Anybody see "Gym" Jordan babbling about Smirnov's lies yesterday?

What a joke. It turns out the entire thing was driven by Russian intelligence assets. And the republicans bought it hook, line and sinker.

>>>Republicans are seeking to preserve the credibility of their inquiries into the Biden family after a huge setback.

On Tuesday, a court filing revealed that a former FBI informant behind a discredited claim that President Biden and his son Hunter Biden received bribes is allegedly linked to Russian intelligence.


Democrats, including House Oversight Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin (Md.) say the revelation should be the beginning of the end of the impeachment inquiry into the president.

The former informant, Alexander Smirnov, was arrested last week and charged with making false statements to his FBI handler. It was only on Tuesday that the allegation of Russian links emerged.

Raskin told reporters Wednesday, “The impeachment investigation essentially ended yesterday, in substance if not in form, with the explosive revelation that Mr. Smirnov’s allegations about Ukrainian Burisma payments to Joe Biden were concocted along with Russian intelligence agents.”

A legal filing from prosecutors on Tuesday included the details of alleged Russian links as part of a broader argument that Smirnov, a citizen of Israel, should not be allowed out of detention pending his trial because the government considers him a flight risk.

The filing asserted that Smirnov could be resettled outside the United States by foreign intelligence services and also alleged that he has access to over $6 million “in liquid funds” that he had previously concealed.

Smirnov became a central figure in the Biden investigations primarily because of one explosive allegation.


He said that he had been told by an executive of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden served on the board, that the executive had felt obligated to pay the Bidens massive bribes, amounting to $5 million each.

The new legal filing starkly notes that these events “were fabrications.” Smirnov was not even in contact with the Burisma executives until much later than he claimed.

Separate from the bribe allegation, the legal filing notes that one obvious flaw in Smirnov’s story was an account of a supposed Hunter Biden trip to Kyiv and a stay in a particular hotel — none of which actually happened. The president’s son has, in fact, never been to Ukraine.


Even more explosively, the document outlines extensive meetings between Smirnov and figures from the Russian intelligence world. Prosecutors say that during an interview after he had been taken into custody last week, Smirnov “admitted that officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved” in propagating some of his information

The whole farrago is, by any reasonable measure, a sizable black eye to GOP efforts to impeach the president.

At the time that Smirnov’s bribe claims first emerged last summer — albeit as an anonymous FBI informant — Republicans including former President Trump seized upon them.


“Look, the guy got bribed!” Trump wrote in a social media post last August, referring to the president.

Other Republicans joining the fray at that time included Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) who said that President Biden and Hunter Biden had been “extorting Burisma to the tune of $10 million” and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who alleged the president had been “caught on tape getting bribed.”

Now, those allegations have been shredded.


Republicans, however, are not giving up the fight. On Wednesday, GOP members insisted that their allegations of malfeasance were not “reliant” upon the claims made by Smirnov.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) argued that the Smirnov revelations “doesn’t change the fundamental facts.”

He asserted that those facts included that Hunter Biden had been paid excessively by Burisma and that President Biden, during his time as vice president to President Obama, had helped get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired in order to aid the company.


In fact, the Obama administration, as well as other figures in the European Union and broader international community, had become disenchanted with the Ukrainian prosecutor in question — no because he was overzealous in taming corruption but because he was too lax about it.

To be sure, this point does not delegitimize real questions about why Hunter Biden was getting paid so lavishly by a Ukrainian energy company in the first place. It is widely accepted that this would not have happened were it not for his last name.

But that is a different issue to whether President Biden acted corruptly — an allegation for which Republicans have yet to find any persuasive evidence.


Law professor Jonathan Turley argued in a New York Post op-ed published Wednesday that the new revelations pertain only to the false allegations of bribery but do “not address hundreds of confirmed emails of Hunter Biden cashing in on an array of foreign contacts.”

That may be true — but it also does not prove anything about the president’s behavior.

At a minimum, the revelations about Smirnov also entirely overshadowed a closed-door deposition of the president’s brother, James Biden, on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

James Biden’s opening statement, however, asserted that “I never asked my brother to take any official action on behalf of me, my business associates or anyone else.”

The general shadiness of Hunter Biden’s business dealings has created some fertile political ground for the GOP.

An Economist/YouGov poll released Wednesday found that a huge 67 percent of Americans believed that the president’s son “has personally profited from his father Joe Biden’s positions in government.”

But Hunter Biden has never been the main target for Republicans.

Now, their efforts to make incriminating charges stick to the president have suffered a major blow.

https://thehill.com/homenews/h...russian-revelations/

Now, it's coming out that they knew Smirnov's allegations couldn't be corroborated and had no clue about his credibility .....but moved full-steam ahead and used the information anyway.

>>>Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) revealed Wednesday that his Republican colleagues were previously warned that the former FBI informant’s claims at the center of the Hunter Biden probe could not be corroborated.

“We were warned at the time that we received the document outlining this witness’s testimony … we were warned that the credibility of this statement was not known,” Buck said on CNN’s “The Source.”


“And yet, people, my colleagues went out and talk to the public about how this was credible and how it was damning and how it proved President Biden’s — at the time Vice President Biden’s — complicity in receiving bribes,” he added.

Alexander Smirnov was arrested and charged last week for making false statements to the FBI in connection to his testimony about the president’s son. He previously told the agency that the Bidens received $5 million bribes from the head of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.

House Republicans have previously relied on Smirnov’s claims as a central part of their investigations into the younger Biden. Buck said it is evident now that the information Smirnov relayed was false.

“It appears to absolutely be false, and to really undercut the nature of the charges. We’ve always been looking for a link between what Hunter Biden received in terms of money and Joe Biden’s activities or Joe Biden receiving money,” Buck explained. “This clearly is not a credible link at this point.”

CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins then asked the Colorado Republican if House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) used the information “to fuel these investigations regardless” of them knowing the information was not corroborated.

“That’s what it appears,” Buck responded. “I certainly didn’t have any evidence outside the statement itself that it was credible. And as a prosecutor for 25 years, Kaitlan, I never went to the public until I could prove the reliability of a statement.”


When asked if it was time to shut down the impeachment inquiry, Buck said he did not know.

“When all the evidence is given and I don’t want to judge the evidence one way or the other until I have a chance to sit down with the investigators and go through the evidence. But this certainly undermines a lot if the, if the impeachment inquiry was based on this witness, it undermines the credibility of this impeachment,” he said.

“I will say that it’s suspicious that anybody would pay Hunter Biden as much money as they paid him without any expertise in the oil and gas industry without any expertise in international banking,” he continued. “So those things are suspicious, but again, there’s no link directly to Vice President Biden’s activities.”


Jordan and Comer have each brushed aside the indictment of Smirnov, with Jordan saying it “doesn’t change the fundamental facts” of the Republican case against the president.

In the wake of the Smirnov’s arrest, House Republicans turned the blame on the FBI, saying agency officials had ensured lawmakers that his words were credible.

“Chris Wray told us this confidential human source was so important he couldn’t even let us see the 1023, if you remember that fight we had a year ago,” Jordan told reporters Wednesday, referring to the FBI director.


“You’ve got to ask the FBI about that. He may, in fact, have given false statements. I don’t know,” the Ohio lawmaker said. “But what I do know is that everything we knew ahead of time, that was the facts around the whole situation.”

The Hill has reached out to Comer’s and Jordan’s offices for comment.

https://thehill.com/homenews/h...not-be-corroborated/