Biden Impeachment Inquiry Is Political Improv
Plus: Cash is king and the king wants to keep all the cash.
In November, an edition of this newsletter ran with the headline, “The Lying Will Continue Until Biden is Impeached.” Now, with the basis for the most salient part of the inquiry having dramatically disintegrated, the committee chairmen leading the probe seem to have redoubled their commitment to proving that headline true.
Last week, the Justice Department charged an informant named Alexander Smirnov with lying to the FBI when he told them, among other things, that Joe Biden had sought bribes from Ukrainian officials while serving as Barack Obama’s vice president. The core argument underwriting the GOP probe collapsed the moment Smirnov was taken into custody at a Las Vegas airport last week.
But none of this stopped Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the Oversight Committee chairman, or Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Jason Smith (R-Mo.), the other two chairmen in the probe, from continuing the spin.
Republicans running the inquiry quietly deleted references to Smirnov from interview request letters in their probe while insisting nothing has changed about their case. On Wednesday, Jordan told reporters:
It doesn’t change the four fundamental facts: Hunter Biden was put on the board of Burisma and gets paid a million dollars a year. Fact number two: He’s not qualified to be on the board—he said so himself . . . Fact number three: . . . the two executives at Burisma specifically asked Hunter Biden, “Can you weigh in with D.C. and help us deal with the pressure we are facing from the prosecutor?” . . . then he gets called—Hunter Biden calls his dad, according to Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner. Fact number four: Joe Biden then goes to Ukraine three days later and conditions the release of the money—American tax money—on firing of the prosecutor who was applying the pressure to the company that Hunter Biden sat on the board of.
The facts Jordan listed are, well, just that—things that happened. Without the narrative frame that Smirnov’s allegations provided them, they don’t cohere into a picture. Smirnov has been charged with making the whole thing up, which means that narrative frame has been destroyed, potentially turning Jordan, Comer, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), and a whole lot of other Republican officials into rubes who got taken advantage of by a sophisticated international operator.