House holds first hearing in Biden impeachment inquiry

House Republicans kicked off their first impeachment inquiry hearing Thursday laying out the allegations they will pursue against President Joe Biden, though their expert witnesses acknowledged Republicans don’t yet have the evidence to prove the accusation they’re leveling.

Thursday’s hearing in the House Oversight Committee didn’t include witnesses who could speak directly to Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealing at the center of the inquiry, but the hearing offered Republicans the chance to show some of the evidence they’ve uncovered to date.

None of that evidence has shown Joe Biden received any financial benefit from his son’s business dealings, but Republicans said at Thursday’s hearing what they’ve found so far has given them the justification to launch their impeachment inquiry.

Democrats responded by accusing Republicans of doing Donald Trump’s bidding and raising his and his family’s various foreign dealings themselves, as well as Trump’s attempts to get Ukraine to investigate in 2019 the same allegations now being raised in the impeachment inquiry.

At the close of the hearing, House Oversight Chair James Comer announced that he was issuing subpoenas for the bank records of the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and brother, James Biden. The subpoenas will be for their personal and business bank records, a source familiar with the subpoenas confirmed.

Here are some key takeaways from Thursday's hearing:

GOP witnesses say not enough evidence yet to impeach Biden: While Republicans leveled accusations of corruption against Joe Biden over his son’s business dealings, the GOP expert witnesses who testified Thursday were not ready to go that far.

Forensic accountant Bruce Dubinsky, one of the GOP witnesses, undercut Republicans’ main narrative by saying there wasn’t enough evidence yet for him to conclude that there was “corruption” by the Bidens.

Witness testimony frustrates some Republicans: Some inside the GOP are expressing frustration to CNN in real time with how the House GOP’s first impeachment inquiry hearing is playing out, as the Republican witnesses directly undercut the GOP’s own narrative and admit there is no evidence that Biden has committed impeachable offenses.

“You want witnesses that make your case. Picking witnesses that refute House Republicans arguments for impeachment is mind blowing,” one senior GOP aide told CNN. “This is an unmitigated disaster.”

GOP maps out questions they want to answer: House Republicans opened their first impeachment hearing Thursday with a series of lofty claims against the president, as they try to connect him to his son’s “corrupt” business dealings overseas. Comer claimed the GOP probes have “uncovered a mountain of evidence revealing how Joe Biden abused his public office for his family’s financial gain,” even though he hasn’t put forward any concrete evidence backing up that massive allegation.

Democrats attack inquiry for lacking evidence on the president: Democrats repeatedly pointed out that the Republican allegations about foreign payments were tied to money that went mostly Hunter Biden – but not the to the president. “The majority sits completely empty handed with no evidence of any presidential wrongdoing, no smoking gun, no gun, no smoke,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the Oversight committee.

Raskin’s staff brought in the 12,000 pages of bank records the committee has received so far, as Raskin said, “not a single page shows a dime going to President Joe Biden.” Raskin also had a laptop open displaying a countdown clock for when the government shuts down in a little more than two days – another point Democrats used to bash Republicans for focusing on impeachment and failing to pass bills to fund the government. 

Read more takeaways from the debate.

CNN’s Melanie Zanona and Avery Lotz contributed reporting to this post.

At the close of the impeaching inquiry hearing Thursday, House Oversight Chair James Comer announced that he was issuing subpoenas for the bank records of the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and brother, James Biden.

The subpoenas will be for their personal and business bank records, a source familiar with the subpoenas confirmed.

Comer had been signaling his intention to issue the subpoenas for the personal bank records. The move shows where Republicans will head next in their investigation as they continue to seek evidence to substantiate their unproven allegations about the president.

Republican Rep. James Comer, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, said in his opening remarks at the hearing on Thursday that the committee has uncovered how "the Bidens and their associates created over 20 shell companies" and "raked in over $20 million between 2014 and 2019."

Facts First: The $20 million figure is roughly accurate for Joe Biden's family and associates, according to the bank records subpoenaed by the committee, but the phrase "the Bidens and their associates" obscures the fact that there is no public evidence to date that President Joe Biden himself received any of this money. And it's worth noting that a large chunk of the money went to the "associates" — Hunter Biden's business partners — not even Biden's family itself.

So far, none of the bank records obtained by the committee have shown any payments to Joe Biden. And a Washington Post analysis in August found that, of about $23 million in payments the committee had identified from foreign sources, nearly $7.5 million went to members of the Biden family almost all of it to Hunter Biden -- and the rest to people Hunter Biden did business with. (The Post also questioned the use of the vague phrase "shell companies," noting that "virtually all of the companies" that had been listed by the committee at the time had "legitimate business interests" or "clearly identified business investments.")

