The Republicans' star witness in the probe of a Ukrainian bribery scheme they claim involved President Joe Biden has been accused of lying to the FBI — and the investigators are rushing to delete any reference to him in their documents.
Huffington Post reporter Arthur Delaney noticed that GOP members in the House Oversight and Reform and Judiciary Committees killed a full paragraph about informant Alexander Smirnov when writing a letter to former State Department official Amos Hochstein. Chairmen Jim Jordan (R-OH) and James Comer (R-KY) killed the paragraph, according to a Democratic House aide, though Huffington Post reviewed an earlier version of the document in which it was included.
A Republican impeachment aide claimed the letter was drafted before Smirnov's indictment, but the lawmakers still think they should speak to the ex-State Department official.
In many letters requesting interviews before the respective committees, Republicans claimed, “According to this confidential human source, who has been described as ‘highly credible,’ Burisma executives hired Hunter Biden to ‘protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.’”
That language has now disappeared.
The information was the crux of the GOP's case, claiming that Biden got a $5 million bribe from a Ukrainian company that hired his son onto its board. After his stories began to change, the FBI realized Smirnov had lied because he didn't want Biden to be elected in 2020.
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Republicans haven't found any proof of his claims and were relying heavily on Smirnov's testimony to prove the bribery scheme.
Witnesses at the State Department, both for the Biden and Donald Trump administrations, have consistently debunked claims that Biden pressed for the ousting of a Ukraine prosecutor and had anything to do with a bribe from Burisma. European partners were behind the ousting after finding that the prosecutor was corrupt.
Republicans claimed that Smirnov’s account was critical to their investigation and fought with the FBI over obtaining the information. Once they finally obtained the documentation, they moved to the impeachment inquiry into Biden.
