Biden impeachment inquiry
Until last 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 — late February 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, an eerie echo of 2016’s election interference, or he is dissembling about that, too. Either way, congressional Republicans have staked their impeachment inquiry on the words of a fabulist.