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Top House Oversight Committee Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin (Maryland) has said that Republicans must call off their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden after an FBI informant who provided a large bulk of allegations that Republicans have based their inquiry on was charged with lying and fabricating evidence on Thursday.
“In a detailed indictment, Special Counsel David Weiss — who was appointed by former President Donald Trump — has demonstrated how key evidence at the heart of House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry is based on a lie,” Raskin said in a statement. “Special Counsel Weiss’s investigation is just the most recent to debunk the Ukraine-Burisma conspiracy theory at the heart of this fraudulent impeachment inquiry.”
Federal officials announced on Thursday afternoon that a grand jury has charged Alexander Smirnov with making false statements and creating a false record in an official FBI investigation. Smirnov alleged — in statements that Republicans have cited many times throughout their impeachment inquiry — that the president and his son, Hunter, had been given bribes from Ukrainian energy company Burisma and that Hunter had sought to use Biden’s political sway to shield the company, of which Hunter is a board member, from scrutiny.
The new 37-page indictment says that Smirnov knowingly fabricated his accounts of the Biden family’s alleged conspiracy involving Burisma.
“As alleged in the indictment, the events that Smirnov first reported to the FBI Agent in June 2020 were fabrications,” read a press release on the indictment by the Department of Justice. “As further alleged in the indictment, when he was interviewed by FBI agents in September 2023, Smirnov repeated some of his false claims, changed his story as to other of his claims, and promoted a new false narrative after he said he met with Russian officials.”
Republicans downplayed the indictment and claimed that they had not cited Smirnov’s testimony that heavily in their inquiry, despite having cited it repeatedly in press releases and at hearings regarding the allegations against the Bidens.
“It is an undeniable fact that Republicans’ allegations against President Biden have always been a tissue of lies built on conspiracy theories, and I formally call on Speaker Johnson, Chairman Comer, and House Republicans to stop promoting this nonsense and end their doomed impeachment inquiry,” Raskin said.
Democrats have long said that Republicans have based their impeachment inquiry into Biden on a series of fabrications and mistruths — and Republicans themselves have admitted that the evidence is flimsy at best. In November, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) pointed this out when Republicans refused to allow Hunter Biden to testify publicly in an Oversight Committee hearing, saying that they didn’t want the hearing to be public because it would show that they have no case.
“The reason GOP don’t want a public hearing on Hunter Biden is because [Oversight Democrats] have hoisted them by their own petards in every public hearing this year. They’re scared of getting humiliated for not having an actual case (again), so they need to hide,” she said.
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