The Department of Justice bringing two counts of lying to the FBI against the informant who accused Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden of corruption is the latest bad news in what’s been a bad year for congressional Republicans. That informant’s claims, which DOJ says were false, was the linchpin for House Republicans’ crusade against President Biden. That witness was key to Republicans’ plan to impeach President Joe Biden for the wrongdoing they’ve imagined.
Rather than hurt Biden, House Republicans have more often than not found that having the power to lead investigations has backfired on them tremendously. Alexander Smirnov, who’s now been charged with lying to the FBI, was charged by the same special counsel that Republicans insisted be appointed to investigate the president and his family.
House Republicans have more often than not found that having the power to lead investigations has backfired on them tremendously.
Much of the GOP’s extremely flimsy case against President Biden revolved around whether he, while vice president, profited illegally from his son’s business deals. While Hunter Biden’s role as a board member for a Ukrainian gas company during that time led to conspiracy theories that his father traded policy favors for his son’s financial gain, the president has maintained that he did not mix his public duties with his private life. Smirnov, though, had claimed the Bidens had been paid $5 million each to protect Burisma from prosecution.
His claims were recorded on an FBI form known as a FD-1023, a record of whatever unsubstantiated claims someone has provided to the FBI. Such a form “does not validate the information, establish its credibility, or weigh it against other information known or developed by the FBI,” as the bureau’s congressional liaison explained in a letter to Republicans. But the idea that the FBI was keeping allegations of corruption against the president a secret became a major talking point from House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky. He threatened to hold FBI Director Chris Wray in contempt if he didn’t hand the form over.
Once the Department of Justice finally provided that form, it became clear that there wasn’t much at all to the claims that we hadn’t heard before. Many of the claims were along the same lines as those that former credible person Rudy Giuliani had been chasing back in 2019 that eventually lead to his then-client, President Donald Trump, getting impeached. That includes the entirely debunked theory that a Ukrainian prosecutor had been fired in 2016 for investigating Burisma, the company that had hired Hunter Biden, at the insistence of then-Vice President Biden.
The indictment says Smirnov lied because of his dislike of Joe Biden. According to the indictment, Smirnov was warned repeatedly that he had to “provide truthful information to the FBI,” but he still provided “false derogatory information” about the Bidens in June 2020, that is, after the elder Biden was the Democratic nominee for president. That “false derogatory information” includes the claim about father and son getting $5 million each. The FBI says Smirnov only provided that information to his FBI contact after sending texts disparaging Biden and praising Trump. According to the indictment, some of the meetings where Smirnov says he learned that information never happened, while others occurred at a time much later than he’d claimed, that is, when Biden was not in office.
If not for the Republicans trying to bring down President Biden, Smirnov many never have been charged. A former IRS official had claimed to the House that David Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware, had been rebuffed when he’d asked to be appointed as a special counsel to better pursue his criminal investigation of Hunter Biden. Even though Weiss told them that wasn’t true, Republicans still howled that the Biden administration was trying to protect Hunter Biden. So Attorney General Merrick Garland went on and made Weiss a special counsel in August. That increased his authority, which he used to bring charges against Smirnov.
Smirnov’s indictment is just the latest GOP self-inflicted wound.
Smirnov’s indictment is just the latest GOP self-inflicted wound. The party rushed to launch an impeachment inquiry against Biden which drew attention to the negligible evidence it had gathered. Despite their initial claims, the closed-door testimony Republicans got from Devon Archer, a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s, gave them nothing useful. On the contrary, once the transcript was released it became clear that Archer had actually told them that Joe Biden didn’t involve himself heavily with his son’s business even though his son had hyped up his family name. Republicans’ pending deposition of Hunter Biden this month is also unlikely to provide any substance to their hapless probe.
The sensible thing to do at this point would be to call it quits and admit that there’s nothing more to be gained from going down this rabbit hole. But that would involve Republicans admitting to their voters that there was nothing to their promises to prove Biden is a criminal and satiate their base’s call for his arrest. More likely, though, they’ll double down and insist that Smirnov is being silenced for his bold truth-telling. If they do and the pattern holds, though, that decision will come back to bite them even harder once it becomes increasingly apparent that there’s nothing real propping up their Potemkin impeachment inquiry into the president.