It’s Even Worse Than We Imagined

A primer for how to think about the way investigations and disinformation have been weaponized

Rep. James Comer during a House Oversight Meeting. Photo courtesy of Alex Cole on X.

Just when you thought it couldn’t be worse, here we are.

As I reported last week, a star witness for the GOP-led impeachment inquiry, someone Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) had called a “highly credible human source,” was indicted for making false statements and reports.

The informant, Alexander Smirnov, completely fabricated a claim that Joe and Hunter Biden had each received $5 million in bribes from the Ukrainian company, Burisma. For that attempt to frame the Bidens, Smirnov is now facing up to 25 years in prison.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) now admits that the House impeachment is on life support because “the math keeps getting worse.” But in fact, it’s his star witnesses who keep getting indicted. Smirnov, unbelievably, is the second GOP witness to face federal charges. The other, Gal Luft, is charged with being an arms dealer, violating Iran sanctions, and (checks notes) being an unregistered foreign agent for China.

That’s some track record for the GOP’s star witnesses.

Then yesterday, another Russian nesting doll emerged. In support of its request to hold Smirnov pending trial, the government revealed that Smirnov had held several high level meetings with Russian intelligence officers in 2023 and was being used as a conduit for disinformation to disrupt the 2024 election. 

That’s right: The same guy Reps. Comer and Jordan and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) pumped as a reason to go after Biden for bribery turned out to be a Russian intelligence tool. 

Now the question is, were GOP leaders just useful idiots for Russian election interference, or did they know, like Bill Barr and his cronies apparently did, that Smirnov’s claims were false, but amplified them anyway to dirty up Biden?

I’ll save the details of the Russian intelligence meetings, and questions over why the government is burning its informant to a crisp, for another time. In today’s piece, I want to zoom out a bit to provide a way to think about all this, one that I hope will help make everything clearer. There’s a through line to these shenanigans involving investigations, prosecutors and trumped-up charges. To understand this, we need to go back to 2016 to discuss how Hillary Clinton got taken down and then to 2019 when Trump got himself impeached for the first time.

Trump learned that investigations create lots of smoke

The GOP got some solid confirmation that they could abuse their congressional investigative powers to achieve political ends when they chose to dirty up Hillary Clinton over Benghazi. That in turn led to the media hyperventilating over her private email server, which seems very silly and trivial now in retrospect. And right when that all seemed to finally die down, FBI Director James Comey announced that he was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton, just weeks before the 2016 election. 

That announcement led many Americans to believe that there was something truly nefarious going on with Clinton, and it probably cost her the election. It also taught Trump, and later his Attorney General Bill Barr, a valuable lesson: The levers of prosecutorial and investigative power really can be abused to throw an election.

Trump tried that play when he sought to extort Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in 2019, saying that he was going to need him to do a favor by creating a false investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of Trump’s main political rival. Principled whistleblowers, including Lt. Col. Alexander Vindmann and Fiona Hill, testified about that extortion before Congress, which then led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Thwarted in his plans to use Ukrainian-based investigations, Trump pivoted. As I discussed in my Q&A session in The Big Picture yesterday with legal and national security expert Marcy Wheeler, Trump leaned on then-Attorney General Bill Barr in October of 2020, just weeks before the national election, essentially to pull off a Comey move. Trump had screamed at Barr that he needed him to do something about Hunter Biden, so Barr reopened an investigation into false claims that Joe Biden had received a $5 million bribe from Burisma.

We know this because in October 2020, Barr ordered David Weiss, now the Special Counsel on the Hunter Biden matter, briefed on the assessment. Curiously, as noted in my discussion with Marcy Wheeler, this part was omitted from the Smirnov indictment and conflicts with the “official” version, which says the investigation into Smirnoff by Weiss began nearly three years later. 

As of October 2020, the internal report at issue, called an FD-1023 form, the one that included informant Smirnov’s wild claims, had already been reviewed. And the matter had been deemed closed by the DoJ. Barr wanted it sprung back open, though, because Trump insisted on more Hunter Biden pressure. Trump understood that even the appearance of an investigation was enough to smear an opponent and, unlike Biden and AG Merrick Garland, Trump was willing to insert himself directly into the chain of command and demand the investigation of a political rival’s son.

The GOP used the false claims to create grounds for impeachment 

The mere existence of an FD-1023 report, which again was replete with baseless and unfounded claims, was also the hook that the GOP needed to hang its impeachment hat on. 

Comer, Jordan and Grassley referred constantly to the idea, now clearly disproven, that there was a longtime FBI informant who was a “trusted” human source, and that therefore these bribery charges against the Bidens were credible. Jordan even called that form “the most corroborating evidence we have” and cited Bill Barr’s stooge, Scott Brady of the DoJ’s Pittsburgh office, who first surfaced and “vetted” the FD-1023 form, for the notion that Smirnov was somehow a credible human source.

Now the source of that evidence has turned out to be a Russian disinformation tool.

Comer and Grassley even threatened FBI Director Christopher Wray with contempt of Congress charges unless he coughed up the FD-1023 form. But that report was filled with so many unsupported and debunked claims that Wray likely knew that its release would create precisely the kind of maelstrom that would be useful to Biden’s political opponents. It’s not like Wray could say, “Wait, hold on, we don’t believe this informant and think he may be compromised.” They were actively investigating and possibly preparing to charge him, after all. This illustrates the danger of allowing politics to interfere with intelligence work.

Happily, Comer is now boxed in. He can’t move forward with impeachment without any further hearings being about his star witnesses, who are now both indicted. And any further hearings will open Comer up to questions of why his latest star witness turned out to be a mule for Russian intelligence to plant negative stories—the very kind of false conspiracies these GOP leaders like him gleefully and uncritically amplified. 

Russia was watching and learning, too

How amazed the Russians must have been to discover that they could easily mainline disinformation to the American public, not just through social media, but through the very people who are supposed to work to stop it. 

As discussed in my piece with Wheeler, former Attorney General Bill Barr, for example, actually set Rudy Giuliani up with a special channel to receive dirt on Hunter Biden. This included Giuliani meeting with a known Russian agent, Andrii Derkach, and receiving intelligence from him. Barr then protected Giulani from oversight, even while signaling to the Russians that his operation was open for business.

Come tell Rudy any story you want to, comrades! We’ll be sure to pass it along.

The Russians must also have realized that FBI informants bearing false dirt on the Bidens would get very special attention, not only from Trump, but also from his willing allies in the Department of Justice. Such dirt would then inevitably find its way to people like Comer, Jordan and Grassley, who would weaponize it to serve their own political agendas, which are now aligned with those of Russia. 

Just like spooks in a horror film, the Russians learned they could now literally make the call come from inside the House.

These GOP leaders are at best hapless dupes. They should have known and understood the games Russia was playing with them. But we shouldn’t discount the possibility that they were well aware that the Smirnov claims were false and may have originated from Russian intelligence… and then went along with them anyway.

Indeed, we should now actively investigate this possibility.