Being a Republican means never having to say ‘I was wrong’
Even a casual political observer can recognize that the House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into President Biden is all but dead. Multiple allegations from Alexander Smirnov, a former FBI informant, led House GOP legislators to hype their investigation into Biden and his son Hunter. That included an explosive claim that Biden, when he was vice president, and his son pressured a Ukrainian energy executive for $5 million in bribes. But now a Justice Department special counsel who was investigating Hunter Biden is charging Smirnov with peddling lies planted by Russian intelligence officials. Just like that, Republicans lost the star witness whose mendacious tales of corruption fueled their inquiry.
Anyone with a shred of integrity would shut down a bogus investigation that has always been short on evidence and long on sound-bite bombast. Instead, House Republicans are trying to downplay, if not outright dismiss, Smirnov’s oversized role and march forward with their ridiculous impeachment pursuit.
Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican House Judiciary chair who once claimed that an unclassified FBI document detailing Smirnov’s accusations was the “most corroborating evidence” from a “highly credible confidential human source,” now insists that Smirnov was never that important to the GOP inquiry into the Bidens.
“It corroborates but it doesn’t change the fundamental facts,” Jordan said as he tried to move quickly through a scrum of reporters Wednesday.
How about this for a fundamental fact? There’s no juice left in this dried-out Republican nothingburger of an investigation. In a CNN interview on Wednesday, House Republican Ken Buck of Colorado said Republicans had been warned about Smirnov’s credibility when documents about the informant’s testimony were released, at their insistence, last year.
“And yet my colleagues went out and talked to the public about how this was credible and how it was damning and how it had proven President Biden’s, at the time Vice President Biden’s, complicity in receiving bribes,” he said. “It appears to absolutely be false.”
Or, as Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland called the investigation, “a wild goose chase built on conspiracy theories and lies.”
But most House Republicans, who, instead of doing their jobs to help address America’s problems, are doing
Donald Trump’s bidding, seem to love nothing more than conspiracy theories and lies.
Those beholden to Trump are hellbent on continuing this charade for one reason only: to impugn as much as possible the integrity of his likely Democratic opponent for the presidency.
It’s Trump who’s propelling this Biden investigation. He wants Biden impeached, and soon. In the former president’s vengeance mindset, he may believe that attaching an impeachment charge to Biden nullifies the president’s or any Democrat’s ability to wield Trump’s two impeachments as a line of attack.
There’s also this: Faced with 91 federal felony charges in four jurisdictions, Trump loves to pretend that he’s being singled out for the kinds of actions that all politicians, especially Democrats, engage in. Pushing the Biden corruption narrative is a way for Trump to normalize his own alleged corruption while insisting that the rule of law be applied to his political enemies.
Think of it as Trump’s new birtherism tactic: It’s pure distraction and a means of amplifying Republican claims that for any number of reasons Biden is unfit to be reelected president. Of course, that’s what’s also said about Trump, whose main defense against any accusation of wrongdoing evokes the playground taunt “I’m rubber, you’re glue. Everything you say bounces off me and sticks to you.”
There’s an old saying that once someone tells a lie, they must forever treat what it conveys as true. To borrow a line from writer Agatha Christie, Republicans lie “with fluency, ease, and artistic flavor.” And they haven’t worked this long and hard to erode Biden’s reputation only to get waylaid by admitting they got it wrong on an impeachment inquiry that’s as empty as it is politically motivated.