conduct the vote with the democratic clerks we can do it. >> a recorded vote is ordered and the clerk will call the roll. >> mr. jordan votes yes. mr. turner. mr. ghosts are. ms. fox. mr. grossman. he votes yes.

mr. cloud. mr. cloud votes yes. mr. palmer. mr. palmer votes aye. mr. higgins. mr. higgins votes yes. mr. sessions. mr. sessions votes aye. mr. biggs. mr. big -- biggs votes aye. mr. mason votes aye. mr. turner votes aye. mr. fallon . mr. donald's. mr. donald's votes yes. mr. perry. mr. timmons. mr. timmons votes aye.

ms. green. ms. green votes aye. ms. mclean. ms. mclean votes aye. mr. fry. mr. fry votes aye. ms. luna. mr. langworthy. mr. langworthy votes aye. mr. burlison. mr. waltz. mr. waltz votes aye. mr. raskin. no . mr. raskin votes no. ms. norton. mr. lynch. mr. lynch votes no. sister connelly. mr. connelly votes nay.

he votes no. mr.,. no. >> he votes no. rep. ocasio-cortez. rep. ocasio-cortez votes nay. ms. porter. ms. busch. ms. brown. ms. stansbury. mr. garcia. mr. garcia votes no. mr. frost. ms. lee. ms. lee votes no. mr. cassara. mr. cassara votes no. ms. crockett votes no.

mr. goldman. mr. goldman votes no. mr. moscowitz. mr. moscowitz votes no. ms. talib votes no . ms. presley votes no. mr. chairman. >> i vote yes and how is mr. burlison recorded. >> mr. chairman votes yes and mr. burlison is not recorded. mr. burlison votes yes. >> how is ms. boberg recorded. >> ms. barbara does not recorded. >> ms. boebert votes aye. >> mr. turner is not recorded. mr. turner votes aye. >> how is mr. frost recorded ? >> mr. frost is not recorded. >> mr. frost votes no. >> how is mr. fallon recorded?

>> mr. fallon is not recorded. mr. fallon votes aye. >> how's ms. porter recorded. >> ms. porter is not recorded. >> ms. porter votes no. >> will the clerk tally the report. >> mr. chairman, on this vote it is 21 for 23 and then a 16. >> the ayes has it.

we recognize mr. connelly. >> thank you. in your deposition, mr. bobulinski, you're asked about taking a picture with your phone. you said, and i quote i still have that phone and i could put that on the table right here. every person in this room could look at that individual text and validate that it is a legitimate text and the date and time stamp on it. are you willing to provide the committee voluntarily with a black very referenced in that phone? >> i am willing to sit in a room with both the chairman and the ranking member with my phone and their staff and we can go through each and every text message and as i said in my interview, i had a forensic expert plug into my black very and somebody who has done extensive work with the fbi for over 10 years with an interest of pulling all the data off of that phone so i could provide it to the committee. unfortunately, they were using a software that the fbi uses and they were unable to pull the data off the phone. but i am more than willing to sit down with the mr. chairman and the ranking member and their staff with that black

very fully charged. we can go through each and every message of that. >> that is some progress, and i appreciate that but you can understand i am sure why the committee wants to look at this evidence on its own. excuse me. this is my time. you can understand why we would want to look at evidence, raw and unvarnished so we can make our own determination, but thank you for your willingness to cooperate at least at that level. mr. parnas, you observed back in 2023 in a letter you sent to chairman comber -- comer that giuliani was interfering in politics and why would he be interfering in another country's politics? >> because he would do and say whatever he needed for the purpose of getting the information he wanted to secure

donald trump 2020 election. so just a prime example of one of the things he did is he had a close relationship with then the mayor in ukraine and when the new president came over there was rumors about me be him not being or staying in office as mayor of ukraine and he flew to new york and met with rudy giuliani and then the meeting we had with andre in spain relevant but had to do with president zelenskyy announcing the investigation and he also brought up the situation with president zelenskyy got rid of him he would be very upset about that because we love him and he needs to be in there. >> so was rudy giuliani just doing this as a rogue on his own because of his patriotic american who loves donald trump or had somebody encouraged him to engage in this kind of political indifference in

another country? >> i think he was encouraged by donald trump. >> personally. >> that is your testimony. >> in your letter you also said that mr. giuliani was to "deliver a precise message and very strict words.". and with respect to the administration of the then newly installed president of ukraine, president zelenskyy. what did you understand a very strict message or a message a very strict words construed, and what was that message that you delivered that was in very strict words? >> yes. he basically told me not to be nice and to be very stern and relay a message unless president zelenskyy announced an investigation by monday and this was sunday that there would be no cooperation and no aid to ukraine from the united states and the vice president,

vice president pence, scheduled to appear before the inauguration would not appear for the inauguration. >> that would seem to corroborate that beautiful and famous telephone conversation between president trump and president zelenskyy basically saying, but i need a favor. and hinting that they are -- there would be withholding of aid until that favor was delivered. is that fair? >> absolutely. i was a part of setting up that famous phone call, that famous phone call he had with president zelenskyy. >> i think your testimony is very important, and it is under oath. >> the chair recognizes ms. taylor green from georgia for five minutes. >> joe biden continues to lie to the american people about his role and his family's business. in 2020 he stood up on stage of a presidential debate and told the american people that his family didn't take any money

from china. that was a lie. not only was it a lie, he knew it was a lie. he knew it because he met with his son, hunter biden's, chinese business associates. i want to talk about the china energy fund committee. mr. bobulinski, who is the chairman? >> he was the chairman of it. >> gym biden -- jim biden told the irs that he was the protigi of the president of china and the chinese communist party and, mr. bobulinski, rob walker told this committee that joe biden met the chairman and are you aware of that? yes or no. >> i am now but i am -- was not at the time. >> he also met with you is that right? >> he did. >> who is the director? >> he was the number two there.

>> the executive director? >> the number two executive but really the point person that i worked with and the biden family worked with and the individual that hutton by -- hunter biden was shaking down at the end of july demanding that they fund the $10 million and they ultimately sent 5 million but 10 million directly to hunter biden's account. >> thank you, mr. bobulinski. i want to show you a text message that hunter biden sent to you and his other business associates and i am holding it and i will read it to you. "hey, tony. i have an idea. in light of the fact we are at an impasse of sorts and both james lawyers in my chairman gave an emphatic no we should all meet in romania." he is speaking about my chairman and when hunter biden came in for his deposition, he said he was referring to chairman e and they were affected to him as a different

chairman. >> that was a lie and i never heard the director reference as chairman and i had communications with the director over we chat and meta- myth romania and met him around the world trying to develop this business and he was never referred to as the chairman, first of all. second of all, it makes absolutely no sense in the context of this message because we are discussing oneida holdings, llc. >> thank you. he was not the chairman, just to clarify. >> right. >> i want to show you another text. when he said his chairman, he was talking about his dad and this is from rob walker and it didn't seem to make much sense to him. when hunter was talking about his chairman he was talking about his dad. when rob walker came in to give is transcribed interview to the committee he basically said,

hunter was high or confused or mad and rob walker said he was just trying to calm things down between you and hunter, but that doesn't answer the question about who hunter biden is talking about. hunter biden lied to this committee. so here clearly he says and rob walker is saying he is talking about his dad. i wanted to be clear. we establish that he is not the chairman and is that correct? >> yes. >> let me show you another message. this message doesn't call him that does it. it just says that the chinese want to do business with them and as a matter of fact it said both coming to be my partner and to be partners with the bidens with an s and he has implied that the number one has made it clear and available to him. who is the number one? >> the number one is xi jinping. >> the president of china?

>> yes. >> the leader of the communist party, the ccp is the number one? >> yes. that is the number one that hunter was referencing in that message. >> now, let's be clear and this was in 2017 but i would like to make it known for this committee that joe biden told the press in 2016 as a matter of fact and i quote, yes, i am. i am going to run in 2020 and he told the press that he was running for president of the united states in 2020. so here are the bidens doing business in china and 2017 when everybody knew he was planning to be president of the united states and do you see that to be a serious problem? >> i do. i wish this committee would thoroughly investigate it and focus and all of the evidence that they have on it and they had warrants so they were

recording conversations and i wish they disclose that in this committee. i yield. >> >> rudy giuliani task you with a mission to travel the globe to find dirt to damage the bidens imitation in the 2018 2019 timeframe and this was an effort to secure trump's reelection for 2020 as president, right? >> correct. >> by dirt you mean evidence of wrongdoing or criminality? >> yes, sir. >> in your travelers you or cri >> yes sir. >> in your travels you found "precisely 0 proof of the bidens criminality." >> correct. >> there was no evidence of corruption in ukraine because you said, there truly was none. >> correct. >> interestingly, you have looked for dirt around the

world about the bidens, joe biden in particular. you say the f.b.i., c.i.a. and nsa have failed to produce any evidence of criminal wrongdoing. >> correct. >> former ukrainian president stated "there is not a single word of truth to these allegations about joe biden." >> absolutely. >> there is a guy named, the former prosecutor general of ukraine. he also "confirmed that nothing ties the bidens to criminal activity in ukraine." >> correct. >> another prosecutor general also said, he conceded "he had no evidence that either joe or hunter biden had ever interfered with ukrainian law." >> yes sir. >> the reason you know this is because you talked to each of these people. >> yes sir. >> your job was to try to dig up dirt or manufactured or.

