AOC Asks Republicans When They Knew Their Impeachment Push Was a Sham

Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tore into Tony Bobulinski during a House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday, pressing conservatives’ so-called “deadly witness” on his ability to point to any illegal activity conducted by President Joe Biden—and in doing so, urging Republicans to admit that the whole proceeding was “based on false charges.”

“I have a quick question. Simple. Is it your testimony today that you personally witnessed President Joe Biden commit a crime?” the New York lawmaker asked.

“I believe the fact that he was sitting with me while I was putting together—” Bobulinski started, before Ocasio-Cortez cut in, narrowing her question.

“Did you witness the president commit a crime? Is it your testimony today?” she prompted.

“Yes,” Bobulinski replied.

“And what crime did …  you witness?” Ocasio-Cortez continued.

In the ensuing back-and-forth, Bobulinski vaguely responded with categories of crimes rather than specific ones, flagrantly patronizing Ocasio-Cortez for not understanding corruption statutes like RICO, only to then be schooled by her explanation that RICO is simply an umbrella category and not a specific crime.

“Clearly what we are seeing here today is a continuation of the 15-month saga of the Republican majority lost in the desert,” Ocasio-Cortez said, starting a speech that would lean into her conservative colleagues for pushing forward with an impeachment probe based on meritless claims that have since been thoroughly debunked—including by one of the investigation’s supposed star witnesses, Alexander Smirnov, who is currently in prison after admitting that he spun the story with the help of top Russian intelligence.

“What we are seeing is that this committee was warned about the falsehoods of these allegations long before that, warned by Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “And yet they proceeded anyway. The chairman proceeded anyway. This committee was warned by a Rudy Giuliani associate right here, Lev Parnas. After that document, about the falsehoods of this, then held hearings where your own expert witnesses said that there was no grounds for impeachment, and you proceeded anyway.”

“At this point, the story is not the fact that the basis of this impeachment inquiry is wrong. The story is why it’s proceeding anyway. Why is this committee proceeding based on false charges?” she added.

Of course, some of her colleagues across the aisle didn’t take so kindly to her laying it all out on the table, deciding instead that the best course of action—rather than respond frankly—would be to attempt to twist Ocasio-Cortez’s vocal offense into fodder for their social media followers.

“Weekly meltdown by Rep. AOC,” posted South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace, sharing a clip of the speech. “Someone needs to remind the Left, just because you are loud, does not mean you are right.”

In a sign of how well the Republican impeachment investigation into Joe Biden is going, right-wing networks on Wednesday barely covered a House hearing that was part of the probe.

The House Oversight Committee heard testimony Wednesday from Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s onetime work partner with a history of shady business dealings, and Jason Galanis, who is testifying via video call from a federal prison where he is serving a 14-year sentence for financial fraud. Republicans claim both men can prove the Biden family is guilty of corruption, despite the fact that Hunter says he and Galanis only met once.

But before the hearing even began, Newsmax host Rob Finnerty asked House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, who has helped lead the probe, why Republicans insisted on continuing with the investigation. The Republican House majority has shrunk so much that articles of impeachment are unlikely to pass.

“It kind of seems like you’re chasing your tail at this point because this is not going to go anywhere,” Finnerty said.

When the hearing began, Fox News barely acknowledged it was happening. Instead, the network only showed the hearing in a small, soundless box in the corner of the screen.

One of the few times Fox did show the hearing was during the opening statement from Lev Parnas, a former associate of Rudy Giuliani. Parnas said he had seen “precisely zero evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine.”

“No credible sources ever provided proof of criminal activity,” Parnas said. “The only information ever pushed on the Bidens in Ukraine has come from one source and one source only: Russia and Russian agents.”

Fox quickly cut off the audio and switched to different programming.

Newsmax did cover the hearing, but even the far-right network’s reporters couldn’t deny the fact that Republicans have turned up no proof of the president’s wrongdoing. While Parnas was being questioned, one reporter pointed out to Representative Byron Donalds that “a lot of this evidence is situational, it’s circumstantial.”

