A hot mic captured a lawmaker labelling the heated House Oversight Committee’s impeachment inquiry hearing into alleged corruption committed by the Bidens as “Jurassic Park,” encapsulating the hearing’s devolution into chaos.
An apparently frustrated GOP-led committee heard testimony from a variety of witnesses who have more or less confirmed their so-far failed efforts to support evidence of any corruption.
Rep James Comer, the committee chair, told Dan Goldman, a Democrat on the panel, that he was “out of order,” banged his gavel, and said, “We are in suspension here until the clerk comes so we can take the vote that your side of the aisle requested.”
Then, a lawmaker could be heard on a hot mic saying defeatedly: “You can’t make this stuff up. This is Jurassic Park. Jeez!” It wasn’t clear who made the remark.
Earlier in the day, Massachusetts Democratic Rep Stephen Lynch, a decades-long member of the Oversight Committee, told Republicans that so far, “You’ve actually provided more evidence to impeach Donald Trump for a third time than you have in so much as laying a glove on Joe Biden.”
“We keep on hearing about the ‘Biden family,’” he explained. “When you hear someone say, ‘the Biden family,’ that translates to: ‘We have no evidence on the president so we’re going to use the Biden family to try to implicate President Biden.”
He also called out those across the aisle for their “bumbling and shifting arguments” that he claimed have “done nothing more than exonerate President Biden.”
Earlier this month, Mr Comer invited Hunter Biden and his associates to testify before the committee.
Former Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas also testified, saying he was “witness to numerous efforts to prove that Joe and Hunter Biden were linked to corruption in Ukraine.” Mr Parnas said that after travelling around the world for a year — as he was tasked to do by Mr Giuliani — he found “precisely zero evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine.”
Last month, the arrest of FBI informant Alexander Smirnov poked a sizeable hole in the Republicans’ impeachment inquiry. Mr Smirnov had accused Joe and Hunter Biden of being involved in a bribery scheme.
February’s indictment branded these allegations, which once added fuel to the inquiry, as “false derogatory information.”