>> yes sir. >> and yet, we have conducted months of hearings, and because there's been no evidence of wrongdoing, you have called this whole impeachment inquiry a "wild goose chase. >> yes sir. interestingly, we have heard from the other side that "the real quid pro quo wasn't donald trump, it was joe biden when he tried to hold that foreign aid when he was vice president in exchange for firing the federal prosecutor in ukraine that was investigating the corruption from his son. again, you looked for evidence to support this claim. there is no evidence, correct? >> correct. that was false >> in fact, firing the prosecutor would make it more likely that they would go after the company in question, burisma, not less, right? >> the ironic part is the reason why the majority of the world and ukraine and the obama administration wanted to fire, get rid of him, he was corrupt, not because he was investigating burisma, but he was stalling

investigations from the uk looking into $23 million they wanted to get. >> the logic is just the opposite of what the majority claims to be the case. namely, they say that somehow joe biden without the fire the prosecutor to reduce the chances of a prosecution of burisma, but actually in fire ring that prosecutor, he increase the chances of prosecuting burisma. >> correct. >> let me talk to you about what is of the other witnesses have said. the constitutional expert that republicans brought forward said there is no evidence of which he was aware to support impeaching the president. you agree with that, correct? >> 100%. >> a colleague of ours said just last week, "have i seen anything impeachable? no." do you agree with that as well? >> yes, sir. >> are republican colleague who

is about to retire, ken buck, said that evidence of wrongdoing by president biden "doesn't exist right now, it doesn't exist now and didn't exist then. >> that is exactly true. >> how many times have you met donald trump? >> well over 10 times, i would say. i would have to count. lots of times. >> is there anything you would like to relate to us about your conversations with donald trump that would bear on the conduct of these proceedings? >> i mean, donald trump was aware of everything that was going on on that day in the red room when we were in the white house. after rudy bringing donald trump up to speed that i could go out to ukraine and get victor shokin. donald trump shook my hand and said, thank you for all you are doing. keep up the good work. and i was off to ukraine. >> to meet with shokin. >> to bring them back here to meet with lindsey graham. thank you so much. i yield back. >> thank you, chairman.

we have heard time after time joe biden say that he had no knowledge whatsoever about the business dealings and that change. he never allegedly had any kind of conversation with hunter. then they move the ball to say, well, he didn't have any business dealings. he wasn't involved and didn't have financial contribution. since then, we haven't covered about 20 shawl companies and have bank records that bring light to that. while we can't cover all 20 show companies in five minutes, i wanted to focus on one, that is rosemont. rosemont is interesting. devon archer testified and said this in his testimony. he said that this entity "was used as a common entity owned

50/50 on a handshake deal between devon and hunter splitting the chance." actually, those were your words. you stand by those words? >> yes, i do. >> devon archer agreed with epic he said he was a corporate secretary and had a handshake deal. is that correct? >> that's correct. yes. >> primarily this company was set up to initially, as a place to hold equity from the equity stake of bohai harvests. is that correct? >> what i was told at the time was to help do that and invest in other businesses. devon archer subsequently testified to the effect. it included monies paid from the fraud, $15 million wire to the rrsp account as well. conducted multiple transactions

. >> even if this were legal and there was no impropriety here, it is very concerning, because this company is up to basically compete against america's energy interest at the behest of the ccp. then we have other flows into rosemont seneca bohai from burisma. we all know about hunter's $1 million salary he received for sitting on the board and providing no actual function. we have $1 million salary going through rosemont seneca to hunter biden. and then this is interesting, we have a meeting with the $300 at the end of the $142,000 that goes into that. the next you went to a porsche dealership for a car for hunter biden. what is interesting about all this, of course, is that each of these not only flowed money through the show companies to

hunter biden, but each of them also involved important meetings with, of course, president biden. and so, on december 4 we have coffee with jonathan lee, one of the members who started bohai harvests. he was connected with the ccp. they were having trouble getting licensed to work because, of course, the ccp has to get permission for that, until hunter flew over on air force 2 with vice president joe biden at the time. they met with jonathan lee. hunter introduced him. joe ended up writing a letter of recommendation to jonathan lee's daughter to get her into college. we see this relationship continues to be formed. in the ukraine, we know that april 16, 2015 joe biden had dinner with the burisma official at cafi milano, a popular spot, because joe biden also had dinner with their. all in slow

to we here. of course, as mr. bobulinski pointed out several times, this comes down to, eventually, the one big guy who gets 10% to the big guy. we know all this money flowed through this to get to hunter, and then we know, of course, that 10% went to the big guy. mr. bobulinski, does this general pounder -- pattern of hunter getting paid and joe getting a share that, is that basically what the general practice across many of the show companies was? >> as i outlined, the big guy is clearly joe biden. the details of some of those transactions i was not involved in, but that is clearly how they operated. >> that is the pattern. >> you said at the beginning hunter didn't really provide

any sort of intellectual propriety asset value or anything of the sort, that his entire value was the brand. is that correct? >> we didn't rely on him for any product other than delivering the biden lift. >> the biden left. will more question for you. did you offer to provide information on hunter biden and devon archer back in 2016 to prosecutors and the sec? what happened there? >> through counsel i offered to provide information specifically on that to as -- as pmi and also the security exchange commission, which was interested. somebody was told to quash that interest. i understand it was in order to quash the sec information. >> i yield back. >> time has expired. >> thank you, mr. chairman.

i only have five minutes, mr. bobulinski. i will try to move quickly, and i would appreciate if you just answer the questions. you testified that joe biden was involved in your business venture related to oneida holdings and hunter biden. i want to drill down on the crux of what your testimony is. oneida holdings is the business venture that you are referring to, correct? >> when i'm referring to what? >> any business you did with the biden's -- bidens. >> llc and oneida holdings llc owned 50% of that. >> right. oneida holdings was the 50% that was on the american side of that deal, right? >> it was a 50% that was the bidens side. summer not american. >> fair enough. it was a joint partnership

memorialized in an incorporating document. and had equal shares divided among five partners. is that right? >> asking me about what you are holding up? >> wasn't -- rather equal 25% shares among five partners in oneida holdings? >> in the final signed documents? that's what you're asking me? >> yes. not complicated. >> it is. >> you are filibustering now. i get it. there were five partners, hunter biden, jim biden, rob walker, james gill yard, and you. each owed 20%. >> the llc owned it. a material difference. >> you see joe biden or an llc related to joe biden on this? >> i don't know if joe biden owned any of the hunter or jim biden's llcs. >> do you know when this agreement was entered into?

>> the poster board or the legal document side? >> the agreement, sir. >> the agreement was signed may 22, 2017. who was the vice president then? >> may 22? it was mike pence. >> who is the president. >> donald trump. >> when did you first meet hunter biden? >> i first met hunter biden in early 2017. >> when? when in 2017. >> the day? >> the month is good. >> i believe i briefly met him in new york, but i spent -- the first meeting i had extensive time with him was in early may 2017. >> that was around the same time you have those two meetings with joe biden. >> it was, but prior to that -- >> look, you have said -- can i

please reclaim my time? we have to move quickly here. unfortunately, in your testimony earlier today, one of my colleagues asked you about that meeting at the boar 45 minutes to 60 minutes. you were also asked about that in your transcribed interview. in neither of your answers did you mention any discussion you had at that meeting with joe biden about the chinese business venture. yet in grandiose terms today you have declared that joe biden was involved, and then the that you have mountains of irrefutable evidence. let's look at the mountains of irrefutable evidence. you provided the committee with a screenshot of a text message that is between james gill yard and you dated may 11, 2017. you see this? i don't know if you can see it. if you can't, it is just you and james gill yard. you remember this i am sure. >> generally, yes. >> in it he writes, man, you're right. let's get the company set up, then tell the high-stakes and get joe involved.

two days later, he sent an email to you copying rob walker and hunter biden in which he suggested a division of the company and included a proposal of "10% held by letter h for the big guy?" you remember that? >> the infamous email what the big guy. yes i do. >> did anyone respond to that email? >> yes they did. hunter biden himself did. that is important. his claim that he didn't -- [ overlapping speakers ] >> you are going to filibuster. i would clean my time. no one responded to the big guy reference. >> thank you for making my point. they didn't have to respond because they knew the guy was joe biden. >> may i reclaim my time? please control the witness. i would like to get a little extra time, mr. chairman. i want to read what mr. mr.

gilliar said to the wall street journal. "i would like to clear up any speculation that the former vice president was involved with the 2017 discussions about our potential business structure. i am unaware of any involvement at any time of the former vice president . the activity in question never delivered and project revenue nine days later, the agreement without joe biden was signed." you and mr. gilliar wanted joe biden involve come in that is why hunter biden dumped you into the business on his own. >> you know better. >> time has expired. chair now recognizes mr. higgins from louisiana. >> thank you, mr. chairman. mr. bobulinski, thank you for being here today. we appreciate the candor of your responses, sir. it is reflective of the way you handled yourself in private testimony and deposition. i thank you for communicating truthfully to the american people today. i am going to ask you about the china energy fund committee.

are you familiar with that? >> i am. is this a multibillion dollar company like a fortune 500 company at one time? >> if you go back and look at the financials, and 2016 and 2017 it was probably one of the farge largest private companies in china. >> exactly. this was a major operation with a lot of money. apparently, i'm going to hold up a memo here, this is from the second bank memo. it shows disbursement of a total of almost $24 million for diamonds. you have a major chinese company spending a lot of money on diamonds, and apparently diamonds were used as a means of payment for the

biden family. we know that the bidens have testified and admitted to having two diamonds . we suspect there are many, many more, $23 million worth of diamonds. are you familiar with the exchange of valuable assets to pay the bidens other than electronic transfers of monies ? are you aware of payments in diamonds, payment in cash, payment in board memberships, et cetera? >> in my generally aware? >> yes. >> i read jim and hunter biden's transcript multiple times. jim biden in the transcript references two diamonds that

were given to hunter biden. one he implies was in 2015 by an individual who he could not recall his name, but the name is scott, a surrogate for cfc. a second time and apparently was given at a meeting in miami. i really want to second the record clear. i was not at that physical meeting. i was in miami, but not at that physical meeting. that is what i told the f.b.i. in my transcript interview. >> are you aware, mr. bobulinski, of a pattern of bribery payments coming from the china energy fund committee? >> i appreciate that pressure. i wish everyone on this committee would read the 1200 pages of testimony in the eight- day trial in the fdny where mr. will then used to work with the actual trial was golding on that accused numerous executives, ultimately patrick oh, of corruption, bribery to political figures in africa. >> exactly. mr. bobulinski, from your perch within the biden family

operations and their interactions with major businesses in china in exchange of millions of dollars that are known. we tracked them through bank records, suspicious activity reports, emails, communications that this committee has documented. there is no debate that millions and millions of dollars flowed into the biden family bank accounts. the existence of other forms of payment is fascinating because diamonds are untraceable. we really don't know how many diamonds biden received. >> we don't. for someone who has been to mainland china probably 10 plus times, hong kong probably 15 plus times, hundreds of people working for me in mainland

china, at one point i never got a diamond from any businessman or woman. >> i hear you. >> mr. bobulinski, a shift quickly to a text message . are you familiar with this? it is from a gentleman named james. >> generally, yes. >> it says, don't mention joel being involved . it is only when you're face-to-face. i know you know that, but they are paranoid. the response says, okay, they should be paranoid about things. and then there is a response saying, for real. what is meant by, don't mention joel being involved? it is only when you're face-to- face, i know you know that but they are paranoid? >> i think it outlines how the biden's -- bidens operated. not just specifically with cfc. you have numerous other witnesses that have given a tremendous amount of evidence

