House GOP: A crumbling impeachment case

The Republican case for impeaching Joe Biden just got “a lot emptier,” said Molly Olmstead in Slate. Their star witness, an FBI informant who made “possibly the most credible accusation” of corruption against the president, was arrested and charged last week with lying about, well, everything. Justice Department special counsel David Weiss said Alexander Smirnov, 43, fabricated claims that, in 2015 or 2016, Ukrainian energy firm Burisma paid then–Vice President Biden and his son Hunter— a Burisma board member—$5 million each to quash a government investigation into the firm. More embarrassing for the House GOP impeachment effort is that Smirnov “admitted he has ties to Russian intelligence,” said Tori Otten in The New Republic. Smirnov told prosecutors that he met as recently as December with Russian officials, who passed him a story about Hunter. And this is the “supposedly credible” source whom the House GOP has repeatedly touted in its monthslong “quest to impeach the president.” Republicans still have no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden. It’s time to shut down this sham of an investigation.

There’s more than enough to keep probing, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. While candidate Biden claimed in 2020 that he was not involved in Hunter’s business, his son’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, testified to the House last week about how the Bidens together peddled the family “brand.” When Bobulinski and Hunter worked with a Chinese energy firm in 2017, we learned, Bobulinski wrote an email proposing a 10 percent cut for “the big guy”—who everyone understood to be Joe Biden. And “the big guy” was on at least 20 of Hunter’s business calls.

Bobulinski’s claims “didn’t hold up very well” under questioning from Democrats, said Joe Perticone in The Bulwark. He admitted that he’d never talked with Biden about Hunter’s business and that despite saying he couldn’t remember having any personal connection to Donald Trump, he’d been a Trump campaign guest at a 2020 presidential debate. Yet again, the investigation’s supposed “bombshell” revelations wither under scrutiny.

But hard-line Republicans don’t care about facts, said Greg Sargent in The New Republic. Already, MAGA types such as Donald Trump Jr. are declaring that Weiss—a Trump appointee who has indicted Hunter Biden on tax and firearms charges—is a deep-state stooge. “In MAGA-land, when one Big Lie implodes, there’s always another conspiracy theory lying underneath it.”