GOP’s Impeachment Basis Crumbles: FBI Informant Indicted For Biden Lies
GOP’s Impeachment Basis Crumbles: FBI Informant Indicted For Biden Lies
The FBI informant House GOP used to form the basis of their impeachment inquiry was indicted for making the entire story up. Biden’s exoneration deserves just as much attention as his defamation.
Thank you for reading! With media layoffs rattling the industry and the 2024 election looming, support for journalism has never been more crucial. If you value in-depth, honest analysis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. My content isn’t paywalled, but paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive community features. Your subscription makes a difference.
Something very important happened this week that deserves a lot more media attention.
The FBI informant that House Republicans have used to form the foundation of their impeachment inquiry into President Biden was just indicted for making the entire story up.
Special Counsel David Weiss, the same prosecutor who indicted Hunter Biden, indicted FBI informant Alexander Smirnov for providing “false derogatory information to the FBI” about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s ties to Burisma. The indictment claims that Smirnov’s “story to the FBI was a fabrication, an amalgam of otherwise unremarkable business meetings…”
Smirnov falsified an intricate bribery scheme that involved the Bidens being paid $5 million each by Burisma in an effort to push then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin to end an investigation of Burisma. In June 2020, Smirnov suddenly reported to the FBI two 2015 and 2016 meetings where Burisma executives allegedly paid Joe and Hunter Biden. The thing is, this never happened.
The indictment debunks Smirnov’s lies in a straightforward manner, highlighting the fact Smirnov’s contacts with Burisma happened later than he claimed, and the context of the meetings was totally fabricated:
“In truth and fact, the Defendant had contact with executives from Burisma in 2017, after the end of the Obama-Biden Administration and after the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General had been fired in February 2016, in other words, when [Joe Biden] had no ability to influence U.S. policy and when the Prosecutor General was no longer in office.”
The indictment goes even further, accusing Smirnov of fabricating these derogatory claims in an effort to damage Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign:
“In short, the Defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against [Joe Biden], the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against [Joe Biden] and his candidacy.”
I’ve written articles debunking the Burisma conspiracy theory before, but this indictment takes the debunking to a whole new level. The anatomy of Smirnov’s lies is laid bare in black and white in a court document, definitively taking down the GOP’s false impeachment narrative.
The crux of the GOP’s Burisma conspiracy theory revolves around an incident where then-Vice President Joe Biden conditioned $1 billion in aid to Ukraine on the ousting of Shokin. The claim is that he was doing so to protect Burisma (a company Hunter Biden was on the Board of) from being investigated. This was the narrative that emerged from the 2020 Trump impeachment trial for his extortion of Ukraine. The bribes component became part of this story after Smirnov’s June 2020 lies to the FBI.
While Vice President Biden did condition aid to Ukraine on Shokin’s ousting in 2016, he was working to combat corruption in Ukraine, not to protect Burisma. Biden called for the removal of then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin because he wasn’t investigating corruption. This push to oust Shokin was also part of a broad multilateral campaign alongside America’s European allies to oppose corruption. Shokin wasn’t even investigating Burisma at the time. And as we know now for sure, no bribes pushed Biden to advocate for his ousting.
In the aftermath of Smirnov’s indictment, Republicans need to be called out on the fact their impeachment inquiry is based on lies.
House Republicans have repeatedly parroted this false narrative and referred to the now-indicted liar Smirnov as “credible." CNN reported the extent of the Republican reliance on Smirnov and how central his lies were to their impeachment inquiry:
Congressional Republicans have championed Smirnov’s now-discredited allegations for roughly a year, though not by name. They fought with the FBI to obtain memos about what Smirnov told investigators and publicly released the materials over the FBI’s objections. The congressional Republicans repeatedly praised Smirnov as “credible” and put his uncorroborated claims front-and-center in their impeachment inquiry into the president.
In his September 2023 announcement of the impeachment inquiry, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) cited Smirnov’s false claims, declaring: “Even a trusted FBI informant has alleged a bribe to the Biden family.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) said in remarks to reporters, “The impeachable offense is — I think, the key thing is in Burisma.” Rep. James Comer (R-KY), Chairman of the House Oversight Committee leading the impeachment inquiry, has also heavily relied on these lies.
During their first impeachment inquiry hearing in September 2023, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) falsely said, “We already know the president took bribes from Burisma,” based on the lies told by Smirnov.
Smirnov’s overt disinformation wasn’t just amplified by House Republicans. The entire right-wing media ecosystem mobilized behind this false narrative.
Media Matters reported how many times the false bribe claim was spread on Fox News Host Sean Hannity’s show:
“Hannity’s show aired at least 85 Hunter Biden segments in 2023 promoting the dubiously sourced and wholly unproven notion that Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian oligarch who controlled Burisma, paid a $5 million bribe to Joe Biden. This is an extension of the Ukraine conspiracy theory with all the problems detailed above, in addition to its own issues, but nonetheless is treated credulously by the Fox host. Of those 85 segments, 28 were Hannity monologues.”
Here is just one example of those segments. Comer posted his appearance with Hannity on Twitter/X. It got nearly 1 million views. Take a look at the chyron overtly spreading Smirnov’s lie:
Now, when their false narrative has been totally debunked in court docs, Fox News is silent. In a post on Twitter/X, Media Reporter Brian Stelter pointed out that on the night of this development, Fox News didn’t mention it once:
Fox's talk shows have been obsessed with the allegation of a "Biden bribe." Now the so-called "informant" has been arrested and charged with lying. The # of times this bombshell was mentioned by Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity tonight: Zero.
You can always count on right-wing media to propagate defamatory allegations. It’s safe to assume that Fox News will not spend nearly as much time covering the news of Smirnov’s indictment as they did covering his lies.
NBC News Reporter Peter Alexander asked President Biden today about the indictment of Smirnov and whether the impeachment inquiry should be dropped. Biden responded by saying: “He is lying, and it should be dropped, and it’s been an outrageous effort from the beginning.”
This development comes amid another exoneration event for President Biden. Under all the noise of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s Comey-like, extraneous editorializing about Biden’s memory, the fact remains that Biden will not be charged in the classified documents probe.
Two weeks, two exonerations in a row.
Since we know right-wing media won’t cover it and certainly won’t atone for their role in perpetuating Smirnov’s lies, it’s up to the mainstream media and independent journalists to put a spotlight on this crumbling impeachment narrative.
President Biden’s exoneration deserves just as much attention as his defamation.