that outlined they often skated, created layers of obstruction. that is why rob walker was sent millions of dollars instead of hunter biden directly. that is why devon archer was receiving millions of dollars instead of going to hunter directly. you guys have a mountain of evidence that stacks high and answers that question on how they obfuscated and lived in a world of plausible deniability. >> thank you. mr. chairman, my time is expired. >> thank you, mr. chairman. thank you for appearing voluntarily for this hearing. i understand you are currently serving a 189 month sentence in federal prison, almost 16 years after being convicted of not one, but two, but three different schemes for the victims of your schemes, as the judge who presided over your criminal prosecution, noted included "one of the poorest native american tribes in the country, as well as pension

funds held for the benefit of transient workers, longshore men, housing authority workers, and city employees are hard- working people, every day people among others. the court also noted that you personally benefited from these schemes, and again i quote "using over $8 million, almost $9 million, for lavish personal expenditures, including home expenses, automobiles, travel, clothing, jewelry, expenses, and meanwhile, investors were left with nothing." but this is not your only encounter with prosecutors. in another case, the security and exchange commission charged that you in 2005, accounting

fraud in connection with your investment, your involvement rather, with penthouse magazine . in 2010 you were convicted of attempted tax evasion, and you were sentenced to five years probation and ordered to pay nearly $2 million in restitution. in imposing your prison sentence, the judge noted that you are "an extremely talented man, extremely gifted in his interpersonal skills, uncommonly so. he is very persuasive as an individual, and those were the tools in his tool bag of the fraud he committed and the people he ensnared, his intelligence, his interpersonal skills, his charm, if you will, and this is something that is

not unseen in people who are commonly referred to as con artists." another judge who presided over your case refer to you as "a skillful con artist." a skillful con artist, that is who my republican colleagues are relying on to carry their water in this sham impeachment inquiry after their last our witness, the author of the infamous f.b.i. form 1023, was indicted for lying and outed as a likely republican agent. it is time we put an end to this pathetic and desperate inquiry. i yield my remaining time to ranking member raskin. >> thank you very much. for more than a year now we have heard innuendo, rumors, propaganda, big lies, but no

facts. no evidence that could reasonably support the finding of impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors against president biden. in our first real impeachment hearing, the majority invited several expert witnesses who came together, and their witnesses agreed with that, there was nothing that remotely approached the level of proof needed to support a finding of high crimes and misdemeanors. and now we come back again today , and the majority has two witnesses, one, the designated conman, as determined by two different federal courts, not without talent, but someone who deploys his talent towards the purposes of exploiting native american indian tribes, pensioners and other innocent investors, and then mr. bobulinski, who offers a lot of rhetoric and hot air, but

absolutely no facts that could indict the president of the united states for high crimes and misdemeanors, impeachable offenses against the republic. the kinds of offenses which james madison said are great attacks on the republic itself. great affronts to our republic and form of government. nobody others i can even tell us the impeachable high crime and misdemeanor that suggests they're moving in the direction of criminal referrals, and they should start by looking at their own witnesses. i yield back to you, mr. chairman. >> i would like to remind the ranking member and ms. norton, the witness was partners with hunter biden. that is why he is here. we have their partners. you could have indicted -- invited partners, but you invited this guy. >> donald trump's partner, mr. parnas. and rudy giuliani. >> all right. chair recognizes. >> we have a variety of things i would like to go through. first, the complaint about mr.

galanis complaining from prison. i would like to enter into the record the department of justice 's own press release announcing the sentencing of the democrat's witness, mr. parnas, for among other things, making false statements. >> without objection. thank you. >> now, mr. chairman, we originally hope to see a few more witnesses today. they are not here. i would like to write a brief tape, because i showed up today hoping i would be asking these witnesses a little bit more about this tape. i know there is a mystery, or some people feel it is ambiguous as to how this prosecutor was fired in ukraine. i wonder if this tape could do a little bit more to shed light on why that prosecutor was fired. and why we want hunter biden and mr. archer here today. >> so i got ukraine. i remember going over convincing our team, convincing

that we should be providing for loan guarantees. i went over to my guest, the 12th or 13th time. i was supposed to announce that there is another $1 billion loan guarantee. i had gotten the commitment from porsche go that they would take action against the state prosecutor, and they didn't. they said at the press conference, we are not going to give you the $1 billion. i said, you have the authority. i am telling you, you're not getting it. you're not getting $1 billion. i will leave here, i think it was six hours, i said leaving in six hours. of the prosecutors not fired, you're not getting the money. son of a, he got fire. they put in place someone to -- >> i wanted to put that up there.

i eventually want further efforts made to get hunter biden art mr. archer here. we have joe biden, himself, bragging that they got rid of a prosecutor who would have provided his son's business dealings more observation. i will put it that way. now, mr. bobulinski, in previous interviews with this committee you said that joe biden not only knew about the family business dealings, but enabled them and participated. you went so far as to say it is clear to me that joe biden was the brand sold by the biden family. could you elaborate a little bit why you felt that way? >> correct. it is one of the challenging things i've had to deal with the last four years with the focus of just simply telling the truth my the obfuscation around the facts are just beyond insane. i will use a meeting at the four seasons hotel in washington d.c. i was not at, but apparently 8 to 10 chinese

executives of cfc were at with chairman ye and director zang. i interacted with director zang. hunter biden was in that room, rob walker. my understanding best on rob walker's testimony, is that joe biden walked in and sat down and shook hands of people and spent five or 10 minutes talking about his family, i guess. i was not in the room. people of try to obfuscate that meeting like joe biden was walking in there to ask about the weather, and rob walker said the chinese didn't even know that joe biden was the former vice president of the united states, which is beyond absurd. the power those 10 chinese individuals had to go back to mainland china and say that they were in the room with joe biden is the value of what they were giving. >> okay. you stated that the biden family concocted a scheme to give joe plausible deniability.

can you elaborate on that? >> i would just point to all the different text messages and communications. they call him the big guy. i wasn't involved with mr. galanis or mr. archer, but they are giving you data points. there was after station. they didn't use his name, they use the big guy. you were supposed to talk about it. >> you personally met with the vice president of. i did twice. >> okay. did he say anything that indicates that you wanted him to help his son? >> he thanked me for helping his son and his brother and asked me to keep an eye on them as i walked him out to his car after he gave his speech on the second meeting of the conference. >> one other follow-up. this may be a vague question, but i would like to know. one of the things that disturbs me about that is the interaction with the chinese, and obviously other countries as well, that apparently, in

their own mind, the way you deal with the united states as a way to deal with, say, a corrupt city council or something like that. in other words, you give the money and get what you want. you want to comment on that? did you hear any stories about that? did you see that it was that they were surprised how easy it was to buy the u.s. government? >> i think cfc, there is tremendous evidence, believed they were bribing the biden family and doing it via hunter biden. >> it is kind of shameful. thank you. >> very good. turnout recognizes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. mr. parnas, can you tell me about your meetings with dimitri and why you believe the trump campaign used his services? >> yes. dimitri had resources, he is an

oligarch in vienna waiting to be extradited to the united states. he was very close with vladimir putin, ukraine and lots of characters in that part of the world and my objective at the time was to have him help us lien on and get her on the biden's. >> what type of dirt? >> >> we were searching for hunter's hard drive we were told without their. we were searching for we were given hunter's personal bank records given to me by john solomon that he said he got from the f.b.i. to validate certain payments that were going for car purchases. the objective was to try to find a link with any of the payments that would go into joe biden's account. >> who told you to get this

dirt? >> rudy giuliani. >> anyone else that you remember? >> john solomon. i mean, everybody that was part of the team. >> did bill barr know you were involved in getting this dirt? >> absolutely. bill barr was notified of our investigation from the day he took office. >> did you ever have a conversation with bill barr of being lenient towards dymitri firtash in his role as attorney general? >> i personally did not. i was witness to having a conversation with bill barr about dymitri firtash. >> what did they say? >> basically, they were telling him that the charges were false, and that he needs to drop the charges and end the

case. >> why did they tell him to drop the charges on this russian oligarch? >> because dymitri firtash was going to help us getting dirt on the bidens or whatever else the trump campaign needed. >> my understanding is you have the trump campaign telling you to talk to a russian oligarch to get dirt on the president of the united states for political reasons, and that someone from the trump campaign is talking to the attorney general to drop the charges because this for national is helping get dirt on the political candidate. >> absolutely. >> did bill barr indicate any willingness to drop the charges? >> after meeting with doj, they came back and informed me they were going to vienna to tell dymitri firtash that everything will be okay. >> do you know if bill barr , and anyway, told you to say that? >> i was not privy to that meeting. >> do you have any evidence that bill barr would have indicated to signal to dymitri firtash the charges would be dropped? >> only from conversations with rudy giuliani or victoria toensing. >> what did they say about what bill barr said? >> they told me this a be taken care of as long as dymitri firtash played ball. >> and they said bill barr was

conveying that to them directly? >> yes. after meetings. there were several meetings. there was a private meeting where rudy giuliani bumped into bill barr at the trump international hotel. he use that as a moment to take him aside and speak to him. then there were certain official meetings through official channels where victoria met with them. >> do you know anything, if anything was done with the charges? >> until this day, dymitri firtash is not here. >> do you believe that bill barr should be investigated for his conduct and potentially dropping the charges? >> i absolutely believe that. >> -- not only that, i believe he should be investigated in the cover-up of trying to silence me. >> explain the cover up. >> my arrest was set up strictly to shut me up and seal my documents and take away all my information and turn me into a crazy man that had no way to prove what was going on.

