Jared Moskowitz, Lev Parnas take spotlight as they zing, torpedo Biden impeachment effort

A pair of South Floridians captured the Capitol Hill spotlight on Wednesday by debunking House Republicans' investigation of President Joe Biden.

U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat whose district covers swaths of Palm Beach County, wore a Vladimir Putin mask as he walked to the congressional hearing room where the panel he serves on, the House Oversight Committee, would again discuss so-far baseless allegations of corruption by the president.

Moskowitz then turned the heat lamp on committee chair James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, daring him to call an impeachment vote right then and there. Moskowitz even made the motion — sardonically saying, "I want to help you out" — to impeach and called out Comer to second it and hold the vote.

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Comer demurred, and Moskowitz then tore into the chairman and his GOP colleagues.

"No? Nothing? We got nothing," Moskowitz began. "I want … to show the America people that they're never going to impeach Joe Biden. It's never going to happen, because they don't have the evidence. This is a show. It's all fake."

Moskowitz has long been a critic of the House Oversight investigation into the Bidens and the lack of evidence.

In an interview in December, he told The Palm Beach Post, that the key piece of evidence, a whistleblower document said to be smoking-gun evidence against the president, was "no bombshell" and the Comer-led probe was a fact-less, proof-less, "total-failure theater" intended to damage Biden politically "because they can't save Donald Trump."

On Wednesday, Moskowitz said the GOP members are "lying" to their base.

"They just want to do these hearings. It's not leading to impeachment," He railed. "They're lying to their base, on Newsmax and Fox, leading these people to believe that they're going to eventually impeach the president. It's not going to happen, at all, ever. Period."

Moskowitz added that even if the committee could muster the votes to move an impeachment forward, there are not enough votes in the U.S. House, where he said the vast majority of members know the evidence does not exist.

"They don't have the votes on the floor. They know that," he said. "They've got members resigning rather than taking a vote on the fake, faux impeachment."

Comer later doubled down and announced on Twitter that the investigation would continue, and would call the president as a witness.

"In the coming days, I will invite President Joe Biden to the House Oversight Committee to provide his own testimony and explain why his family received tens of millions of dollars from foreign companies with his assistance," Comer posted.

Last week, however, citing the lack of any evidence or findings, White House counsel Edward N. Siskel called on House Speaker Mike Johnson to end the inquiry.

“It is obviously time to move on, Mr. Speaker,” Siskel wrote in a letter to Johnson. “This impeachment is over. There is too much important work to be done for the American people to continue wasting time on this charade.”

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Lev Parnas said impeachment 'evidence' pushed by Russia

Moskowitz spoke out on a day of testimony that included a searing attack on the U.S. House GOP impeachment probe by Boca Raton resident Lev Parnas, an erstwhile Trump supporter and Rudy Giuliani associate who was at the center of the Trump White House's 2019 pressure campaign on Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“I have never wavered from saying that there was no evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine — because there truly was none,” Parnas said in his prepared remarks.

He then said the effort to cast a cloud on the president was ushered by Moscow. He called out Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and GOP U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas as "collaborators." A spokesman for Johnson called Parnas' accusation baseless, and Sessions has denied any wrongdoing associated with Parnas, The Hill reported.

Parnas, who finished a 20-month prison term in September for campaign-finance violations, wire-fraud conspiracy, making false statements and falsifying records, was nonetheless direct and blunt.

“The only information ever pushed about the Bidens and Ukraine has come from Russia and Russian agents, which everyone sitting here today knows,” he said.

He added: “In my travels, I found precisely zero proof of the Bidens’ criminality. Instead, what I learned in that time frame was the true nature of the conspiracy that the Kremlin was forcing through Russian, Ukrainian, American and other channels to interfere in our elections. Ultimately, this was meant to benefit Trump’s re-election, which would in turn benefit Vladimir Putin.”

That reflected what Parnas told The Post in a December interview and wrote about in a book published this year, "Shadow Diplomacy," and recounted on his podcast, "Lev Remembers."

"The whole motive and the whole Biden stuff was never about getting justice, and getting to the bottom of Biden criminality or doing an investigation in Ukraine," Parnas said during the late 2023 interview. "It was all about announcing an investigation and using that in the media to be able to destroy the Biden campaign and have Trump win."

Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at afins@pbpost.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: What Jared Moskowitz, Lev Parnas said about Biden impeachment probe