Russian Egg on GOP Faces

Republicans are scrambling to rewrite history over their reliance on Russian-fed disinformation from an indicted informant.

The GOP is backpedaling furiously after their star witness turned out to be a Russian disinformation mule, and it’s really something to behold.

Over the past week I’ve been covering the scandal that has now engulfed the House GOP. For months, GOP leaders had amplified false claims of the now indicted FBI informant, Alexander Smirnov, who claimed the Bidens had each been paid $5 million in bribes. 

But now that their witness has been indicted, arrested and accused by the Justice Department of meeting with Russian intelligence and feeding false stories about the Bidens, the GOP is scrambling mightily to rewrite history.

Smirnov was just a “micro piece” of their investigation, House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer (R-KY) actually insisted to Newsmax recently. He “wasn’t even an important part of this investigation because I didn’t even know who he was.”

This denial has some real Papadopolous covfefe boy vibes to it.

Luckily, the internet is forever, and it isn’t hard to show that the false Smirnov claims were not only a major part of the GOP’s impeachment push, but were in fact fundamental to it. Today, we’re rolling the tape and exposing how the GOP is trying to run from this scandal but is getting tripped up quickly.

While Republicans have been scrambling to downplay Smirnov’s role and claims, and even to cast blame on others like the FBI for the fiasco, we get to watch their impeachment effort crumble in real time and hold them to account with receipts demonstrating their efforts to paper over the gaping hole this has left in their inquiry.

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The bribery allegation was foundational to the impeachment effort

Rep. Comer would like us to ignore everything he and his cohorts have been saying for months about that FD-1023 form and the informant who provided the false, Russian-fed information. So here’s just a smattering of what they had been claiming up until the news broke that their witness was a Kremlin stooge.

“A very crucial piece of our investigation,” Comer said earlier when describing the allegations in the FD-1023.

“The biggest political corruption scandal, not only in my lifetime, but I would say the past 100 years,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the third highest ranking Republican, told Fox News with a straight face. Stefanik is not known for understatement.

”The most corroborating evidence” is from “this highly credible, confidential human source,” declared a visibly animated House Judiciary Chair Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).

Before the House vote on impeachment, Jordan even very plainly stated, “The impeachable offense is — I think, the key thing is in Burisma.”

When House investigators got a chance to actually look at the 1023 form, which was inside a secure facility, they went public with their assessments, even though they were warned that the alleged bribes had not been corroborated. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) insisted it shows Biden is “100% guilty” of bribery. 

And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-GA), who later snapped a picture of the form and posted it on social media, went even further in her claims in an interview with the right-wing site The Daily Caller, which breathlessly reported,

“This is an impeachable document. President Biden should be impeached. Secondly, he should be prosecuted. This is unbelievable. It’s a pay-to-play scheme. He took a bribe from a foreign national in a foreign country that paid millions of dollars,” Rep. Greene stated. “He needs to be prosecuted for this, and I would argue that he should serve jail time.

Small wonder that viewers of Fox and Newsmax and readers of The Daily Caller might have come away with the absolutely false belief that the Bidens had taken bribes. The GOP had been absolutely uniform in its public messaging on this.

What a difference an indictment makes

Now that Smirnov has been arrested and charged with making false statements and false records, and now that it’s clear Smirnov was also actively funneling false information directly from Russian intelligence, Republicans are predictably downplaying Smirnov’s importance to their impeachment effort, as Comer’s interviews post-Smirnov indictment show.

But they are also throwing everyone else they can think of under the bus, including the FBI.

Comer complained, for example, that the FBI—and not his Oversight Committee, which might have done the same—“did nothing to verify the troubling claims contained within the record.” He also insisted that the FBI Director, Christopher Wray, had told his Committee behind closed doors that Smirnov was one of the most trusted, highest paid informants the Bureau had for over a decade.

But Comer and others were expressly warned that the allegations in the FD-1023 had not been corroborated and could not be used the way Republicans were determined to deploy them.

Roll the tape of Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), who warned as early as September 2023 that the alleged bribe-induced effort to remove a Ukrainian prosecutor from investigating Burisma had been debunked, and that Republicans “who are itching for an impeachment are relying on an imagined history.” Buck confirmed in a recent interview with CNN that “we were warned that the credibility of this statement [in the FD-1023] was not known.”

Buck added, ”And yet, people, my colleagues, went out and talked 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. It appears to be absolutely be false and to really undercut the nature of the charges.”

Meanwhile, the GOP is scrambling to physically scrub evidence of the Smirnov claims from its impeachment inquiry. As CNN’s Manu Raju reported, the House GOP removed all reference to the Smirnov allegations and the FD-1023 form from a recent letter to a witness.

And as noted by the eagle-eyed spokesperson for the White House for oversight and investigations, Ian Sams, the House GOP also has quietly deleted the Smirnov claims from the impeachment inquiry website.

Before:

After:

House Democrats are scornfully calling for an end to the charade. Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) of the House Oversight Committee described the Smirnov allegations as the “birth of this whole fake impeachment.” He added, “Thoughts and prayers to James Comer and the fake, frivolous, faux Biden impeachment that they’ve been trying to run. … Now what do we find out? What we’ve known all along, that this 1023 form that they cried over for months and months was all a lie. It was all a lie. And the guy who made it up has been indicted.”

Quipped Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), “I think it’s time for Chairman Comer and the Republicans to fold up the circus tent.”

But the real question isn’t whether Biden should be impeached over bogus claims. The answer there is a clear “no” already. The more pressing question is who in the government—such as Bill Barr, the “investigating” AUSA Scott Brady, Special Counsel David Weiss, or various GOP leaders— knew the Smirnov claims were false and had originated from the Russians, but amplified them anyway.

That question carries far more long-term implications for our national security and the sanctity of our elections than the now patently absurd question of whether Biden should still be impeached. It’s time we found out who might be knowingly helping the Russians dirty up the Bidens and hold them to account.