but the real story was bill barr was trying to save donald trump from impeachment and use me as a scapegoat when he didn't realize was donald trump was not going to stop and would continue doing what he wanted to do. that is why it blew up in his face. he also hired special counsel at the time, brady, to look into ukraine. when we try to reach out to special counsel brady, he never returned a phone call. nobody wanted to hear anything i have to say that have to do with ukraine, donald trump or rudy giuliani. >> thank you. mr. parnas, i want to say that you have stuck to the facts today. we don't hear bombastic rhetoric from you. you're telling a true story and have conducted yourself with great purpose and dignity. i know your son is here with you today. i hope he and the rest of your family are proud of what you are doing for america. i yield back. >> turnout recognizes . >> it has been interesting hearing so far. let's get to the paper trail of

money flow from the cfc into the bank account for president joe biden. i want to start with the text message july 31 between hunter biden and one chairman, mr. zhou. >> i would actually like to spend 20 seconds. if you notice, the congressman scurried out very quickly. i am disgusted as i sit here that he didn't address me based on the fact i'm sitting here in front of the world trying to testify to the truth. in october 2020 i had messages, i can produce them to both democrats and republicans, that ro khanna sent to me saying, you have always demonstrated to me you are nothing but an honest highest integrity individual. i was begging for him to go on cnn and tell the world in october 2020. i have extensive emails with congressman ro khanna in 2021 and 2022 where i thanked him and his staff to sit down with

me and look at my blackberry phones that the democrats are so focused on, to hire forensics expert to go through all the factual information i had. the fact that he did not even address me and then scurried out of here is disgusting to me. sorry, i will answer your question now. >> now were at three minutes. mr. chairman, for the record i want to submit into the record two different whatsapp messages, one july 31 between hunter biden and mr. mr. bobulinski -- zhou that stipulates hunter biden wants to move on and get the contract resolved, the deal resolved and that mr. zhou -- zhou says the cfc is willing to cooperate with the family . on august 31 there was another exchange, this time -- august 3, excuse me, between hunter biden and mr. dong talking about the

stipulations of the arrangement between the biden family and the cfc. i want to send both messages into the record. now to the money flow. this is where the rubber meets the road. on august 3 they actually stipulate through what's apt -- what's apt text messages. on august 4 $100,000 wired into from cfc infrastructure. mr. chairman, i want to submit for the record a portion of the bank statement for the time period of august 3 of 2017 through august 31, 2017 stipulating $100,000 going from cefc into the bank account of hunter biden through a bosco pc. on august 8, four days later, $5 million has been transferred from the northern international capital account of $5 million to hudson west, a bank account controlled by hunter biden and

mr. dong, a cefc associate. that comes from the northern international capital bank account , it bank account tied to the ccp. want to submit for the record the bank statement demonstrating that transfer. moving on. on august 8, the same time period, there is a wire transfer of $400,000 to pc from the hudson west bank account. that $400,000, i have the transfer records and the bank account from the august time period program which is a bit that for the record. >> without injection. >> here is where the fun stuff comes in, everybody. i have a minute to do it. on august 14 there is $150,000 transferred from pc controlled by hunter biden to the group controlled by james biden.

i have the records here of the $150,000 that is gone to lion hall group. i want to submit that. >> so order. >> on august 20, i believe we have a screenshot. on august 28 we have the withdrawal ticket from lion hall group that is signed by sarah biden, the wife of jim biden, for $50,000 to withdraw. i want to submit that withdrawal receipt for the record. >> so ordered. >> on september 3, august 28, actually, we have deposit reference into sarah biden's account on the same day. >> so ordered. >> last document. on september 3 20 stash september 3, 2007, from sarah biden's personal account there is a check written to joe biden, the president of the united states today, for $40,000 , signed loan repayment. a repayment, by the way, that

joe biden's own personal accountant has no record for. want to submit that for the record. >> without objection. >> it is clear the source of this money came from cefc and cefc is a company directly linked to the ccp , and actually the chairman of the ccp, the cheramie -- josh chairman cg paying. >> the staff report, the majority side, which details the cefc's business interactions with donald trump. they own a $5.5 million unit in trump world tower and others. and then, the department of justice press release announcing the sentencing of mr. galanis in federal court , ordering him to pay restitution of more than $80 million for three criminal fraud conspiracies against a native american tribe, pension funds

and other investors. >> so ordered. >> thank you. i am sitting here and imagining what i would be thinking if i were not here, but rather somewhere around the country watching the congress of the united states, in this case, this committee, for 15 months holding these hearings on hunter biden and coming up with not one impeachable offense in all that time. 15 months, over 10,000 documents , and more today. this is a do-nothing congress. we should be doing the jobs we were sent here to do. not have investigation hearing

after hearing, over and over again, and then run to our favorite tv outlet to give interviews afterwards. we were sent here to get a job done. taxpayers are looking at all of us. meanwhile, americans, black, white, asian, latino, native american, and their families are wondering what is going on. is this another investigation hearing in this 15 months that has yielded nothing at all? it is the do-nothing congress. you thought harry truman said it in 1948. anybody can say it today. look at what we have done in 15 months. virtually nothing. nothing at all. senior citizen set in their homes and watch c-span or some other outlet carry this. some of them sitting in nursing homes. all of them worried about losing their social security. they are on fixed incomes and expect the congress to use its time and energy to deal with things that affect them directly. students are defaulting on loans to colleges all over the country. no one wants to talk about

that. healthcare is in adequate in most places in this country. diseases are ravaging our communities, and people assume that at some point the congress will deal with that. and so, whether it is cancer, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, diabetes, hiv, stroke, the disparities in the health system say please, please give us a little bit of your time also when you're not dealing with hunter biden and when you can't prove he has done anything wrong. crime is out of control. white-collar, as well as black color. assault weapons are still being used every day. shooting and killing innocent americans. we're sitting up here talking about something that we have talked about for 15 months with no substantial evidence. can't get humanitarian aid to palestine. can't get military aid to the ukraine. children are looking and wondering what is going on. is that what politics are about?

we are doing a disservice. i know i'm supposed to be asking questions, and mr. parnas, i may have one or two for you, but i am so outraged at a do-nothing congress just pointing the finger and pointing the finger over and over again. people are hurting. they are looking for real help. can't deal with immigration because donald trump calls up and kills the immigration bill. and yet, people say that is a major issue. is it? i haven't seen the sort of attention that we thought we were put into that or anything else. and so, this particular hearing will probably be followed by another hearing and another hearing and another hearing until this congress expires in january of next year. and we haven't done anything to move the ball forward except

make accusations. life is too short but maybe son of you have a guarantee you will be around forever, but i don't. i came to this body first in 1987. i worked under ronald reagan in the first bush and bill clinton and donald trump, and now joe biden. this congress is not doing anything. it is not like the previous congress. that is why people have such a low esteem of those of us who said, i am congressman so and so. people on the street don't buy that. they don't see the action. i am done. i know i have exhausted my time. mr. parnas, a couple of quick questions, and i will let you go. is it your understanding that rudy giuliani worked for an individual identified by the trump administration as a russian agent? >> yes. >> do you know what these russian actors were trying to do? >> push a conspiracy theory about the bidens. >> did you know that, did you

warn rudy giuliani? >> yes, i did. >> what was his response? >> he told me that , i mean, he agreed with me, but then proceeded to work with these people behind my back. >> these people been identified as russian agent. >> yes, sir. >> we have meeting here of mr. giuliani with one of those. i am disgusted , as most people are, about this process. the only way we get to a point where we get things done is that we learn to talk to one another across the aisle without having another conspiracy theory after another one after another one. you don't buy trust that way. you by contempt. i yield back. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i want to start out by saying, i think most americans are taught at a very young age that you are who you surround yourself with. keep that in the premise as i

sat here and listen to everyone talk about how hunter biden is just this golden boy. are we really supposed to believe that hunter biden is the golden boy? his associates, such as devon archer and mr. galanis are felons convicted of fraud, yet he is the golden child. i want to talk about examples of biden's influence peddling scheme. this time it was romania. have follows the same general pattern that we have seen with other countries like china, russia, ukraine and cassock stand. here is the pattern . it is really simple. a corrupt foreign oligarch needs access to the u.s. government. hunter biden sales influence to the u.s. government. the oligarchs pay up. let's just take a deeper dive into this romanian scheme. mr. bobulinski, who is gabriel popovich? >> he is a businessman from

romania, probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars. >> okay. is a true that he faced corruption charges in romania in 2015? >> it is. >> when you were in europe with the bidens to close on that cefc deal with the chinese, you separately negotiated with popovich to get a 17th payment. is that also correct? >> i did. >> but he did not want to pay. is that correct? >> correct. your talk about a 17th payment that would go to rob walker, and then rob walker would distribute to hunter biden. >> that is correct. is a because hunter biden had failed and the work he was engaged by popovich to do, which was to get the corruption charges dismissed by the romanian authorities? isn't that correct? >> it is two things. they failed to do that, but also the joe biden had left the white house at that point. >> so i get 16 payments while

joe biden is in the white house , but after joe biden leaves the white house, coincidentally, the payments stop. >> correct. >> okay. just want to make sure we can connect the dots very simply. >> obviously, -- >> i am much more -- i am not much for coincidences. mr. bobulinski, what do you think popovich wanted hunter biden to do? >> i don't have to think because gabriel told me personally. he expected hunter biden, rob walker and mr. galanis do whatever was necessary to impact his case in romania. >> how do you know that? >> because gabriel popovich

told me that. >> from his mouth? >> yes. >> okay, there's another dot we can connect. with that be a conspiracy theory? >> that is not a conspiracy theory. >> okay. thank you. >> i would encourage you to interview gabriel popovich. >> thank you. lastly, after claiming he wanted a public hearing, hunter biden decided to skip today. why do you think he skipped the hearing today? >> is that a rhetorical or serious -- well, i don't think he wanted to sit next to me because, obviously, i have emphatically stated he perjured himself in his transcribed interview with the committee, as did his uncle, jim biden. for every fact the claims are want to say i was high on drugs or off the skate, i can show a document, a text message, and recording that confirms he is lying. >> let's not let the facts get in the way of a good story, right? here are the facts. but highly disappointing he is not here. >> i would agree. here are the facts. hunter biden was engaged by a foreign principal, gabriel popovich. it is well-known that hunter biden met with the ambassador to romania in november 2015.

hunter biden was not registered . he stopped getting paid as soon as his father leaves office until you got popovich to send hunter biden one more payment. seriously, what services was hunter biden providing to the romanian oligarchs for millions of dollars? we have yet to hear. as far as the committee knows, hunter biden was never registered under the foreign agents registration act. if the department of justice applied the same standards it did in the paul manafort case, hunter would be in more trouble than he is already in. mr. chairman, there are real issues here that we need to continue to look at. with that, i thank you for being here and thank you mr. chairman. >> absolutely. thank you. a job. -- good job. >> mr. bobulinski, i heard

your opening statement submitted to the record part of the proceedings. i have a quick question. simple. is it your testimony today that you personally witnessed president joe biden commit a crime? >> i believe the fact that he was sitting with me while i was putting together -- >> did you witness the president commit a crime? is it your testimony today? >> yes. >> what crime do -- have you witness? >> how much time do i have? >> it is simple. you name the crime. did you watch him steal something? >> corruption statutes, rico and conspiracy. >> what is the crime? specifically. >> you ask me to answer the question. i answer the question. rico, you are not familiar. >> excuse me, sir.

