Once upon a time – until this week, anyway – the House’s MAGA cult got umpteen clicks on right-wing media by claiming that it had devastating impeachable evidence against President Biden. Supposedly, a “highly credible” whistleblower had dished that Biden and son Hunter had taken bribes from a Ukrainian energy firm while Joe was veep. One of MAGA’s top sleuths, Congressman James Comer, declared publicly that the guy’s yarn about Joe was “a very crucial piece of our investigation.”
It’s so delicious when these clowns get humiliated.
We learned this week that the “highly credible” whistleblower, a guy named Alexander Smirnov, made up the whole thing, “creating a false fictitious record” (according to a federal grand jury), concocting the fake allegation against the president at the behest of the Kremlin. You read that right. According to a new document filed by special counsel David Weiss (a U.S. attorney appointed by Trump), Smirnov has “extensive and extremely recent” ties with “Russian intelligence agencies.”
So what does MAGA sleuth Comer – who makes Inspector Clouseau look like Elliot Ness – have to say about that? Here he is: Smirnov “wasn’t an important part of our investigation.” And presto, all references to this supposedly star witness have been deleted from the House impeachment website – flushed down the memory hole as if they never existed, to borrow a line from Orwell.
Bye bye, fake impeachment mission. If I could summon the sound of uproarious laughter via the written word, I surely would. But the hilarity of this Smirnov episode must ultimately yield to a sobering truth that perhaps most Americans are still reluctant to confront:
Putin’s Kremlin, which worked so hard to meddle in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, is still determined to tip the scales to Trump. The Russians play the long game, and now they have the GOP, a formerly pro-American political party, at its beck and call.
It’s a stretch to allege that Comer and ranting chihuahua Jim Jordan are actual Russian assets, but, at minimum, they’re useful idiots who are willing to gargle and regurgitate whatever garbage comes their way without performing due diligence. As House Republican Ken Buck said yesterday, “We were warned (last autumn) that the credibility of (Smirnov’s) statement was not known. And yet, people went out and talked to the public about how this was credible…It appears to absolutely be false.”
Smirnov was arrested this week and taken off the street, according to special counsel Weiss, in order to thwart his ongoing efforts “to spread misinformation about a candidate of one of the two major parties” – that would be President Biden – and, indeed, to thwart lies “that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials.”
Russian intelligence officials have been doing that for the past eight years. As the Mueller Report pointed out, “the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign in sweeping and systematic fashion,” and the Trump campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” The Republican-run Senate Intelligence Committee later concluded in its own report that “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence…the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.” And a few years later, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russia conducted wide-ranging “influence operations” to denigrate Joe Biden’s candidacy in 2020, “undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the U.S.”
Hence the existential stakes in November ’24. The House’s MAGA Republicans are laugh-worthy clowns, but their pathetic credulity, their willingness to be suckered by a hostile foreign power, should remind us yet again how important voting will be in the next free election – and for us to ensure that it’s not our last.