Via the AP: FBI informant charged with lying about Joe and Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukrainian energy company.
An FBI informant has been charged with fabricating a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden, his son Hunter and a Ukrainian energy company, a claim that is central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress.
Alexander Smirnov falsely reported to the FBI in June 2020 that executives associated with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden $5 million each in 2015 or 2016, prosecutors said in an indictment. Smirnov told his handler that an executive claimed to have hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” according to court documents.
Granting that he has only been indicted and not convicted, this certainly looks like a huge blow to the notion that House Republicans have much of a leg to stand on in their impeachment inquiry into Biden.
But, of course,
Comer, R-Ky., downplayed the importance of the informant, who had figured centrally to the start of the probe.
“To be clear, the impeachment inquiry is not reliant on the FBI’s FD-1023,” Comer said in a statement, referring to the form documenting Smirnov’s allegations.
The chairman said the inquiry “is based on a large record of evidence, including bank records and witness testimony,” including interviews this week. He said the committee will continue to “follow the facts” and determine whether to proceed with articles of impeachment against Biden.
I would note that Comer here seems to be dismissing Smirnov, rather than suggesting that the charges are in error (granted, he may have said so elsewhere and it is dangerous to infer too much from one quote). Still, as Philip Bump in WaPo reminds us, Comer made a big deal about Smirnov in the past:
At the beginning of May, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a letter to the Justice Department making a stunning accusation: Evidence existed of “an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions.” The letter called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to make the “verifiable, valuable” evidence public.
For several months, Comer in particular publicly pushed for the release of an FBI interview form documenting the allegation — an allegation provided to the bureau by an informant who claimed to have been told about the bribe by a Ukrainian businessman. Grassley slowly leaked out new details from the interview document, such as a claim that there might be telephone recordings of the parties involved in the alleged bribe, including President Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Eventually, Grassley released the whole document.
As it turns out, the Justice Department was working on the verifiability of the allegation. On Thursday, it unsealed an indictment: The informant who alleged that he’d been told about the bribe had allegedly made the whole thing up.
[…]
It is hard to overstate how much energy Republicans and their allies in the right-wing media invested in the idea that this was credible. When he announced the launch of an impeachment probe of Biden in September, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) invoked the Smirnov allegation.
I wrote about the way Fox News Channel was covering the supposedly explosive allegations back in June: The Fox Propaganda Machine in Operation.
I will state that the documentary evidence that Comer, et al. have shared with the public has been unwhelming. By their logic, every son who has ever gotten a loan from a parent (or brother to a brother) is involved in some kind of dastardly scheme.
It has been patently obvious from the beginning that the House impeachment inquiry into Biden has been nothing more than political payback for the fact that Trump was impeached (twice, in fact). It has also been obvious from the beginning that there is no factual basis for it.
Nonetheless, I am sure that the propaganda machines are all spitting out the notion that Smirnov’s indictment proves that he was telling the truth! Up is down, black is white, and we will all get killed at the next zebra crossing.
Sigh.