rico is not a crime. it is a category. what is the category of crimes. you have charges. you have charges. sir, please name. >> you want me to name the exact statute? it's funny, in this committee room, -- >> all right. i reclaim my time. thank you. i reclaim my time. clearly, we we are seeing here today is a continuation of the 15 month saga of the republican majority lost in the desert. impeachment 101. the majority party, or whomever is raising impeachment, must accuse the president of a high crime, a specific high crime or misdemeanor. i would like to submit to the record 918, the house resolution to open this

impeachment inquiry. >> so ordered. >> this resolution does not outline a high crime or misdemeanor. it is not here. now, when we compare the chairman's opening from his previous opening, he is talking about ukraine and burisma and all of this. this entire inquiry is based on a blockbuster piece of information that was in a classified room, and inside that room was a document alleging president biden directly of a $10 million bribery scheme. extremely serious. what happened? what happened a month ago, mr. chairman? that document, the f.b.i. arrested the person who offer those allegations for falsifying his testimony to the f.b.i. this entire impeachment inquiry is based on an actual, provable

individual who has lied. responsible leadership would withdrawal the inquiry based on that. withdraw it. instead, what we are seeing is that this committee was warned about the falsehoods of these allegations long before that. warned by trump secretary of state mike pompeo, and yet they proceeded anyway. this committee was warrant by rudy giuliani associate right here, mr. parnas, after that document about the falsehoods of this. >> finally, as if none of this was enough, the fbi arrested the individual who was the source of the entire, to quote the chairman, "heart of the

manor and watch it anyway. at this point the story isn't the fact that the basis of this impeachment inquiry is wrong. the story is why it is proceeding anyway. why is this committee proceeding based on false charges? by the way, no charges. i have yet to hear in the chairman's opening the allegation that they are specifically charging the president of the united states with. i am hearing about biden family. i am hearing about this and that. i am not hearing the specific allegation by this committee, what is it. it is not here. and that is the problem. the story is when this committee knew they were working with falsified evidence. that is the story. with that i yield back. >> the chair recognize south

carolina for five minutes. >> on march 1, 2024 joe biden said he didn't interact with hunter or jim biden or business associates and i would like to ask unanimous consent to enter into the record the new york post article where biden insists he didn't interact. >> without objections awarded. >> i have strictly yes or no questions. in the article joe biden also said read the record of every witness. so i did. i first read the deposition of devon archer and he had contracted -- interacted with him. in every one of them, they interacted with joe biden. that is just the people we interviewed. my first questions are for you. did hunter biden call on may 4, 2014, yes or no? >> yes. >> in this call did he say on

that call with joe biden everything is good and we are moving forward? >> yes, he did. >> on that same called the joe biden say okay you be good to my boy? >> yes. he said that as well. >> did she agreed to put money into his business projects after the phone call? >> yes. >> did hunter biden ever take a call in new york? >> i am sorry? >> did hunter biden ever take a call from joe biden while at the peninsula bar in new york? >> yes he did. >> did he update joe biden on progress in landing a business partnership with harvest fund management? >> yes. >> is it a $300 billion chinese financial services company closely tied to the chinese communist party? >> yes, it was. >> is hunter biden involved with harvest? >> through bhr -- >> yes or no?

>> yes. >> as part of the deal that hunter biden wants the company to reserve a board seat for joe biden? >> yes. >> did a chinese businessman the sure he would join the board? >> yes, he did. >> did hunter biden draft an email stating please also remember henry about a conversation of a board seat with a certain relation of mine and we discussed this very idea again and as always he remains keen on the opportunity. here is a photograph of joe biden and devon archer and hunter biden golfing days before the election email draft and do you believe a certain relation of mine refers to joe biden? >> i had first-hand conversations. >> did you ever meet with devon archer were hunter took calls from his father? >> yes.

>> during one of these calls, did he tell him he needed help getting across the finish line? >> yes. that is correct. >> do you recall an email that said the possibility of giving 10% ownership of that? >> yes. >> my last question is for both of you. both of you said you are not to use his name and communications ? >> correct. >> yes. >> the joe biden participate in phone conversations and meetings in foreign interest and his business associates? >> he clearly did. >> yes. >> and hunter biden's deposition, you said he didn't involve his father in his business. did hunter biden lie under oath? >> yes. >> if that is what he said, yes. >> is joe biden line when he says he didn't interact with hunter biden, jim biden or

foreign interest? >> yes. >> yes. >> in the debate on october 22, 2020 joe biden denied hunter biden made money from china and they include money from businesses and business partners and her interest? >> i am sorry. >> correct. yes. >> did hunter biden receive money from chinese interests? yes or no? >> yes. >> all right. joe biden has repeatedly claimed he wasn't involved in hunter biden, gym biden or any other biden family deals and today our witnesses have proved otherwise. today, we have established that joe biden lied about interact with business associates of hunter biden and it's my belief joe biden is the closer for hunter biden, jim biden and their foreign interests and

good luck to the left improving otherwise. thank you and i yield back. >> ms. porter from california. >> the title of this hearing is influence peddling, examining joe biden's abuse of public office. look. the impeachment inquiry is dead. if it were on life support, my colleague, ocasio-cortez, just killed it. there is no allegation of a specific crime. president biden didn't do anything wrong and there is zero evidence and still democrats and republicans on the media treat these hearings like the super bowl, but nobody ever wins, and americans always lose. i have a fresh direction for this hearing. all we have to do is cross off the part after the: -- colon. influence peddling. we should have a policy discussion about how to stop

government officials from using their positions to get money or favors. that is a real hearing, one that nearly every american, regardless of party, wants us to hold. we could start by talking about how senior executive branch officials can leave public service, wait a year and legally become lobbyists for big corporations scoring their new employer's profitable government contracts and favorable regulations. they can even be paid by the big corporations during that short one year while they are waiting to become lobbyists as a down payment for their future ability to pedal influence. that is wrong. for the panel of witnesses, by show of hands as americans, would the witnesses support extending this waiting period to at least two years.

>> no. but i would. >> there we go. everybody supports that we should do more to stop influence peddling. this is the kind of a good government reform that americans of all political stripes support. i should know. in 2022, i passed that exact reform as an amendment to the national defense authorization act with a bipartisan majority vote. what happened to that amendment? why didn't become law? the answer is simple. nearly 500 former members of congress work for lobbying firms. too many people around here want to follow in their footsteps. they don't want to make it harder for government officials to become lobbyists. ultimately, democratic leadership and then speaker pelosi let the amendment get stripped off of the final bill and when i offered it up again during this congress, republican leadership under speaker mccarthy never put it

up for about. both parties have let us down on fighting influence peddling and tackling corruption. i am hopeful we can begin a new approach in this very committee. the american people should know that regardless of party should know an investigation was conducted whether joe biden did anything wrong. we followed the evidence to where it led, a dead-end. this impeachment inquiry should end today and where should we go from here? we should stop partisan attacks on each other and address the real problem that the american people believe the rules that prevent corruption our way to week and to stop politicians on both sides of the aisle from influence peddling. this committee should be working together in a bipartisan way to change the culture of congress and

crackdown on influence peddling and corruption and just as importantly to stop the perception of it. let me give you some facts and i don't even need a whiteboard for this one. 495 former members of congress work for lobbying firms, 467 members of congress take corporate pack money. 78 members of congress violated the stock act last congress. clearly, we have our work cut out for us. let's start the conversation today on what a bipartisan ethics reform package could look like. here are the organizations that could have come today to have a productive conversation and citizens for responsibility and ethics in washington, common cause and project and government oversight, private citizen. with the right witnesses and the commitment to doing what the american people want, this committee can have a real conversation about the problem

of influence peddling. we can pass legislation to create badly needed ethics guardrails. that would be real work and not a real circus. i yield back. >> before i recognize mr. timmons, ms. porter, i think you are sincere, and i look forward to working with you on that legislation. >> can we take a five-minute break? i do need to use the restroom. >> let us get one more and we will do that. the chair recognizes mr. timmons for five minutes and then we will take a break because we do have boats coming up anyway. >> at our hearing last july and laid out a scheme that the biden's concocted to sell the biden brand letting almost $30 million for various members of their family and it was repeated with clients in china, romania, russia and ukraine and i will spend my time on one instance, ukraine specifically involving burisma which netted

hunter $3 million over a three- year period and to clarify these offenses, in his conspiracy to commit bribery and for joe biden conspiracy for extortion under this section and if you want a refresher look up senator menendez and his wife indictment. let's start with this. a foreign client has a problem. i have an email here from the secretary of burisma advocating that hunter biden intervened with high level u.s. officials to facilitate these communications expressing a positive opinion of the president of burisma to the prosecutor general with the ultimate purpose to close down any cases against he and ukraine. this is dated november 2. keep

in mind, and, again the foreign client has a problem so he is being investigated by the inspector general of ukraine and he needs help with the biden brand. and here we have bank records of hunter biden receiving prior to this email over $1 million. and he did earn his feel find out and again he pays him $3 million. and what happens? this is great. 11 days later we have the us embassy in ukraine announcing the vice president is traveling to ukraine on december 7 and interesting. vice president biden travels the country and here we have a great photo of him touching down and they are very proud of themselves. so vice president biden leverages u.s. policy to achieve a favorable outcome for the client and we have seen the video and he brags about leveraging u.s. foreign loan guarantees to get the ukrainian

government to fire him and then the investigation. again, we have the email saying we need to leverage you who haven't provided value yet for your million dollars of service, hunter. he brings in the big guy, biden leverages u.s. influence and withholds that loan guarantee to fire him. if that isn't enough, we have the victory lap in an email a few months later saying we wanted less than a year and take a victory lap. this is straightforward. this is straightforward. pay to play and it is bribery and hunter biden was paid $3 million at the lowest point in his life and he testified in a deposition that he was drug addicted and has never been to ukraine yet he has paid $3 million to get his father to go to solve his clients problem and that is the scheme. mr. bobulinski, does it sound like the scheme you have seen

the biden family do? >> i wasn't involved in ukraine, but the facts surrounding this are very similar to that in romania. >> this is the thing. if hunter biden were here, we would be able to ask him questions and maybe clear this up, but he is not. he is not here. what is interesting is that just yesterday, peter navarro reported to federal prison for four months in miami for not showing up in front of the january 6 committee. i will point out to everybody that this was procedurally defective under house rules and procedurally defective because the minority leader didn't get to appoint amber so that committee. the united states house of representatives oversight and accountability committee is a procedurally perfect committee. we do have authority to subpoena hunter biden, and he has to show up. he has to answer these questions. he has to tell the world that his father didn't leverage us-1

policy so he would get $3 million and this is no different than what senator menendez did. look. the american people are not buying this nonsense you are selling. we must restore their faith in our institutions. we have to stop this ridiculous two-tiered system of justice where the doj persecutes president trump and hides hunter biden behind every corner. this is not the united states of america that the american people deserve. we have to get our country back on track. with that i yield back. >> did the committee subpoena hunter biden today? >> the chair recognizes pursuant to the previous order and at the request of the minority witness, the chair declares the committee and recess for 10 minutes. we will then come back in here and we may have to recess again for votes.

