Republicans' "Russian Intelligence Op” Flops on Capitol Hill

Large portions of congressional Republicans and, of course Donald Trump, who is seemingly a Russian asset, have become the party of Vladimir Putin and will do anything to further Putin's agenda as channeled through Trump.  Most notably, there is their refusal to pass bills providing more funding to Ukraine and their effort to impeach Joe Biden as desired by Trump - and one can assume Putin - to enhance Trump's electoral chances in November.  After this week's arrest of the House GOP's star witness in the fabricated Biden impeachment inquiry, it now is clear that for some of these Republicans they are willing to use Russian intelligence fabricated lies. Moreover, to save face, they refuse to admit they were played for utter fools by a liar of almost Trumpian proportions and his Russian puppeteers.  Clearly, the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan is dead and gone.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at the GOP fiasco that in a sane political party would immediately end the impeachment inquiry demanded by Der Trumpenfuhrer.  Here are article excerpts that look at the farce which were the consequences not so dangerous would almost be comical:

On Tuesday evening, federal prosecutors filed a court document that, in a couple dozen bizarre and ultimately explosive pages, effectively put an end to one of Donald Trump’s great election-year hopes—the impeachment of President Joe Biden. The filing revealed that Alexander Smirnov, a longtime F.B.I. informant who told investigators that Biden and his son Hunter had each received a five-million-dollar bribe from a Ukrainian energy company, had not only invented that claim but had also admitted to passing along bad information about the Bidens from “officials associated with Russian intelligence.”

Smirnov first relayed the sensational and very much unconfirmed bribery claim in a 2020 interview with the F.B.I. This past summer, Republicans pursuing the President released a redacted version of the F.B.I. report that included Smirnov’s allegation. It was their smoking gun, their white whale—the only concrete example they had managed to turn up with a specific person attesting to an actual criminal act on the part of the President. Sean Hannity, the Fox News host and Trump confidant, mentioned the alleged Biden bribe in eighty-five segments in 2023, according to the watchdog Media Matters.

On the evening when Senator Chuck Grassley made Smirnov’s now debunked claim public, Hannity somberly told his viewers that Biden had been “very credibly accused of public corruption on a scale this country has never seen before.”

For months afterward, House investigators tried to find evidence of the alleged bribe in Biden’s finances. They couldn’t, of course. As we now know, it didn’t exist.

But the dream dies hard. In December, on a party-line vote, Republicans chose to go ahead with a formal impeachment investigation of Biden anyway. In the days since Smirnov’s arrest on charges of lying to the government, House G.O.P. leaders have deflected, filibustered, and otherwise obfuscated about the whole affair. It “doesn’t change the fundamental facts,” Representative Jim Jordan insisted to astonished reporters. But the embarrassing new reality is the opposite: the F.B.I.’s trusted informant appears instead to have been an inveterate liar who successfully injected Russian lies about the President of the United States into a partisan election-year impeachment inquiry.

As if that weren’t alarming enough, the government’s court filing also included the following warning: Smirnov, it said, “is actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November.” Cue the flashbacks. It’s Russia, Russia, Russia all over again.

It was perhaps no surprise that the House Republicans’ fever dream of impeachment would evaporate. Their revenge play on behalf of the twice-impeached ex-President always seemed more about payback and partisan politics than anything else. Since taking back the House and launching their probe of Biden last year, they have publicly struggled to find any crime—never mind the requisite high crimes and misdemeanors—to fit the preordained punishment.

But even the probe’s deepest skeptics could not have imagined this latest twist: a fake Ukrainian bribe, seemingly ordered up to fit the Republicans’ darkest fantasies of Biden, and passed along by a source who would eventually admit to spreading lies given to him by Russian spies.

There is much still to unravel about how this came to be. In the government’s court papers this week, Smirnov emerges as an almost comically obvious liar, telling multiple versions of his Biden bribery story, while bragging about contacts with various foreign intelligence services. How is it possible that this guy was an F.B.I. informant for more than a decade?

Apparently, a full vetting of Smirnov and his claims was demanded by [David] Weiss [the special counsel investigating Hunter Biden] only after congressional Republicans made them public—and, when Smirnov did give a formal interview to the F.B.I. in September, the result was not damning proof about Biden but Smirnov’s own arrest.

On the Hill, the sorry saga has not yet caused Republicans to formally abandon their inquiry. But, on Thursday morning, when I spoke with Jamie Raskin, who, as the lead Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, has spent the past year trying to shut down the impeachment folly, he was feeling hopeful that it was now time to “fold up the circus tent” after the long-running “comedy of errors” had turned out to be “a big Russian intelligence op.”

“They seem to be acknowledging the political math is not there for them.” For vulnerable Republicans running for reëlection this fall in moderate districts, it could well be a “career-terminating event if they were to vote to impeach Biden on pure nonsense,” he pointed out.

Raskin readily admitted that some Republicans in Congress were likely to keep pressing the matter even after its source had been discredited—“like Confederate soldiers lost in the woods somewhere,” still fighting on long after the war was over. In the way of conspiracy theories, he fears that Smirnov’s takedown may soon end up being portrayed as just another deep-state plot to cover up Biden’s crimes. I suspect it will not be long before this prediction comes to pass. . . . The circus tent is not coming down; it has taken up permanent residence.