And Just Like That...President Biden's Impeachment Goes Poof
The GOP's pet leopard eats their own face.
Hey everyone. What’s going on? Is it weird that I’m referencing Sex and the City on a Friday in the year of our Lord, 2024? I promise it’s going to make sense. Let’s get into a big indictment that basically ends (or should end) the GOP’s impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.
Are you going to talk about Hunter Biden again?
Yes. If you want to revisit the entire Hunter Biden saga and the (ongoing) impeachment inquiry related to it, I wrote about the dreaded laptop here and the GOP’s plans for impeachment here.
This week, the big story was that the entire impeachment inquiry had a hole blown in its hull: On February 15th, a key GOP witness (in fact, their most important witness) was indicted. Alexander Smirnov - a supposedly credible FBI informant - had a ton of stories about the Biden Crime Family’s™ unprecedented corruption, and was spilling it to Republicans in the House. One small problem: He was making it all up.1 Here is a cute summary:
[Smirnov’s story] was never fact-checked. None of the exotic Slavic characters it implicated came to testify. None of Smirnov’s LE CARRÉ-like meetings in European locales (Kiev, Vienna, London) were confirmed. No recordings of Joe — “the big guy” in Smirnov’s suspiciously familiar words — ever surfaced. No financial records ever showed any Burisma payments to father or son.
But Smirnov’s curious tale of Biden family corruption was reported as fact on the right. “Biden $10M bribe file released: Burisma chief said he was ‘coerced’ to pay Joe, ‘stupid’ Hunter in bombshell allegations.” read a NY Post headline. By one count, SEAN HANNITY aired 85 segments about it. KEVIN McCARTHY cited the Smirnov dossier as a reason he was moving forward with impeachment.
Last week, we learned that it was all made up. “The Defendant’s story to the FBI was a fabrication,” prosecutors alleged in an indictment of Smirnov. He had “transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against” Biden.
Earlier this week, it was a story, but it was one that was mostly embarrassing for the nutty GOP caucus in the House and Fox News. Here is Jesse Watters last year, talking about some of Smirnov’s allegations (Yes, Fox News is a real place and they say things like this):
Joe Biden has been an intelligence op since he was vice president. One of the FBI's top informants, a guy with impeccable credentials, a great track record, reported an allegation that Joe Biden took a $5 million bribe -- right under Barack Obama's nose -- from a foreign national in exchange for a policy decision. They've been blackmailing Joe Biden with this for a decade. Well, until a whistleblower came forward. And now, James Comer wants the document released to Congress and the FBI's caught in a cover-up.
In hindsight, this is pretty hilarious, but not harmful. It is also funny that after Smirnov was indicted, Fox News hosts - who, again, spent a long time calling this guy extremely trustworthy - did not mention it at all.
It is good for a laugh. But later on in the week, the story went from embarrassing to explosive. Not only was Smirnov lying to the FBI about Joe Biden’s corruption, he was actually being fed his “information” by Russian intelligence. Full stop: The GOP (inadvertently2 or otherwise) was laundering a Russian plot against Joe Biden through the impeachment process. That is wild. Here is David Kurtz:
The implications of this Russian operation are staggering, especially for the willing Republicans and right-wing media stooges who were the useful idiots propagating the disinformation for years. The James Comers, Chuck Grassleys, Jim Jordans of the world have been trafficking in this stuff as the purported basis for a Biden impeachment, which is itself tightly yoked to Trump’s campaign for re-election. Right-wing outlets, most notably Fox News, have been amplifying the claims not dozens or hundreds but thousands of times over the past several months.
Everywhere you turn, it’s Russia either helping Trump directly or indirectly by damaging Trump’s foes. The pattern is clear and persistent but also so sweeping and far-reaching that it really requires taking a step back to grasp the full scope of it all. It has dominated right-wing media, become an accepted “fact” among MAGA adherents, and allowed elected Republicans to play mainstream media like a cheap fiddle. All those breathless Biden impeachment process stories? They’re an outgrowth of this disinformation campaign.
Now is where we can get into some fun speculation. Remember the Hunter Biden laptop story from the fall of 2020, and how many people were speculating that it could have been a Russian disinformation campaign, a la Election 2016? I think Smirnov and the laptop are connected. Take a walk with me.
In my original piece on the laptop, I pointed out how some of the stuff on there just looked fishy. The whole story of how it go into a Delaware repair shop is also beyond weird. And the whole thing starts with Rudy Giuliani, so I am assuming aliens, Chupacabra, the Pope, and/or Shawn Kemp are all involved too at some point. But in a later piece that I wrote after Hunter Biden’s plea agreement leaked (but before it blew up), I speculated that Biden was hacked:
My ultimate guess as to what happened is that someone - either Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, or one of the foreign nationals Giuliani was running around with - got a hold of the laptop, and then mixed in a bunch of nutty, salacious material with Hunter’s real data. It’s worth noting that this could all be real evidence from Hunter Biden, but it could have been acquired by other means (hacking), and placed on the laptop to give it an air of legitimacy. It is also possible that this happened after the laptop was dropped off (by Hunter) at the repair shop, or by some other means.
Fast forward a year(ish), and there is a lot of evidence suggesting that Hunter was the victim of a hacking scheme. Marcy Wheeler has spent a lot of time breaking down that (highly technical) evidence, and while my brain hurts when I think about these things, one point does seem to be clear: Some time after 2019, but before the 2020 Election, Hunter’s data was stolen and/or deleted.
Did he do it himself by accident? Maybe. Was it a friend of his? Maybe. Was it the Russians, and did they feed it to Rudy Giuliani? Maybe. Was Smirnov part of the whole giant scheme to try and smear Joe Biden this way? Maybe! I would venture to guess that one day we will know what happened, but - and this is a Jackal Mission Statement™ - Federal investigations take a long, long time, and that’s assuming one is even underway.
