Hunter Biden talks to reporters outside the U.S. Capitol on December 13, 2023 in Washington, D.C.
(Image credit: Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)
published 26 February 2024
Special counsel David Weiss revealed in a court filing last week that former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, who is accused of falsely telling the FBI that President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden took $5 million bribes from Ukrainian energy company Burisma when the elder Biden was vice president, met with Russian intelligence operatives who fed him lies about the Bidens, CNN said. Smirnov was released with GPS monitoring after he was charged earlier this month with telling agents the bribery tale, but prosecutors got a court to order Smirnov rearrested last week by arguing that he had ties to Russian intelligence and financial resources that made him a flight risk.
House Republicans had made Smirnov’s bribery story a pillar of their efforts to impeach Biden. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the Republican-led House Oversight Committee, said to ABC News that “the Smirnov revelations destroy the entire case.” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) said Smirnov’s alleged ties to Kremlin spies indicated that, “wittingly or unwittingly, House Republicans have been acting as an agent or an asset of Russian intelligence for Vladimir Putin.”
Republicans scrubbed mention of Smirnov from impeachment literature, but Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said the news about Smirnov didn’t “change the fundamental facts,” The Hill said. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said Smirnov, a 43-year-old U.S.-Israeli citizen, was just one witness, but the case is based on “a large record of evidence, including bank records and witness testimony, revealing that Joe Biden knew of and participated in his family’s business dealings.” How much will the news about Smirnov impact the GOP push to impeach Biden?
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The impeachment inquiry is toast
With the shameful implosion of the GOP’s “star witness,” the campaign to impeach Biden “has crashed and burned,” said Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling in The New Republic. Insisting the facts haven’t changed only gets you so far when it becomes clear “those ‘facts’ were lies fed by the Russian government.” Diehards in the party “are still scrambling to revive the probe.” But even Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), no bipartisan peacemaker, “seems to be growing tired of the impeachment probe,” telling CNN some of the GOP’s allegations against Biden “might have been a little oversauced.”
“This turn of events is devastating for the Republican effort to oust the president” because they relied so heavily on Smirnov’s outrageous claims, said The Washington Post editorial board. Now their only hope is that Smirnov, a serial liar, is also “lying about Russian officials providing him with dirt on the president.” Smirnov is either “an asset in a current Kremlin plot to spread disinformation about the president, an eerie echo of 2016’s election interference,” or he’s making that up, too. “Either way, congressional Republicans have staked their impeachment inquiry on the words of a fabulist.”
Smirnov’s arrest doesn’t absolve Biden
“The Smirnov indictment doesn’t mean Joe and Hunter are in the clear,” said Miranda Devine in the New York Post. “Far from it.” Comer has gathered “overwhelming” evidence from bank records showing “millions of dollars from China, Russia, Ukraine, Romania and Kazakhstan being laundered through multiple shell companies for the Biden family, and jaw-dropping testimony from Hunter’s former business partners of Joe’s meetings with Hunter’s foreign benefactors right before big payments dropped.” This isn’t the Russian-influence “bombshell” Democrats claim, either, said Jonathan Turley, also in the New York Post. Smirnov’s contacts with Russians appear to have taken place before 2020, and have “nothing to do” with “the evidence of influence-peddling found in emails” on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The “hardcore impeachment heads” are certainly right about one thing, said Jim Newell at Slate. Republicans won’t be dropping their inquiry any time soon. “Even before Smirnov’s tales blew up, this impeachment investigation was already heading toward a bust.” Comer has admitted Republicans might not hold a vote on impeaching Biden. “The case is too — what’s the word? — uncaselike, and the House GOP margins are just too thin.” So Republicans will “just keep their Biden investigations running through the election, because the last thing they’ll ever do is exonerate the president.”
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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.
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