Propaganda: Did Russia ensnare the GOP?

“Are Republicans easy marks or willing participants in Russian anti-Biden operations?” asked Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post. “That’s a troubling question” raised by the recent indictment of former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov—Republicans’ “star witness” in the impeachment inquiry targeting President Biden. The probe had been utterly lacking in evidence that Biden profited from his family’s foreign business affairs, except for Smirnov’s claim that the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where Hunter Biden was a board member, paid his father and then-Vice President Joe Biden $5 million in bribes. Now Smirnov is charged with relaying accusations that seem to have been cooked up by Russian intelligence, including kompromat meant to damage Biden in the 2024 election. This is the same kind of “influence scheme” Russia used to brazenly interfere on Republicans’ behalf in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

House Republicans may have “got out over their skis” trying to pin their case on Smirnov, said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review, but they were abetted by “galactic government incompetence.” It took three years for the FBI to see that travel records it had in hand proved that Smirnov was lying about meeting with Burisma executives. And while FBI director Christopher Wray ultimately “tried to warn” top House Republicans James Comer and Jim Jordan that Smirnov’s claims were unverified, the GOP doesn’t trust the FBI, since so much of what was said to be Russian disinformation—like the embarrassing contents of Hunter’s laptop—proved legitimate. Anyway, Comer and Jordan never needed Smirnov’s allegations, “because there is already extensive evidence, having nothing to do with Smirnov, of corrupt Biden family influencing peddling.”

We’re going to see Russian propaganda of every kind ramp up “in advance of the 2024 election,” said Dan De Luce and Kevin Collier in NBCNews.com. Once again, Moscow is deploying “fake online accounts and bots” to damage Biden and exacerbate American political divisions, especially over continued military aid for Ukraine. And it has succeeded in insinuating “Russian state rhetoric” about the evils of Ukraine and NATO into GOP talking points. Republicans “seem unconcerned about collaborating—colluding?—with a Kremlin operation,” said David Corn in Mother Jones. After all, one helped get Trump elected in 2016. The Smirnov case “shows not only that Trump and the GOP are Putin dupes; they are willing dupes.”