A Republican aide for the House Oversight Committee disputed the Post's analysis on Thursday, saying that bank records obtained by the committee actually show that, of $24 million in payments between 2014 and 2019, $15 million went to the Bidens and $9 million went to associates. CNN has reached out to the Post for comment; the committee has not publicly released the underlying bank records that would definitively show the breakdown in payments.

The records obtained by the committee have shown that during and after Joe Biden's tenure as vice president, Hunter Biden made millions of dollars through complex financial arrangements from private equity deals, legal fees and corporate consulting in Ukraine, China, Romania and elsewhere. Again, Republicans have not produced evidence that Joe Biden got paid in any of these arrangements.

 

Rep. Katie Porter, a Democrat from California, needled what she said was hypocrisy by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, highlighting his past comments about whether a vote was needed to begin an impeachment inquiry.

During Thursday's hearing, she held up a poster board with a quote saying that an impeachment inquiry without a vote authorizing it would "create a process completely devoid of any merit or legitimacy."

After asking the witnesses to guess who said it, Porter said it was McCarthy, revealing his face on the blown-up poster.

The McCarthy remarks were from 2019, when Democrats were pursuing Donald Trump’s first impeachment.

Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina claimed at the Thursday hearing, “We already know the president took bribes from Burisma,” a Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden sat on the board of directors. 

Facts First: Mace’s claim is false; we do not “already know” that Joe Biden took any bribe. The claim about a bribe from Burisma is a completely unproven allegation. The FBI informant who relayed the claim to the FBI in 2020 was merely reporting something he said he had been told by Burisma’s chief executive. Later in the hearing, a witness called by the committee Republicans, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, called “the bribery allegation” the most concerning piece of evidence he had heard today -- but he immediately cautioned that “you have to only take that so far” given that it is “a secondhand account.” 

According to an internal FBI document made public by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa earlier this year over the strong objections of the FBI, the informant said in 2020 – when Donald Trump was president -- that the CEO of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, had claimed in 2016 that he made a $5 million payment to “one Biden” and another $5 million payment to “another Biden.” But the FBI document did not contain any proof for the claim, and the document said the informant was “not able to provide any further opinion as to the veracity” of the claim. 

Republicans have tried to boost the credibility the allegation by saying it was in an FBI document and that the FBI had viewed the informant as highly credible. But the document merely memorialized the information provided by the informant; it does not demonstrate that the information is true. And Hunter Biden’s business associate Devon Archer testified to the House Oversight Committee earlier this year that he had not been aware of any such payments to the Bidens; Archer characterized Zlochevsky’s reported claim as an example of the Ukrainian businessman embellishing his influence.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, blasted House Republicans at Thursday’s impeachment hearing, calling their antics “an embarrassment” and needling them for bringing in witnesses who don’t have firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing.

“Any serious impeachment investigation or inquiry relies on firsthand sworn testimony of witnesses to high crimes or misdemeanors,” Ocasio-Cortez said, before forcing all of the witnesses to acknowledge that they couldn’t offer any direct testimony about wrongdoing by the target of the impeachment inquiry, President Joe Biden.

The witnesses are legal scholars and fraud experts — and weren’t involved in any of Hunter Biden’s business dealings, which are at the center of the impeachment saga.

Instead, they offered their professional opinions about the evidence previously uncovered by House Republicans, information from Hunter Biden’s criminal cases, and press reports.

“This is an embarrassment. An embarrassment to the time of the people of this country,” continued Ocasio-Cortez said.

Democrats on the panel have also demanded Republicans call in Rudy Giuliani and one of his former associates, Lev Parnas, who sought dirt on President Biden in Ukraine.

Rep. Kweisi Mfume, a Democrat from Maryland, held up a sign during the impeachment inquiry hearing and repeatedly shouted “where in the world is Rudy Giuliani?”

Democrats have said that Giuliani and Parnas should be called in as witnesses because they would refute Republican allegations. They investigated President Biden over Ukraine in 2019 and did not find any wrongdoing.

“Where in the world is Rudy Giuliani? That's how we got here, ladies and gentlemen. And this committee is afraid to bring him before us and put him on the record. Shame! And the question was raised. What does this have to do with it? It has everything to do with it” Mfume said.

Back in June, House Democrats released a transcript of Parnas’ interview with Congress in January 2020 that refute a key unverified allegation that President Joe Biden was involved in an illegal foreign bribery scheme. And in July, Parnas called on Comer to end his Biden family investigation in a letter obtained by CNN. 

In their effort to rebut Republican attacks on the foreign money Hunted Biden received, Democrats have pointed to the money that Trump’s son-in-law received from Saudi Arabia.

“We also know that just months after Jared left the White House, the Saudi royal family gave him $2 billion — with a B — into the Kushner hedge fund,” Rep. Mike Garcia, a Democrat from California, said. “This is a man who was put at the head of Middle East policy in the White House.”

