Now that a former FBI informant’s claim about President Joe Biden having supposedly received a bribe from a Ukrainian businessman has been debunked, with ex-informant Alexander Smirnov facing federal charges for lying to the FBI, House Republicans are playing down the importance of the bribery tale to their effort to impeach Biden.
But the record shows that they had repeatedly put Smirnov’s unverified bribery allegation front and center as they made their case against Biden. In 2023 and into 2024, members of the House leadership and rank-and-file House members depicted the bribery allegation as critical to the impeachment push – and sometimes as hard proof that the president is corrupt.
In May 2023, Rep. James Comer, a key impeachment figure as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said the FBI form that memorialized the informant’s uncorroborated and now-discredited allegation was both “very crucial” and “very credible.” Just last month, Rep. Jim Jordan, another key impeachment figure as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, described the FBI form as “the most corroborating evidence we have.”
Multiple rank-and-file members of the House Republican caucus, meanwhile, joined former President Donald Trump and other Republicans in explicitly asserting that Biden took a bribe – going much further than the FBI form, which merely noted what the informant claimed to have been told by the Ukrainian energy executive, Mykola Zlochevsky of Burisma Holdings.
Republican Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado told CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins on Wednesday: “We were warned at the time that we received the document … we were warned that the credibility of this statement was not known. 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…
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