BIDEN IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY HAS UTTERLY COLLAPSED
Until this month, House Republicans referred to information provided by a “highly credible” FBI informant as the core of their case to impeach President Biden. This week, they quietly deleted any mention of that source from official documents. This one small move speaks volumes about an ill-founded GOP crusade that seems finally to be reaching an embarrassing denouement.
Special counsel David Weiss — the man in charge of the Justice Department’s criminal case against Hunter Biden — last week filed charges against Alexander Smirnov. The 43-year-old U.S.-Israeli citizen, prosecutors say, lied to federal investigators about the Biden family’s business dealings. These lies, crucially, included claims that the president and his son each sought $5 million bribes from Ukrainian energy company Burisma when Biden was vice president, in exchange for protecting the firm from scrutiny by Ukraine’s national authorities. Now, Smirnov has also disclosed that “officials associated with Russian intelligence” fed him his information.
Of course, there’s reason for skepticism about that latest explosive allegation from this supplier of apparently bogus bombshells. The memo released on Tuesday portrays Smirnov as a con man hawking “an amalgam of otherwise unremarkable business meetings and contacts,” none of which occurred during the time period he purported, as proof of corruption. He apparently lied about his wealth, his profession and more. Prosecutors even refer to “new lies” Smirnov is “actively peddling … that could impact U.S. elections,” involving suggestions that Moscow “may use as ‘kompromat’ ” information taken from intercepted phone calls of Hunter Biden in a foreign hotel.
Might Smirnov also be lying about Russian officials providing him with dirt on the president? Absolutely. But that is the point. Either Smirnov is an asset in a current Kremlin plot to spread disinformation about the president, or he is dissembling about that, too. Either way, congressional Republicans have staked their impeachment inquiry on the words of a fabulist.
This turn of events is devastating for the Republican effort to oust the president, given how heavily the politicians orchestrating it have leaned on Smirnov’s claims.
The facts about Hunter Biden’s business dealings never supported the effort to remove Joe Biden from office. Smirnov’s assertions had already been dismantled, including in a GOP Senate investigation, before the past week’s discrediting, and the witnesses Republicans have called to their hearings have sworn under oath that the president wasn’t involved in any of his son’s schemes.
The House Republicans’ impeachment quest has never been credible.
After authorizing their inquiry in December, Republicans could abandon it before summer — holding out hope before then that closed-door interviews with James Biden and Hunter Biden will turn up the proof of wrongdoing that so far has failed to materialize. Giving up is the right answer. The Justice Department’s case against Hunter Biden for federal tax crimes as well as falsifying paperwork on a gun purchase might be strong. But Congress’s attempt to punish President Biden for Hunter Biden’s poor decisions was always weak. Now, it has utterly collapsed.