Key Republican source who lied to FBI about Bidens receives prison sentence

The just concluded 118th Congress was an embarrassment to many reasonsincluding the fact that the House Republican majority formally launched a impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden for no reason. As we have discussed, the misguided crusade had its roots in a defamatory accusation: the Democrat, Republican Party officials claimed, was the beneficiary of a strange Ukrainian bribery scheme.

The story never really made any sense, but several Republican congressmen took the allegations seriously and, when pressed to justify their efforts, pointed to an informant who brought the bribery allegations to the FBI’s attention.

What happened to that informant? As The Associated Press reportedNow he’s headed to prison.

I’m aware of the fact that Smirnov isn’t exactly a household name, and this story probably won’t make the front pages of many newspapers, but the events represent a surprising fiasco for some prominent Republican lawmakers.

Returning to our previous coverageThe problems began in earnest early last year, when Smirnov was accused of providing “false and derogatory information”to the FBI about Biden and his son. The charges arose from the special counsel investigation led by David Weiss, a Trump-appointed prosecutor.

Reporting on the events shortly after the indictment was announced, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes described this as “the most spectacular embarrassment imaginable” for Republicans who attacked the Democratic president, and it’s worth understanding why.

To Biden’s partisan detractors, inside and outside the Capitol, Smirnov’s claims were foundational. he was the one from the party star witness. Sean Hannity’s Fox News show published this whistleblower’s claims on at least 85 separate segments last year. The entire Republican “bribery” conspiracy theory was based on the claims of one man, who is now headed to a prison cell, in part because he lied to the FBI about the Bidens.

To make matters worse, the GOP anti-Biden witness, shortly after being indicted, admitted to prosecutors that some of the false information he spread came from “officials associated with Russian intelligence.”

Ideally, this should open the door to some accountability on the part of Congress. Representative Jim Jordan, for example, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is registered publicly declaring that he relied heavily on Smirnov’s claims as part of his pursuit of Biden. The Ohio Republican specifically told Fox News last year that the allegations raised by Smirnov represented “the heart”of the Republican Party’s case against the sitting president.

Representative James Comer of Kentucky, Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, made similar comments, declaring last year that Smirnov’s claims were “a very crucial piece of our investigation.”

At least one House Republican admitted that the party was warned He did not want to take these uncorroborated accusations against Biden seriously, but Jordan and Comer, among others, ignored the advice and continued with claims that have since failed.

In the Republican Party’s impeachment crusade, the real “scandal” is not what Joe Biden did, but what his accusers did.

This post updates our Related Previous Coverage.