“What does the Oversight Committee need right now to complete its investigation, to fill in these holes?” she asked.

“All I will say is, sit tight and let the rest of the hearing unfold,” Byron said, insisting the first half of the hearing had been “devastating” to the Biden family.

In fact, nothing the Republicans have turned up has been devastating to the Biden family. The only evidence of wrongdoing that has come out has been by the Republicans’ own witnesses. One, Gal Luft, has been charged with acting as a foreign agent for China and as an arms dealer. Another is Alexander Smirnov, the former FBI informant who accused the Bidens of accepting bribes, jump-starting the entire investigation. He is currently imprisoned in California for fabricating the entire allegation. Smirnov has even admitted that he was fed the story by a Russian intelligence officer.

Just a few hours later, Donalds was forced to eat his words on Fox News when host John Roberts pointed out that “the needle hasn’t appreciably moved on this case.”

“Where is the evidence of wrongdoing on the president’s part, and how long can you continue this investigation without that evidence?” Roberts asked.

And shortly before Donalds appeared on Fox, the network’s legal analyst Kerri Urbahn agreed with Roberts that the investigation hadn’t produced any evidence.

“I do think that people are maybe becoming a little bit tired of all this,” she told Roberts.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has urged an appeals court to ignore Donald Trump’s latest effort to worm his way out of paying the $464 million disgorgement from his bank fraud trial.

On Wednesday, an attorney for James told the court that Trump’s claims could not be trusted since they were based on sworn statements by Alan Garten, general counsel at the Trump Organization, and Gary Giulietti, one of Trump’s close friends. There’s a precedent to disqualify them—during the trial, Judge Arthur Engoron decided that Giulietti could not be considered a credible witness and argued that Garten had “professional interests in this litigation.”

Garten, however, snapped back at that. “The court found no such thing. The AG statement is reckless and completely untrue,” Garten said in response to the filing, according to The Washington Post.

So far, Trump has tried and failed to pause the rapidly growing interest on the judgment, counteroffering the court a $100 million bond in lieu of the full amount. He has also approached several brokers and 30 suretors for help securing a bond, though it didn’t seem to work out for him, according to a filing by Trump’s attorneys, who admitted that suretors refused to accept Trump’s real estate as collateral. Instead, they would only accept cash to the tune of $1 billion, which Trump said he and his businesses just don’t have.

In a nearly 5,000-page document filed on Monday, Trump’s attorneys argued that the fine was “grossly disproportional” to Trump’s offenses, which included defrauding banks, insurance companies, and investors by falsely inflating his wealth and the value of his properties.

“The amount of the judgment, with interest, exceeds $464 million, and very few bonding companies will consider a bond of anything approaching that magnitude,” wrote attorneys Alina Habba, Clifford Robert, Christopher Kise, and John Sauer.

Trump issued his own venom Monday night in a string of posts that his former fixer, Michael Cohen, interpreted as fury directed at a “situation that is completely out of his control.”

“A bond of the size set by the Democrat Club-controlled Judge, in Corrupt, Racist Letitia James’ unlawful Witch Hunt, is unConstitutional, un-American, unprecedented, and practically impossible for ANY Company, including one as successful as mine. The Bonding Companies have never heard of such a bond, of this size, before, nor do they have the ability to post such a bond, even if they wanted to,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial.

Regardless of his frustration, he’s quickly running out of time. The former president has until Monday to come up with nearly half a billion dollars—and if he doesn’t, James can begin taking steps to seize his assets to cover the debt, including 40 Wall Street and Trump Tower.*

* This article originally mischaracterized the consequences of the Monday deadline.

Representative Jamie Raskin absolutely destroyed the Republican effort to impeach Joe Biden on Wednesday, describing the somehow still ongoing inquiry as “the most spectacular failure in the history of congressional investigations.”

The House Oversight Committee is hearing testimony Wednesday from Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s onetime work partner with a history of shady business dealings, and Jason Galanis, who is testifying via video call from a federal prison where he is serving a 14-year sentence for financial fraud. Republicans claim both men can prove the Biden family is guilty of corruption, despite the fact that Hunter says he and Galanis only met once.

