“Humiliation”: Fox host buries GOP as Republican admits “we were warned” about indicted informant

Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., claimed that top Republicans were warned about the debunked Biden claims from a former FBI informant before he was indicted for making up allegations that the Bidens took bribes.

David Weiss, the special counsel who charged Hunter Biden with drug and tax violations, last week charged Alexander Smirnov with lying to the FBI that Hunter and President Joe Biden received $5 million bribes from executives at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma for protection. The special counsel said that Smirnov told investigators that “officials associated with Russian intelligence” were involved in passing the story.

Buck, a House Judiciary Committee member who has pushed back on the rush to impeach Biden, told CNN that Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., along with other Republicans were warned about the informant’s claims before they hyped them publicly.

“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 said.

“And yet people, my colleagues went out and talk 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,” he said. “It appears to absolutely be false and to really undercut the nature of the charges.”

Buck added that it “appears” that Comer and Jordan went public with the information even though they knew it was uncorroborated.

“I certainly didn’t have any evidence outside the statement itself that it was credible,” he said. “And as a prosecutor for 25 years, I never went to the public until I could prove the reliability of a statement. And even then, the only one public statement a prosecutor makes is the charging document. Let’s see what the evidence is in this impeachment, if there is more evidence before going forward.”

House Republicans have continued their impeachment inquiry, interviewing President Biden’s brother James behind closed doors on Wednesday. James Biden denied that the president has ever had “any involvement or any direct or indirect financial interest” in his business ventures, according to Politico.

“I don’t know why Jim Comer and Jim Jordan thought that perhaps it was going to be Joe Biden’s brother that brought him down,” Fox News host Jessica Tarlov said Wednesday. “But this is the path that they’ve chosen to take. And honestly, I’m surprised that they have this high of a threshold for humiliation, every witness that they have called has decimated their argument.”

Tarlov called out the Republicans’ reliance on the statement from Smirnov, which they’ve said was key evidence before walking back the purported importance of the document after the charges.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

“Not only did he lie, he was lying because the Russians were feeding him the disinformation. It’s so embarrassing,” Tarlov said.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said Wednesday that the “impeachment investigation essentially ended yesterday, in substance if not in form, with the explosive revelation” that Russia fed information to Smirnov.

“It appears like the whole thing is not only, obviously, false and fraudulent, but a product of Russian disinformation and propaganda,” Raskin said. “And that’s been the motor force behind this investigation for more than a year.”