GOP Shoots Down Raskin’s Motion to Subpoena Rudy Giuliani to Testify On The ‘Origins of the Lie’ Behind Biden Impeachment Inquiry
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, moved to subpoena Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas on Thursday, declaring them to be “the insiders who know the origins of the lie upon which this sham impeachment is based and who worked to spread it.”
Raskin made the motion, which was eventually shot down by the House GOP majority on the committee, during a hearing on the “basis for the impeachment inquiry” into President Joe Biden.
Raskin delivered a lengthy opening statement following Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) who argued that the key piece of evidence linking President Biden to his son’s shady business dealings overseas was the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor at the behest of then Vice President Joe Biden in 2015.
Raskin began by arguing that the GOP-led committee has received some “12,000 pages of bank records” and “2000 pages of sales reports the chairman subpoenaed” as well as having “held hearings and conducted interviews with everybody from Hunter Biden’s business partners to a federal agent assigned to that investigation and still we found no evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden.”
“If the Republicans had a smoking gun or even a dripping water pistol, they would be presenting it today. But they’ve got nothing on Joe Biden,” Raskin insisted, adding:
All they can do is return to the thoroughly demolished lie that Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump launched five years ago. The Burisma conspiracy theory, a fairy tale so preposterous that one of its main authors, Lev Parnas, has now disowned and repudiated it.
This is the theory that Vice President Biden, global anti-corruption groups and most Western governance governments targeted Ukraine Prosecutor General Shokin for removal because he was threatening the Burisma Corp, whose board Hunter Biden served on.
Trump synthesized the lie in his August 27th post about President Biden saying, Look, the guy got bribed, he paid people off and he wouldn’t give $1 billion to Ukraine unless they, quote, got rid of the prosecutor. Trump story is the opposite of the truth.
Raskin went on to cite some of the key evidence rebutting the claim, including the fact that “Republican Senators Ron Johnson, Rob Portman, and Mark Kirk wrote to the Ukrainian president assailing corruption in his country and urging him, quote, ‘to press ahead with urgent reforms to the prosecutor general’s office.’”
“Yet years later, in 2018, as President Trump saw Biden as a strong rival in the 2020 election, he worked with Giuliani to twist all the facts around and to suddenly accuse Biden of corruption. In calling for the dismissal of a corrupt prosecutor,” Raskin continued, before detailing Lev Parnas’s role in both helping craft and later debunk the claims.
“A few months ago, Chairman Comer and the committee, received an insider’s account of the plan to concoct and spread this lie from an extraordinary letter sent to us by Lev Parnas, who was Rudy Giuliani’s right-hand man. Giuliani and Parnas searched high and low to find anyone who would endorse their contortions about Biden,” Raskin said, adding:
Their failing crusade culminated in the infamous phone call that then President Trump made to Ukrainian President Zelensky, in which Trump threatened to withhold hundreds of billions of dollars in economic strategy, strategic and military security assistance to Ukraine unless Zelensky embraced their ridiculous fabrication and falsely advertised to the world that Ukraine was investigating Joe Biden. This shakedown became the basis for the first House impeachment of President Trump.
“Giuliani’s big lie has been thoroughly debunked by multiple sources,” Raskin continued before quoting Republican Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) refuting the claim that Shokin was fired to benefit Hunter Biden.
As Raskin ended his remarks he then called for the committee to officially subpoena Giuliani and Parnas to testify under oath in regard to the Shokin conspiracy theory:
Mr. Chairman. If this dysfunction caucus is going to insist on going forward, we must receive the testimony of Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas, the insiders who know the origins of the lie upon which this sham impeachment is based and who worked to spread it.
We know that Mr. Parnas is ready and willing to testify and is a former U.S. attorney and mayor. Mr. Giuliani will surely agree to enlighten us on everything pursuant to clause two, Case six of Rule 11. I move that the committee subpoena Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas to come and testify in these hearings, and I would like to ask for a vote on that or debate, as you would please, Mr. Chairman.
Comer and Raskin then tussled back and forth as Comer questioned why Giuliani and Parnas would be relevant to the inquiry.
Eventually, a GOP member offered a motion to table Raskin’s motion to subpoena Giuliani and Parnas. Comer held a rollcall vote and the motion to table the subpoena passed on party lines, 20 to 19.
Watch the full clip above.