“With any luck, today marks the end of perhaps the most spectacular failure in the history of congressional investigations: the effort to find a high crime or misdemeanor committed by Joe Biden and then to impeach him for it,” Raskin, the ranking Oversight member, said in his opening statement. As he spoke, one of his aides held up a poster with quotes from the right-wing outlets Fox News and the Washington Examiner acknowledging that the impeachment investigation has turned up no proof.

Raskin described some of the “hilarious episodes” in Republicans’ “long-running madcap series,” including almost all of the GOP’s supposed “star” witnesses stating that the president had not been involved in his family’s business dealings. Lawmakers also combed through tens of thousands of pages of financial documents but were unable to find proof of Biden’s wrongdoing.

Over the course of the investigation, Raskin noted, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene waved Hunter Biden’s nude photos around during a hearing (and may have emailed them to minors). One of the GOP’s primary witnesses, Gal Luft, has been charged with acting as a foreign agent for China and as an arms dealer. And Alexander Smirnov, the former FBI informant who accused the Biden’s of accepting bribes, jump-starting the entire investigation, is currently imprisoned in California for fabricating the entire allegation. Smirnov has even admitted that he was fed the story by a Russian intelligence officer.

“The comedy of errors comes crashing to an end, as House Republicans in more than a dozen Biden districts beg for mercy and the Committee throws a flabby Hail Mary pass three weeks after the Super Bowl is over,” Raskin said.

Although Oversight Chair James Comer and Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, who have spearheaded the charge against Biden, remain gung-ho about the investigation, other Republicans have begun to sour on it. In fact, Representative Ken Buck, the one Republican willing to openly oppose the impeachment inquiry, will leave Congress at the end of this week in large part because of the investigation.

“We’ve taken impeachment and we’ve made it a social media issue as opposed to a constitutional concept,” Buck said last week when he announced his retirement. “This place just keeps going downhill, and I don’t need to spend my time here.”

Once again, Donald Trump wants everyone to know he is totally not worried about money—especially not the $454 million judgment stemming from his New York bank fraud trial that the self-purported billionaire can’t seem to muster the money for.

“These baseless innuendos are pure bullshit,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement on Tuesday, referring to a CNN segment that reported the GOP presidential nominee was looking to sell his New York properties—and fast.

“President Trump has filed a motion to stay the unjust, unconstitutional, un-American judgment from New York Judge Arthur Engoron in a political Witch Hunt brought by a corrupt Attorney General,” Cheung continued. “A bond of this size would be an abuse of the law, contradict bedrock principals [sic] of our Republic, and fundamentally undermine the rule of law in New York.”

But Cheung’s insistence that Trump isn’t trying to get rid of his properties just doesn’t seem to jibe with what Trump himself is saying, and what seems to be keeping him up at night. On Tuesday, the former president was online in the early morning hours, complaining that he’d have to sell his properties at “Fire Sale prices” to cover the disgorgement.

“I would be forced to mortgage or sell Great Assets, perhaps at Fire Sale prices, and if and when I win the Appeal, they would be gone. Does that make sense? WITCH HUNT. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” he wrote on TruthSocial.

So far, Trump has tried and failed to pause the rapidly growing interest, counteroffering the court a $100 million bond in lieu of the full amount. He has also approached several brokers and several dozen suretors for help securing a bond. That, however, didn’t work out for him, according to a filing by Trump’s attorneys, who admitted that suretors refused to accept Trump’s real estate as collateral. Instead, they would only accept cash to the tune of $1 billion, which Trump said he and his businesses just don’t have. All in all, a curious turn of events for a man who claimed during a deposition last year that he had “substantially in excess of 400 million in cash” which was “going up very substantially every month.”

Earlier this month, Trump bragged to Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade that he has “a lot of money” and that he doesn’t “worry about money.” But for all his posturing, Trump is quickly running out of time. The former president has until Monday to come up with nearly half a billion dollars before he’s legally allowed to appeal the case.