'We were warned': GOP lawmaker blasts colleagues for swallowing Biden witness 'lies'

Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) sharply criticized his fellow House Republicans for latching onto the testimony of an "FBI informant" who was arrested last week and accused of peddling lies straight from Kremlin disinformation operators.

“We were warned at the time that we received the document outlining this witness’s testimony, we were warned that the credibility of this statement was not known,” Buck told CNN's Kaitlan Collins, reported Edith Olmsted for The Daily Beast.

“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 proved President Biden’s — at the time Vice President Biden’s — complicity in receiving bribes.”

Buck, added, “I certainly didn’t have any evidence outside the statement itself that it was credible. And as a prosecutor for 25 years ... I never went to the public until I could prove the reliability of a statement.”

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A conservative Republican who has been skeptical of the whole Biden impeachment operation run by House committee chairs Jim Jordan (R-OH) and James Comer (R-KY), Buck is one of several longtime GOP lawmakers who are calling it quits on seeking another term, frustrated by the current state of the House.

The informant, Alexander Smirnov, told federal agents that Biden and his son Hunter were paid millions in bribes to shield the Ukrainian firm Burisma from prosecution. This formed a core part of the GOP's evidence for an impeachment investigation. But Smirnov was indicted earlier this month for making false statements to the FBI, and he now admits his claims were disinformation pushed by the Russian government to interfere in U.S. politics.

Republicans involved with the impeachment inquiry have since scrambled to remove any reference to Smirnov's allegations from their materials.