this impeachment hearing into president biden is taking a break now. the committee is looking into the business dealings of the biden family and we will hear more testimony when the committee returns. the house is working today on several energy policy bills and congress faces a friday deadline to fund part of the government for the rest of the fiscal year. live coverage on c-span3. >> we will hear from witnesses who have previously provided information during a deposition and interview phase regarding the biden families business practices in china, ukraine, russia, and other places around the world. at the start of this congress, the oversight committee investigated what product or service the biden family and their associates were selling that would justify over $24 million in payments. we have reviewed e-mails, bank records, text messages, suspicious activity reports of

treasury, and other evidence normally compiled during an expansive investigation such as this. the oversight committee has found no credible evidence of the biden's providing any work product and the committee has identified no legitimate value or document or even one single did of work the biden's have provided their business partners. nothing. what is apparent after over a year of investigation is the biden's don't work in any traditional sense of the word. they don't work as consultants or lawyers or advisors. the biden's don't sell a product or service or have a set of skills. the biden's cell joe biden and that is their business.

four months -- for months we have are democrats proclaiming that witnesses have told the committee had no involvement in his family's business dealings, but where are they today? it is the telling. democrats haven't invited one of these witnesses to today's hearing. that is because they do know their testimonies wouldn't withstand public scrutiny. democrats have relied on these witnesses opening statements and have willfully turned a blind eye to the facts that have come out in these interviews once they were questioned about our record. democrats must rely on bringing in a witness to talk about nonsense. and he can't talk about the facts brought about by the witnesses today who worked with the biden's. president biden can't control his adult son or control his brother or sister in law or his nine family members who received money from these transactions. all he can do is control his

own actions. and that is what we are here today to discuss of the witnesses. and during the course of this investigation, we have learned that joe biden has taken action after action to further his family's plan to get rich. and he shows up to meetings and gets phone calls and shakes hands and tells people and he goes the dinners with foreign oligarchs and the ukrainian executive pain his son millions of dollars. and he gets paid from meetings with chinese businessmen and he has meetings with them and he tells others he can help their situations and he writes letters of recommendation for foreign business associates children and the scam is simple and the biden family promises they can make a foreign partners problems go away by engaging in the u.s. government and the problems could be anything with a ukrainian and

corruption investigation and moving money to the united states or access for china to american energy sources and joe shows up and shakes a few hands and says take care of my boy or something similar and the money flows to the tune of tens of millions of dollars and it is done over and over again. the biden family promises his power in joe biden shows up, and millions of dollars come into their pockets. joe biden is the families closer. how could he not be. the biden's aren't doing any other work for these foreign companies that would warrant tens of millions of dollars. there only two explanations. the first is joe biden knows exactly what he is doing and knows a handshake, wink and a smile is enough for him to have his plausible deniability as jim biden calls it. or joe biden is being led around by his family and has no

idea who he is meeting with and is truly an elderly man with a poor memory. there is no other explanation. either joe biden is complicit or joe biden is incompetent. and since becoming chairman of this committee in january 2023 i promise the investigation of this influence peddling would be based on bank records, witness testimony and verifiable facts. and after years of democrats using this committee as a mouthpiece for every conspiracy they can find under my leadership it is turned a real investigations and if democrats want to spend another russian hoax i will allow them to answer what question, what services do the biden's provide to earn them and their business associates over $24 million? what they do for the money? democrats have the same bank

records as we do and those don't lie. the witnesses are here to talk about joe biden and republicans are here to talk about joe biden. if democrats wish to spend their time talking about another russian collusion hoax for protecting president biden, they could do so. i would have invited hunter biden here today to provide his side of the story and hunter biden demanded a public hearing. i have given him one. maybe he will show up and he said he isn't but he does love saying one thing and doing another and one point he is saying one thing and doing another and it will reflect poorly on his telling the truth at all. but this isn't about hunter biden. this investigation is not about hunter biden but about joe biden and the lies he continues to tell the american people. with that, i yield to chairman smith. >> thank you chairman,. from the beginning of this investigation we have made clear that we will follow the facts wherever they lead and the facts have led us to two conclusions, one that the biden family has for years traded on

joe biden's name in order to rake in millions of dollars. often doing so with his direct knowledge and clear involvement. second, president biden has continually been dishonest with the american people about his knowledge of his family's business dealings. we do have testimony from multiple witnesses that joe biden was the brand. he knew what his son and brother were doing and did nothing to stop it. that alone makes him complicit in a scheme to make money off of his public service. but he wasn't just complicit. he was as one of today's witnesses has testified, and enabler of this activity. the evidence of the two irs whistleblowers who came to the ways and means committee has been affirmed by volumes of material provided to congress by the testimony of others and even by the department of justice who blindly brought charges against hunter biden

that mirror those called for by the irs investigators. the evidence obtained shows that, one, joe biden met with his son's business partners on multiple occasions. he used an alias to exchange dozens of e-mails with his son's bookkeeper. he took official government action that suspiciously coincided with those meetings and correspondence. the connections between joe biden and his son's business practices extended even to the biden 2020 campaign and at the height of the democratic primary, kevin morris, a hollywood lawyer who met hunter biden at a joe biden campaign fundraiser paid off hunter biden's tax liabilities because there was, in his words, risk personally and politically. if that matter wasn't swept under the rug, investigators that were interested in pursuing a potential criminal

campaign violation were told to stand down in the biden family relied on the biden brand so much that evidence has revealed that hunter biden believed that all of this stuff, meaning his legal troubles would all go away when his dad became president. why did he believe that? because for years the biden family has personally benefited from joe biden's position of power and joe biden knew this and did nothing to stop it. andy lied about it. i yield to gym jordan. >> i think the moment. who planted the pipe bombs on january 6. nobody seems to know. who leaked the dobbs draft opinion? the leak that led to an assassination attempt on justice kavanagh and who left cocaine at the white house? the biden administration doesn't seem to have time to answer these questions because they are too dizzy investigating parents at school

board meetings and labeling catholics extremists and retaliating against whistleblowers. they are too busy putting together a sweetheart deal for hunter biden. a deal that got laughed out of court. the guy who put together the deal they got laughed out of court is the guy that they made the special counsel. democratic have time for going after president time -- trump and they spied on his campaign for eight years and then it was the mueller investigation with 19 lawyers and 40 agents and $30 million. they found nothing. it was impeachment and rate his home in special counsel and in the 14th amendment. the party of democracy said we will keep the guy off the ballot who is leading in every poll. the ranking member said that president trump should be disqualified from even running for office and thank goodness we do have a supreme court who disagreed with the ranking member and the democrats. 9-0. not 5-4 not 6-3 and not 7- 2 but 9-0 they disagreed.

now, democrats say, how dare republicans investigate joe biden. how dare they look into the money, the business, and the brand. millions of dollars as the chairman said run through 20 different companies for what? i mean, 20 different companies. devon archer told us what it was for, access to the brand, and the brand was joe biden. the brand that played rounds of golf and took meetings and had dinners with hunter biden's business partners. the brand that conditioned $1 billion of american tax money on the firing of the prosecutor pressuring the company hunter biden sat on the board of. by the way was getting paid $1 million a year. today we will learn about that brand.

>> the american people are tired of this charade and as i said before my republican colleagues are some fully grasping at straws. while they worked to cut costs of prescription drugs and expand student loan forgiveness and mitigate the threat of gun violence, republican members of congress continue to chase after russian disinformation campaigns from the 2020 election which have been thoroughly debunked again and again. and, as usual, in this committee, we do know who is in charge. it is the bond list, broke bluffer twice impeached and four times indicted and insurrection initiator, election denying self-declared dictator on day one and puppet for putin. the one who wants to terminate the constitution and defund the

fbi. the one who romanticized exchanging letters with the north korean dictator kim jong- un, the one who just last week embraced the autocrat and hungry to discuss diabolical plans to destroy our democracy and the one who proposed a policy to ban muslims from this country and the one who just this week said any jewish person who votes for democrat hates the religion and israel. the one who called neo-nazis carrying tiki torches good people in the one who referred to african nations as i quote countries and the one who called nfl players names about brutality that continues to evade or justice systems and the one who called mexicans those and the one who told

women of color born in the united states elected to congress in serving on this very committee to go back to their own countries and the one who bragged about grabbing women by their private parts. the one who confused his victim whom he claimed wasn't his type for his very own ex-wife and the one who is an admitted and committed adulterer who attempted to pay off a star for her silence . the one who is public we mocked people all with disabilities. the one who dodged the draft and referred to prisoners of war as losers, the very people who paid a high price so we could enjoy the freedoms that far too many of us take for granted and the one who boasted about being able to stand in the middle of fifth avenue to shoot somebody and not lose votes. the one who promoted political and physical violence multiple times including, most recently at my rally in the home state of ohio where he declared there would be a bloodbath if he didn't win. the one who intentionally

denied covid was deadly and eventually suggested testing injecting bleach into our bodies to kill the respiratory virus that took the lives of 1 million people in the united states. the one who ordered his son-in- law get top secret security clearance overruling concerns flagged by intelligence officials, who, according to this committee's chairman, admitted the former presidents son-in-law crossed the line of ethics by accepting a $2 billion investment into that very same son-in-law's fledgling firm only six months after leaving the white house. if any of this sounds crazy, it is because it is. this may sound unbelievable, but it is all true. these are facts, indisputable facts, a thing that is known and proven to be true. this may be a foreign concept to some of my colleagues, but

for those of us who still have a relationship with the truth, please note this is not in exhaustive list of inappropriate and unethical and questionable behavior by the maniacal manipulator of mar lago because i could go on, but i only have five minutes. yet here we are again trying to make sense out of nonsense and i would humbly respectfully ask my republican colleagues on this committee to stop falling over yourselves to win the approval of one because millions of people are depending on you to defend our delicate democracy. with that i yield the remainder of my time to the ranking member. >> i don't know if there is much time left but thank you for that eloquent and compressed recitation of some of what we have lived with over the last few years. >> we recognize the gentleman from kansas. >> i want to talk about me and 2017 and to be clear hunter biden was doing business with them while his dad was vice president and are you aware of that? >> yes.