The Democrats charged that Kushner's actions were far worse than Hunter Biden's, because Kushner worked in government, while Biden's son did not.

“We also know that Hunter Biden never held any sort of public office, and there is no evidence that he ever influenced any kind of policy in the White House,” Garcia said.

Republicans have responded that Kushner had a business and expertise, while Hunter Biden did not have any expertise when he hired to the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Rep. James Comer, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said in his opening remarks a hearing on Thursday that the committee recently uncovered “two additional wires sent to Hunter Biden that originated in Beijing from Chinese nationals; this happened when Joe Biden was running for president of the United States – and Joe Biden’s home is listed on the beneficiary address.”

Facts First: This needs context. Comer was correct that the committee has found evidence of two wire transfers sent to Hunter Biden from Chinese nationals in the second half of 2019, during Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, but he did not explain that Joe Biden’s home being listed as the beneficiary address doesn’t demonstrate that Joe Biden received any of the money. Nor did he explain that there may well be benign reasons for the inclusion of the address. Hunter Biden has lived at his father’s Wilmington, Delaware home at times and listed that address on his driver’s license; Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said in a statement to CNN this week that the address was listed on these transfers simply because it was the address Hunter Biden used on the bank account the money was going to, which Lowell said Hunter Biden did “because it was his only permanent address at the time.”

“This was a documented loan (not a distribution or pay-out) that was wired from a private individual to his new bank account which listed the address on his driver’s license, his parents’ address, because it was his only permanent address at the time,” Lowell said in the statement. “We expect more occasions where the Republican chairs twist the truth to mislead people to promote their fantasy political agenda.”

White House spokesman Ian Sams wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Wednesday: “Imagine them arguing that, if someone stayed at their parents' house during the pandemic, listed it as their permanent address for work, and got a paycheck, the parents somehow also worked for the employer…It's bananas…Yet this is what extreme House Republicans have sunken to.”

Comer told CNN this week his panel is trying to put together a timeline on where Hunter Biden was living around the time of the transfers, which occurred in July 2019 and August 2019. Joe Biden was a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary at the time.

Some inside the GOP are expressing frustration to CNN in real time with how the House GOP’s first impeachment inquiry hearing is playing out, as the Republican witnesses directly undercut the GOP’s own narrative and admit there is no evidence that President Joe Biden has committed impeachable offenses. 

“You want witnesses that make your case. Picking witnesses that refute House Republicans arguments for impeachment is mind blowing,” one senior GOP aide told CNN. “This is an unmitigated disaster.”

One GOP lawmaker also expressed some disappointment with their performance thus far, telling CNN: “I wish we had more outbursts.”

The bar for today’s hearing was set low: Republicans admitted they would not reveal any new evidence, but were hoping to at least make the public case for why their impeachment inquiry is warranted, especially as some of their own members remain skeptical of the push.

But some Republicans are not even paying attention, as Congress is on the brink of a shutdown – a point Democrats hammered during the hearing.

 “I haven’t watched or listened to a moment of it,” said another GOP lawmaker. There’s a shutdown looming”

At the Thursday hearing, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio repeated a false claim about Hunter Biden that CNN debunked when Jordan made the same claim last week.

Jordan claimed that Hunter Biden himself said he was unqualified to sit on the board of directors of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings.

“Hunter Biden’s not qualified, fact number two, to sit on the board. Not my words, his words. He said he got on the board because of the brand, because of the name,” Jordan said Thursday.

Facts First: It’s not true that Hunter Biden himself said he wasn’t qualified to sit on the Burisma board. In fact, Hunter Biden said in a 2019 interview with ABC News that “I was completely qualified to be on the board” and defended his qualifications in detail. He did acknowledge, as Jordan said, that he would “probably not” have been asked to be on the board if he was not a Biden – but he nonetheless explicitly rejected claims that he wasn’t qualified, calling them “misinformation.”

When the ABC interviewer asked what his qualifications for the role were, he said: “Well, I was vice chairman on the board of Amtrak for five years. I was the chairman of the board of the UN World Food Programme. I was a lawyer for Boies Schiller Flexner, one of the most prestigious law firms in the world. Bottom line is that I know that I was completely qualified to be on the board to head up the corporate governance and transparency committee on the board. And that’s all that I focused on. Basically, turning a Eastern European independent natural gas company into Western standards of corporate governance.”

When the ABC interviewer said, “You didn’t have any extensive knowledge about natural gas or Ukraine itself, though,” Biden responded, “No, but I think I had as much knowledge as anybody else that was on the board – if not more.”

Asked if he would have been asked to be on the board if his last name wasn’t Biden, Biden said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. Probably not.” He added “there’s a lot of things” in his life that wouldn’t have happened if he had a different last name.

A side note: Biden had served as the board chair for World Food Program USA, a nonprofit that supports the UN World Food Programme, not the UN program itself as he claimed in the interview.