Giuliani working with the Russians? That is pretty wild, and hard to believe.
When it comes to Giuliani, I think you should be ready to believe just about anything. If a guy can be tricked by Borat into sticking his hands down his pants, then he is almost certainly an easy mark for the Russians.
But what if it actually goes further than Giuliani? Representative Jerry Nadler wrote a letter to Merrick Garland and the Inspector General of the FBI yesterday, and heavily suggested that the anti-Biden narrative spun by Smirnov originated in Donald Trump’s Department of Justice. Here is the gist of Nadler’s letter:
I write to ask that you investigate former U.S. Attorney Scott Brady for what appears to be misleading testimony provided to the House Judiciary Committee. […] During his October 23, 2023, transcribed interview before the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Brady repeatedly testified that he had vetted and found credible statements made by confidential human source (CHS), now identified as Alexander Smirnov. Of course, on February 14, 2024, a federal grand jury in the Central District of California indicted Alexander Smirnov for making a false statement to the FBI and creating a false and fictitious record. Given what we now know about Mr. Smirnov, it seems unlikely that Mr. Brady actually verified any of the information Mr. Smirnov provided to the FBI. Mr. Brady’s testimony to the contrary does not appear to be a mere misstatement—his comments were deliberate, repeated, and detailed (my emphasis).
Later on, Nadler makes a bold accusation:
And, according to his testimony, he was not acting alone. Mr. Brady told the Committee that his investigation into matters relating to Hunter Biden and Ukraine was conducted at the direction of then-Attorney General Bill Barr and then-Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. Deputy Attorney General Rosen’s Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General (PADAG), Seth DuCharme, instructed Mr. Brady to contact counsel for President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, in January 2020. Mr. Giuliani would later describe this work as “years-long efforts to work with Ukrainians to dig up dirt on the Bidens.”
That is some big talk, and in Nadler’s defense, he has the receipts. I am not sure if Bill Barr was involved, but I will say this: Since leaving resigning from office, Barr has not been shy about being mean to Donald Trump. He has called him all sorts of names and was happy to assist with the January 6th Committee.
In short, it was looking pretty clear that Barr had joined #TheResistance. But last week, on February 16th, Barr “brought the house down” at a conference when he said he would be voting for Donald Trump over Joe Biden. He conceded that Trump was dangerous, but continuing with Biden was “suicide.” Barr is no Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, but it was sort of a 180.
Do you know what happened the day before Barr changed his tune? Smirnov got indicted.
So, what happens now?
I have to say (without knowing anything substantive at all), I think there is a strong possibility that Hunter Biden’s case may be over. The special counsel handling the case - David Weiss - has had a series of embarrassing setbacks (like confusing sawdust with cocaine) and Smirnov’s allegations were one of the reasons Weiss reneged on the plea agreement with Hunter’s attorneys. If Smirnov is a liar, as Weiss alleges, then it is an open question as to why the plea agreement was blown up in the first place.
It is notable that Weiss himself is bringing the charges against Smirnov and not another attorney. Although special counsels are called to investigate any crimes they come across, it’s weird that Weiss is doing this because Smirnov was a witness against Hunter. In other words, Weiss was talking to Smirnov because he thought he had some sort of information on Hunter Biden that was relevant to Weiss’s investigation.
That could have been related to the reason Hunter’s plea agreement blew up: Weiss did not want to give up on potentially charging Hunter with failing to register as a foreign agent. If Smirnov was lying about everything to Weiss, then we might be going back to square one, which is the plea agreement. Maybe I’m reading the tea leaves wrong, but I would watch this space.
OK, when are you going to link this to Sex and the City?
So, in the Sex and the City reboot, they had a major problem: Chris Noth (“Big”) was facing multiple sexual harassment allegations. That is bad in the post-#MeToo era. But he was a huge character in the show, and ended up as the husband of the main character. So, what did HBO do? They killed him off in the first episode of the reboot!
Bold move! Guess who is gone from the GOP’s impeachment website? Alexander Smirnov! They “killed off” their star witness, but left their impeachment website up! All of this is to say that while the GOP’s impeachment plans look dead in the water, I think they still might try to force a square peg into a round hole, because Donald Trump wants them to; just because their “Big” is dead doesn’t mean the show is going to end.
Are you impressed that I was able to finagle Sex and the City into this Jackal? Even more impressive: I have not watched a single episode and only know about Big’s death because they took shots at my precious Peloton. #YOLO
Should-Reads:
Glenn Kessler has a really good piece on how Bill Barr connects to the Biden impeachment.
Everyone was talking about this New York Magazine piece last week and I will say this: I would not fall for this scam. Have I been scammed before? Yes. One time, I bought a clearly fake Google Nest doorbell off of a clearly fake Chinese website. But I would pay much more attention to what I did with $50,000 than what I did with $100 (yes, in hindsight, it was clearly a scam that a $300 doorbell was on sale for ~66% off).
Noah Berlatasky makes it clear: No one is replacing Joe Biden. He is the nominee. I might write more about this if I have time next week.
This is more in the legal nerd wheelhouse of the Jackal: Why is SCOTUS taking so long to make a decision on Trump’s immunity? Lots of reasons.
Have a great weekend. The Jackal moves full steam ahead with no breaks until Holy Week.
Fun fact: You should never speak to the FBI, because lying to them is a crime, whether you are under oath or not. Smirnov is finding that out the hard way.
A lot of people on the Left have said this was done on purpose, and that Republicans in the House are “traitors” for “colluding” with Russia. I must remind everyone to watch Veep and apply Dumas’s Razor: If any D.C. scandal can be explained by sheer stupidity, it is more than likely a scandal was the result of sheer stupidity.