The just-completed 118th Congress was an embarrassment for a great many reasons, including the fact that the House Republican majority formally launched an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden without cause. As we’ve discussed, the misguided crusade was rooted in a scurrilous accusation: The Democrat, GOP officials claimed, was the beneficiary of a weird Ukrainian bribery scheme.
The story never really made any sense, but several congressional Republicans nevertheless took the claims seriously — and when pressed to justify their efforts, they pointed to an informant who brought the bribery allegations to the attention of the FBI.
Whatever became of that informant? As The Associated Press reported, he’s now headed to prison.
A former FBI informant who fabricated a story about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter accepting bribes that became central to Republicans’ impeachment effort was sentenced Wednesday to six years in prison. Alexander Smirnov pleaded guilty last month in Los Angeles federal court to tax evasion and lying to the FBI about the phony bribery scheme in what prosecutors say was an effort to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
I’m mindful of the fact that Smirnov is not exactly a household name, and this story probably won’t appear on the front pages of many newspapers, but the developments represent a stunning fiasco for some prominent GOP lawmakers.
Circling back to our earlier coverage, the trouble began in earnest early last year when Smirnov was indicted for providing “false derogatory information” to the FBI about Biden and his son. The charges stemmed from the special counsel investigation led by David Weiss, a Trump-appointed prosecutor.
Reporting on the developments shortly after the indictment was announced, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes described this as “the most spectacular embarrassment imaginable” for the Republicans who targeted the Democratic president, and it’s worth understanding why.
For Biden’s partisan detractors — on and off Capitol Hill — Smirnov’s claims were foundational. He was the party’s star witness. Sean Hannity’s Fox News show ran with this informant’s claims in at least 85 separate segments last year. The Republicans’ entire “bribery” conspiracy theory was based on the claims of one man — who’s now headed to a prison cell, in part because he lied to the FBI about the Bidens.
Making matters worse, the GOP’s anti-Biden witness, soon after getting indicted, conceded 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 congressional accountability. Rep. Jim Jordan, for example, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, is on record publicly declaring that he was relying largely 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 GOP’s case against the incumbent president.
Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the GOP chair 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 conceded that the party was warned not to take these uncorroborated anti-Biden allegations seriously, but Jordan and Comer, among others, ignored the advice and ran with the claims that have since collapsed.
In the GOP’s impeachment crusade, the real “scandal” isn’t what Joe Biden did, it’s what his accusers did.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com