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By any fair measure, the House Republicans’ impeachment crusade against President Joe Biden was already a disaster. GOP investigators spent a year desperately searching for something they could use against the Democratic incumbent, only to come up empty.
Several Republicans recently conceded that the effort is a failure, and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, who’s helped lead the charge against Biden, has acknowledged that he’ll probably never have the votes to impeach the president — because too many members of his own party realize that there is no credible case.
But over a seven-day stretch, what was already a fiasco for the GOP has become an epic humiliation for the ages.
It started on Thursday of last week, when the Republicans’ star witness — the man at the heart of the party’s case — was arrested for lying to the FBI about the Bidens. Soon after, the public learned that the same witness Alexander Smirnov, according to a Trump-appointed prosecutor, peddled false claims he received from foreign intelligence officials, including lies from Russia.
For good measure, Smirnov was soon after re-arrested by federal authorities.
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Republican Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado told CNN this week that Comer and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan were warned in advance to be skeptical of Smirnov’s claims, but they ran with the nonsense anyway. It led CNN’s Kaitlin Collins to ask Buck, “So, James Comer and Jim Jordan, they knew that this was not corroborated information, yet they still went public with it, talked about it, on television, used it to fuel these investigations, regardless?”
The GOP congressman replied, “That’s what it appears.”
Soon after, Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman of New York called for a Justice Department investigation into the Republican lawmakers who pushed Smirnov’s claims, to determine whether or not the GOP lawmakers knew the informant “was spreading Russian disinformation.”
As this unfolded, GOP officials also decided quietly do a little online editing. The New Republic noted, “House Oversight Republicans have yanked a reference to their major flop of an FBI informant on the committee website, where it previously had pride of place as part of the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden.”
It was against this backdrop that the editorial board of The Washington Post published a piece urging Comer and Jordan to quit while they’re behind.
Giving up is the right answer. ... Congress’s attempt to punish President Biden for Hunter Biden’s poor decisions was always weak. Now, it has utterly collapsed.
Earlier this month, CNN reported that “around 20” GOP members were prepared to vote against their own party’s impeachment effort. This week, one House Republican said that total is now 30.
To be sure, we can — and almost certainly will — have a robust conversation about why that number isn’t vastly larger, given that the case against Biden no longer exists in any kind of coherent way, but for now, the one thing all fair-minded observers should be able to agree on is that this ridiculous debacle has collapsed.