A Ukrainian-American businessman who helped Rudy Giuliani try to dig up dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine during the run-up to the 2020 presidential election testified Wednesday on Capitol Hill that he found “precisely zero evidence of the Bidens’ corruption” there.

Lev Parnas’ testimony before the House Oversight Committee contradicted a claim Republicans have made for years that Biden, as vice president in 2016, pressured Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor to squash an investigation into Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, for which Biden’s son Hunter was a board member. Joe Biden, now president, has acknowledged he threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid to Ukraine if it did not remove Viktor Shokin but has said it was because Shokin was not investigating corruption among the country’s politicians.

Meanwhile on Wednesday, GOP members of the panel called on two of Hunter Biden’s former business partners, who testified that President Biden has lied about not being involved in his son’s business affairs.

Tony Bobulinski said he met twice in 2017 with Joe Biden, who was not in public office at the time. And Jason Galanis, testifying from prison, said he attended a meeting with Hunter Biden, Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina and Baturina’s late husband, former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, in which Hunter Biden called his father, then the vice president, on speakerphone “to say hello.”

House Republicans are six months into their impeachment inquiry into President Biden, in which they allege his family and their associates — including Joe Biden himself — raked in at leat $24 million from foreign entities by selling access to Joe Biden.

House Republicans to date have produced no concrete evidence that Joe Biden profited from his son’s or his brother James’ business deals or that their professional interests influenced Joe Biden’s actions in office. 

President Biden has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. The White House has decried the probe as baseless.

Parnas, who was invited by Democrats on the committee, testified he, along with Giuliani, played a key role at the behest of then-President Donald Trump in trying to link Joe and Hunter Biden to corruption in Ukraine in 2018 and 2019. The effort was at the heart of Trump’s first impeachment in 2020. The Senate acquitted him.

“The American people have been lied to by Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and various cohorts of individuals in government and media positions,” Parnas testified. 

“The only information ever pushed on the Bidens in Ukraine has come from one source, one source only — Russia and Russian agents,” he continued. “The impeachment proceedings that bring us here now are predicated on false information spread by the Kremlin.”

In 2022, Parnas was sentenced to 20 months in a U.S. prison after being convicted of fraud and campaign finance crimes.

Parnas said he acknowledges his wrongdoings and “will be silenced no longer.”

He was not the only witness testifying with a criminal record. Galanis testified via video link from Atlanta, where he is serving a nearly 16-year prison sentence for his participation in multiple fraud schemes, including defrauding a Native American tribe.

“The entire value out of Hunter Biden to our business was his family name and his access to his father, Vice President Joe Biden,” Galanis testified.

Similarly, Bobulinski told lawmakers: “It is clear to me that Joe Biden was the brand being sold by the Biden family. His family’s foreign influence peddling operation from China to Ukraine and elsewhere sold out to foreign actors who were seeking to gain influence and access to Joe Biden and the United States government.

“Joe Biden was more than a participant and a beneficiary of his family’s business,” Bobulinski added. “He was an active, aware enabler who met with business associates such as myself.”

Hunter Biden was also invited to testify but did not appear. House Republicans left an empty seat at the table with a name placard for him.

“Hunter Biden demanded a public hearing,” said Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky. “I’ve given him one.”

In a letter to Comer, Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, wrote his client had already answered Republicans’ questions and said the public hearing “is not a serious oversight proceeding.”

The president’s son testified before the Oversight and Judiciary committees in a closed-door meeting last month. He initially fought a subpoena from Republicans and said he would only testify publicly but later agreed to a private interview after GOP lawmakers moved forward with a criminal contempt-of-Congress referral.

Republicans and Democrats attacked the credibility of each other’s witnesses Wednesday.

Comer called Parnas a “distraction witness” who would “talk about nonsense” and questioned why Democrats did not invite any of Hunter Biden’s other business associates. 

“For months, we have heard Democrats desperately claiming that witnesses have told this committee that Joe Biden had no involvement in his family’s business dealings. But where are those witnesses today?” Comer asked. “ … They know their testimonies would not withstand public scrutiny.”

Democrats attacked Galanis’ character.

“I want to remind people he’s sitting in prison,” said Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass. “That’s why he can’t be here today. He’s sitting in prison for scamming workers’ pensions. I mean, how low can you get then if the Republicans’ idea that this is the best guy they can get to testify against the president?”

And Democrats argued Bobulinski produced no evidence to support his claims, that he was upset Hunter Biden did not involve his father in a failed business venture and that he was working on behalf of Trump and Republicans, who invited him to speak at a news conference before a 2020 presidential debate. They also noted Bobulinski did not meet Hunter Biden until after Joe Biden was out of office in 2017.

At one point, Rep. Gary Palmer, R-Ala., showed photos of text messages on Bobulinski’s phone that appeared to corroborate his story that he met with Joe Biden in 2017 in Beverly Hills, California. But when Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee, called for a vote to subpoena Bobulinski’s phone so all the texts could be read, Republicans voted to table the measure.

“What we’re doing is we’re tabling evidence here, which you [Republicans] keep relying on,” Raskin said. “ … That just makes no sense.”

After the vote, Bobulinski he would voluntarily sit in a room with Comer and Raskin “and we can go through each and every text message.”

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, White House spokesperson Ian Sams wrote: “Chairman Comer could have had any of the TWO DOZEN Republican witnesses who have testified that President Biden did nothing wrong at today’s hearing. But of course he isn’t. He’s relying on the discredited ones for his Hannity Hearing.”

"That hearing was embarrassing for House Republicans," Sams said later in a statement. "A total waste of time. It’s time to move on from this sad charade. There are real issues the American people want us to address."

Republicans again insisted the evidence points to Joe Biden being directly involved in his family’s foreign business affairs.

“Joe Biden knows exactly what he is doing and knows a handshake, wink and a smile is enough for him to have his plausible deniability, as [brother] Jim Biden calls it, or Joe Biden is being led around by his family and has no idea who he is meeting with and is truly an elderly man with a poor memory,” Comer said. “There is no other explanation. Either Joe Biden is complicit or Joe Biden is incompetent.”

But Democrats argued that impeachment inquiry has turned up no proof of wrongdoing by Biden, with Raskin listing several embarrassing moments along the way for Republicans. Most notable among them, an FBI informant who claimed Burisma executives bribed Joe and Hunter Biden with $5 million each to help kill a Ukrainian investigation has been charged in the U.S. with lying about the story.

Alexander Smirnov also has admitted that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden, federal prosecutors said.

Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, one of the Republicans leading the impeachment inquiry, had previously called the allegation the “most corroborating evidence we have.”

“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 said.

At the end of Wednesday's hearing, Oversight Committee Chair Comer, invited President Biden "to provide his own testimony" for the GOP impeachment inquiry. The last sitting president to testify before Congress was Gerald Ford in 1974, who volunteered to speak before a House Judiciary subcommittee to explain his pardon of Richard Nixon.