Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz on Wednesday slammed Democrats for bringing in a convicted felon to try to make President Joe Biden’s impeachment hearing about Donald Trump.
Democrats oddly seek to make Trump their counter to the GOP’s case about Biden wrongfully profiting from his son Hunter’s bag-man activities with corrupt foreign oligarchs.
They resorted to Lev Parnas, a former associate of Rudy Giuliani, as their chief witness.
As Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin told Axios, Parnas “can debunk the bogus claims at the heart of the impeachment probe and, in the process, explain how the GOP ended up in this degraded and embarrassing place.”
Read: Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz Leads Call For Biden To Send U.S. Navy To Halt Potential Haitian Invasion
Yet what was embarrassing was Parnas’ appearance before the House Oversight Committee, as Gaetz grilled him about his conviction.
In June 2022, Parnas was sentenced to 20 months in federal prison after being convicted of conspiracy to make foreign contributions to U.S. political campaigns.
He disbursed more than $150,000 from a Russian oligarch into those campaigns in an effort to obtain licenses for operations that sell legalized pot.
Prior to that, Parnas pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud with a scheme, ironically, to provide investors phony information about a Florida-based company created to prevent people from being defrauded.
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At the committee hearing, Parnas claimed Trump and Giuliani were lying about the Bidens’ alleged crimes, offering the standard Democratic line: “The only information ever pushed on the Bidens and Ukraine has come from one source and one source only: Russia and Russian agents.”
In response, Gaetz, a Fort Walton Beach Republican, told Parnas after clarifying why he went to prison, “Sounds like from everyone here today, the only one working for a Russian oligarch was you.”
Gaetz argued that the Democrats could have brought almost anyone else in — from Biden himself, his son, or any of their business associates — to refute the GOP’s claims that are “backed up by bank statements, backed up calendar entries, backed up by emails, backed up by text messages.”
Yet, he noted, they sent a witness who was charged with enough crimes to receive 50 years in prison.
Gaetz also refuted Parnas’ testimony by requesting former Biden associate Tony Bobulinski to spell out the crimes he witnessed by the Biden family, such as fraud, bribery, and money laundering.
“Sounds like high crimes and misdemeanors to me, Mr. Chairman,” said Gaetz once Bobulinski finished.
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