>> rob walker told us that before the committee. i want to talk to you about your meeting with joe biden, hunter biden and jim biden in may 2017 with other members bringing up the meeting you had at the beverly hilton the night before that conference, but i want to talk about the next day when you went as his guest to that conference. you did watch joe biden deliver a speech and then you had a follow-up conversation with them, correct? >> correct. >> what did he tell you during that conversation? >> as i have already publicly shared, i was brought backstage by his team because he had just given his keynote and we just exchanged pleasantries and i walked him out to his car and he specifically thanked me for the work i was doing with his son and brother and asked me to keep an eye on them. >> my understanding is that after joe biden left, you went across the street to the peninsula hotel and had a long conversation with his brother jim biden?

correct? >> i did. >> it's my understanding you asked him how they did the business while joe biden was a political figure in what was his response? >> correct. i was concerned and asking from a position of concern and gym biden's -- jim biden's response was plausible deniability. >> he would be kept in the loop but you couldn't talk about it especially in writing? during your transcribed interview with the committees you set a very interesting phrase, say it, forget it, regret it and does this sound familiar? is this consistent with your understanding of how the bidens do business? >> very much so. yes. >> but it does look like somebody made a mistake. mr. bobulinski, you created two companies of the bidens and i want to show you an infamous email discussing the ownership structure of one of these countries. and you can see on the screen 20% 20% 20%.

who is the big guy in this? >> the big guy is 100% joe biden. >> hunter biden didn't respond by saying, knock it off and we can't include him, did he? >> no. that is a critical point. >> did you ever get a text message or group text message or anything like that saying, guys, knock it off, joe biden isn't involved in this deal? >> no. the whistleblowers have a text exchange where they talk about everything else but that and the reason why they weren't talking about it is because everybody knew joe biden was the big guy. >> hunter biden begged for a public hearing, but it turns out he is too afraid of accountability to show up and tell the truth to the american people. but americans don't need his testimony to know they are being gas lit by this

president. it is blatantly obvious to anybody paying attention that joe biden is the big guy and the cefc deal broke the rule of the biden family businesses and they are now trying to cover it up. joe biden said repeatedly that his family never made a dime from china. but mr. bobulinski just confirmed that hunter, jim, and the big guy himself all got a cut from that cefc china energy deal. let me be clear. the only service the biden family ever provided was their ability to leverage the office of the vice president of the united states to cash and overseas. my democratic colleagues are going to try to tell you that joe biden wasn't on the final ownership structure agreement. but isn't it true that if somebody were holding joe biden's part in the company it wouldn't appear in the document? isn't that the point of this email the hold joe biden's part so his name wouldn't be in the

document? isn't this plausible deniability and action? >> it appears that way. >> plausible deniability only gets you so far. i will fast-forward from may until the end of july 2017 when they cut you out of the deal. i will show you a message that hunter sent to his business partners and put it on the screen. he writes, "i am sitting here with my father. and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled." so when hunter biden is desperate for money, the old trick of jim biden of plausible deniability doesn't cut it. when desperate times call for desperate measures, hunter biden let the cat out of the bad -- bag and said the quiet part out loud and gave the game away by calling on his father to help him shake down his chinese business partners for the money. and it worked. mr. chairman, i yield back. >> a point of inquiry. what was the last image we saw

that you put up? where did that come from? i want to authenticate that. >> this is the ways and means committee exhibit 300. >> the chair recognizes the last question. >> thank you, mr. chairman. welcome to the gop's day long campaign for donald trump. i want to start with mr. galanis to connect some dots that haven't been connected in this hearing. you are serving just under 16 years among other things for what has been said today, defrauding a tribal nation and specifically a tribal corporation held by this tribe which is why you are testifying from a prison today. i would like to ask you, mr. galanis, have you had an attorney representing you before this committee from last december and that attorney's

name is mr. mark pel letter? correct? >> that is correct. >> when you first testified before this committee in a taped interview, you're actually stopped by him from answering just a simple question about how you met him and who exactly was paying your legal fees. i do want to make sure the american people understand exactly who he is because he is in fact a former lawyer to donald trump who served in the administration and the office of management and budget and was at the center of the ukrainian pressure campaign for which donald trump was impeached and he was the chief lawyer when he withheld aid to ukraine to try to extort the ukrainian government into investigating him to support donald trump's campaign and literally he wrote that memo to

help withhold those funds and i want to dig in on this pressure campaign and he is here to discuss is an eyewitness and we do appreciate your being here and i will move through this quickly so ask for simple yes and no answers. you testified today that donald trump repeatedly asked you and through rudy giuliani to put pressure on the ukrainian government to dig up dirt on joe biden to support his campaign, correct? 's >> 100%, yes. >> as you see here you are very much a business associate of rudy giuliani during this time and as established in your testimony you traveled to and met with the ukrainian officials and told them that the white house would support or withhold support in aid to ukraine if it didn't cooperate with this bribery essentially? >> correct. >> donald trump's administration and specifically the office of management and

budget did withhold that foreign aid in 2019. and here is the guy who did it. he is representing the witness who is literally on zoom with us for this committee today. it is the reason why donald trump was impeached the first time. and the man at the center of that scheme is involved in the house gop's inquiry. i also want to point out that mr. paoletta is very much in bed with the thomases and in fact he represented clarence thomas's wife and her involvement in the stop this deal before the january 6 committee and actually also goes on vacation with mr. harlan crow in the thomases. this man has an interesting roster and participation in this hearing. but the bigger picture here is that the presence of mr.

paoletta is another indication of the way in this hearing and this impeachment inquiry is part of donald trump's larger misinformation campaign, just like it was in 2020, where in addition to pressuring and withholding aid to ukraine, rudy giuliani in the trump organization as was established by mr. parnas, planted a story in the media. and now here we are four years later as they have dredged it back up and planting it back in the media using congress and using this committee and using a baseless impeachment supported by donald trump's own allies on this committee to push that information out. as members on this committee have trafficked false evidence planted by a russian operative to the fbi and is now in jail for that. all of this is in the service

of propping up the criminal enterprise for which donald trump is at the top and has already been twice impeached, and rudy giuliani and others have been exposed as they continue to traffic in russian disinformation that not only props up donald trump but props up vladamir putin himself and his goals back in russia and in the ukraine. i do just want to point out that, once again, as i said, when we had the false impeachment hearing a few months ago, that, once again -- >> time is expired. >> we have the hands of donald trump all of this hearing. >> just to state that you did make a mistake and said mr. -- mr. parnas was a republican witness and he is very much your witness. >> but i was a republican for donald trump. >> pursuant to the previous order we declare the committee

and recess due to votes and we will reconvene 10 minutes after the three votes. >> we are waiting here for the house oversight committees impeachment inquiry into president biden to get underway and the committee is looking into the business connections of the biden family and the presidents son hunter biden was invited to testify but won't attend this morning's hearing. he testified privately last month. live coverage here on c-span3. >> we will hear from witnesses who have previously provided information during our deposition and interview phase regarding the biden families business practices in china, ukraine, russia, and other places around the world. at the start of this congress,

the oversights committee investigated what product or service the biden family and their associates were selling that would justify over $24 million in payments. we reviewed e-mails and bank records, text messages and suspicious activity reports to the treasury and other evidence normally compiled during an expansive investigation such as this. the oversight committee has found no credible evidence of the biden's providing any work product. the committee has identified no legitimate value or document or even one single hour of work that the biden's have provided their business partners. nothing. what is apparent after over of investigation is the biden's don't work in any traditional sense of the word. they don't work as consultants or lawyers or advisors and they don't sell a product or service

or have a set of skills. the biden's cell joe biden and that is their business. for months, we have her democrats desperately proclaiming that witnesses have told the committee that joe biden had no involvement in his family's business dealings. but where are those witnesses today? it is telling that democrats haven't invited one of these witnesses to todas that is because they know their testimony wouldn't withstand public scrutiny. democrats have relied on these witnesses opening statements and have willfully turned a blind eye to the fact that of come out in these interviews once they were questioned about our record of evidence and they relied on bringing in a distraction witness to talk about nonsense and who can't talk about the facts brought by today's witnesses who worked

with the biden's. president biden can't control his adult son or control his brother, his sister-in-law, or his nine family members who have received money from these transactions. all president biden can do is control his own actions. that is what we are here today to discuss with the witnesses. because, in the course of this investigation, we have learned that joe biden has taken action after action to further his family's plans to get rich and he shows up to meetings and get some phone calls, shakes hands and tells people to look after my family and he goes to dinners with foreign oligarchs and a ukrainian executive paying his son millions of dollars and he gets paid with money from chinese businessmen whom he has meetings with and says he'll see what he can do

to help situations and he writes letters of recommendations for foreign business associates children and the scam is simple. the biden family promises they can make a foreign partners problems go away by engaging the united states government and the problems can be anything with a ukrainian corruption investigation or moving russian money to the united states or a romanian criminal prosecution or access for china to american energy sources and joe shows up shakes a few hands in front of his son and says, take care of my boy or something similar. in the money flows. in this is to the tune of tens of millions of dollars and it is done over and over again. the biden family promises joe's power in joe biden shows up and millions of dollars come into the biden's pockets and joe biden is the families closer. how could he not be? the biden's aren't doing any other work for these foreign companies that would warrant that amount of money and there were only two explanations. the first is that joe biden knows what he is doing and

knows a handshake a week and a smile can maintain his plausible deniability as jim biden famously calls it. or joe biden is being led around by his family and has no idea who he is meeting with or what message he is sending and is truly an elderly man with a poor memory. there is no other explanation. either joe biden is complicit or joe biden is incompetent. since becoming chairman in january 2023 i did promise the investigation into their influence peddling would be based on bank records, witness testimony and verifiable facts and after years of democrats using this committee is amount piece for every conspiracy theory they can find like the russian collusion hoax under my leadership we have returned to real investigations and if democrats want to spend another russian hoax i will ask them to answer a question, what services did the biden's

provide to earn them and their business associates over $24 million? what did they do for the money? democrats had the same bank records as we do and they don't lie. the witnesses today are here to today to talk about joe biden and if democrats want to spend their time with another russian collusion hoax for the sake of protect thing president biden, they can do so and as i said i would've invited hunter biden here to sit alongside his business associates and provide his side of the story and hunter biden demanded a public hearing and i am giving him one. maybe he will show up and he said he isn't but he loves saying one thing and doing another and at some point he is saying one thing and doing another it begins to reflect poorly on his ability to tell the truth at all. this hearing isn't about hunter biden. this investigation is not about hunter biden but about joe biden and the lies he continues to tell the american people. with that i yield to ranking

member -- i mean sherman smith. >> from the beginning of this investigation, we have made clear that we will follow the facts were ever they lead and the facts have led us to two conclusions. first biden family has for years traded on joe biden's name in order to rake in millions of dollars and often doing so with his direct knowledge and clear involvement. second, president biden has been continually dishonest with the american people about his knowledge of his family's business dealings. we have testimony from multiple witnesses that joe biden was the brand and he knew what his son and brother were doing and did nothing to stop it. that alone makes him complicit in a scheme to make money off of his public service. but he wasn't just complicit. he is as one of the witnesses today testified, an enabler of

this activity. the evidence of the whistleblowers who came to the ways and means committee has been affirmed by volumes of material provided to congress by the testimony of others, and even by the department of justice who finally brought charges against hunter biden that mirror those called for by the irs investigators. the evidence obtained shows that, one, joe biden met with his son's business partners on multiple occasions and he used an alias to exchange dozens of e-mails with his son's bookkeeper, he took official government action that suspiciously coincided with those meetings and correspondence and the connections between joe biden and his son's business practices extended even to the biden 2020 campaign. at the height of the democratic primary, kevin morris, a hollywood lawyer who met hunter biden at a joe biden campaign fundraiser paid off hunter

biden's tax liabilities because there was in his words risk personally and politically. if that matter wasn't swept under the rug, investigators who are interested in pursuing a potential criminal campaign violation were told to stand down. the biden family relied on the biden brand so much that evidence has revealed that hunter biden believed that all this stuff meaning his legal troubles would all go away when his dad became president. why? for years the biden family has personally benefited from joe biden's position of power and joe biden knew this and did nothing to stop it. he lied about it. i yield to chairman jordan. >> i think the gentleman. who planted the pipe bombs on january 6? nobody seems to know and who leaked the draft opinion? you know the leak that led to an assassination attempt on

justice kavanaugh? who left cocaine at the white house? the biden administration doesn't have time to answer these questions because they are to bed -- busy investigating parents at school board meetings and labeling catholics extremists and retaliating against whistleblowers and to gather -- busy putting together a sweetheart deal for job -- hunter biden, one that got laughed out of court and the guy who did that is the guy they named special counsel. and democrats do have time for going after president trump and they have been doing this for eight years. they spied on his campaign and then it was the mueller investigation with 19 lawyers and 40 agents and $30 million and found nothing and then it was impeachment and rate his home in the special counsel and it was the 14th amendment and the party of democracy said we will keep the guy off the ballot who is leading in every poll. and the ranking member said

that president trump should be disqualified from even running for office and thank goodness we have a supreme court who disagreed with the ranking member and the democrats. 9-0. not 5-4 or 6-3 or 7-2 but 9-0 they disagreed. now, democrats say how dare republicans investigate joe biden. how dare they look into the money, the business, and the brand. millions of dollars as the chairman said in millions of dollars from foreign entities run through 20 different companies for what? i mean, 20 different companies. devon archer told us what it was for, access to the brand and it was joe biden. this is the brand that played rounds of golf and attended lunches and dinners with hunter and his business partners and the brand that conditioned $1

billion of american tax money in the firing of the prosecutor pressuring the company hunter biden sat on the board of and by the way was getting paid $1 million a year. today we will learn more about that brand we will learn more about what was called the biden lift and we will learn about the plausible deniability that jim biden talked to mr. bobulinski about and we will hear about the rules that govern how the business operated around joe biden and the rule that said to say it, forget it, write it and regret it. so i want to thank her witnesses for coming here today. they, like the whistleblowers who came to the ways and means committee are doing it simply because they want the american people to have the truth. i yield back. >> the chair recognizes the ranking member for 12 minutes for his opening statement. >> thank you very kindly. 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. in pryor hilarious episodes of this long-running madcap series, america got to see the following, number one nearly 20 witnesses who can't identify a single act of wrongdoing by president biden much less a high crime or misdemeanor and who overwhelmingly testified that joe biden wasn't involved in any of his family's business ventures. two, three expert witnesses called by the majority itself who said nothing they had seen in the tens of thousands of pages of documents introduced by the majority even remote the approached the level of a high crime or misdemeanor. bank records which show exactly

what all the witnesses told us, that joe biden wasn't involved in his family members businesses, repeated voyeuristic displays of pornographic images by the majority completely irrelevant to any conceivable legislative or investigative purpose and a star witness who turned out to be a chinese agent in an illegal arms trafficking and a key piece of evidence which launched the entire zany goose chase with a form in which the fbi duly recorded a completely fictional tip about a $5 million bribe to vice president biden pedaled for felony counts of systematically lying to the fbi in constructing a false record about joe biden, and now sits in jail in california as a flight risk while the world studies his long-standing and extensive ties to russian intelligence. today, the good chair man and

his ace maga detectives have finally jumped the shark. the comedy of errors comes crashing to an end as house republicans in over a dozen biden districts beg for mercy in these hail mary pass three weeks after the super bowl is order. today, we revisit the fruitless testimony to two more fleeing star witnesses who have failed to testify to any presidential wrongdoing, nonetheless evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors. both are frustrated they would be business partners of biden who tried to leverage the biden name with the biden brand as they called it but they never got any business off the ground for reasons that will be coming painfully obvious to anyone watching. even hunter biden, someone with serious substance abuse addiction, could tell these were not the kinds of people he should be doing business with.

rather than serving the biden brand, they shop today as loyal servants of trump world. each represented by a farmer white house trump attorney. first, the wannabe hunter business partner whose litigious history includes unsuccessfully suing his own dying father posterity for nearly $1 million. and just last month suing cassidy hutchinson for $10 million after she reported mr. bobulinski wearing a mask met with mark meadows, which ms. hutchinson has now backed up with actual documentary photographic evidence. something in very short supply in this investigation. mr. bobulinski made his hazy allegations against the biden's public for the first time at a press conference choreographed by the trump for president campaign, which provided him a venue, a gaggle of journalists, and even a dress shirt that

they went out and bought for him to wear to the event. hours later, mr. bobulinski points to the second 2020 presidential debate as donald trump's personal guest where he was seated with kent brock and mark meadows. the other star witness, mr. galanis, who i believe is appearing by zoom today, is a surreal fraudster and con man, a term i would certainly not use on a witness except it was explicitly bestowed upon him by not one but two different federal u.s. court judges, including the one who sentenced him to over 15 years in prison for defrauding union pension funds, a native american tribe, and scores of innocent investors. trying to was sentenced to pay restitution of over $80 million to his victims. that is a lot of money per car that is what donald trump was sentenced to pay e. jean carroll for in that litigation. the very first record of mr.

galanis's claims against the biden family appear -- check this out -- in the clemency petition he sent from prison to president trump. but the key point is this. even if we were to believe every single word offered by these utterly compromised witnesses, mr. bobulinski, mr. galanis, they do not identify any wrongdoing, much less an impeachable offense by president biden. with the impeachment bus running on empty, our colleagues now are apparently preparing to save face by ending the impeachment farce with criminal referrals. but criminal referrals require evidence of crimes. and the only crimes we have seen are those of the gop's own star witnesses like russian asset alex smirnoff, chinese agent gal loft, devon archer, and jason alanis. the minority witness today, our

witness, lev parnas, casts a piercing light on what is really taking place here. and mr. parnas has reason to know, that he too used to be a maga sycophant peddling lies and disinformation to smear joe biden. today, he joins a long line of self exiles from trump world who could no longer stomach all the corruption. people like cassidy hutchinson. people like michael cohen. sarah matthews. melissa griffin. general james mattis. digit chair joints chief of staff and now vice president mike pence who refuses to endorse for president the man he served with. but we do have what sycophants still in the room and i look forward to hearing their testimony about how they got sunk into this religious cult. mr. parnas wrote chairman

comer and me aramark about letter on july 23rd 2023. this is the first time i am meeting him today. he was rudy giuliani's right- hand man. has globetrotting business partner and a language interpreter in the mission to manufacture ukraine-related dirt and smears against joe biden in 2018 and 2019. he spent all his time traveling around the world trying to stage evidence against joe biden. in his letter, parnas explains that the desperate search to find evidence of any time of fighting corruption was a complete and total bust. because there was no evidence to find. hero to tell us that not only is there no evidence in ukraine that joe biden did anything improper, but, more darkly, the

manic search for a smoking gun against biden became a mission to invent and concoct evidence out of thin air with the active help of russian intelligence assets and agents. i am getting to russia. you have not heard of anything yet, mr. chairman. a man who has rank and with his own descent into trump world, lev parnas is ashamed of what he did to serve the interests of russian propaganda and pollutants with lies and he wants america to know the truth. he knows how the russian- stimulated conspiracy theories and lies that he promoted with rudy giuliani live on in the tiresome fabrication spread by alex smirnoff and now repeated by the committee like pavlov's dog. at every turn, my colleagues cry russia hoax. even in the face of repeated warnings from donald trump's

own treasury secretary and treasury of state from the intelligence community. from robert mueller. and most recently from special counsel weiss. he stated, quote, russian disinformation campaign targeting american citizens are a threat to our democracy. but secretary mnuchin, someone that you guys usually defend, but my gop colleagues continue to cry russia hoax like cold members selling flowers at the airport. our colleagues are the ones loyally amplifying the actual russian hoax. not the russia hoax. the russia hoax. the ones they have eagerly adopted from putin and his agents. that participate a while they shamefully block $60 million in military assistant to president zelenskyy and the siege to the ukrainian people five years after trump and giuliani