The case against a longtime FBI informant accused of fabricating a multi-million dollar bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden is not a game-changer, a top House GOP investigator argued on Wednesday.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) said the indictment against Alexander Smirnov and his claims of having contacts with Russian intelligence officials do not “change the four fundamental facts” tied to Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company that employed Hunter Biden on its board for several years, and Joe Biden pressing Ukrainian officials to fire a top prosecutor in the country, Viktor Shokin, when the elder Biden served as vice president.
Fact number one is Hunter Biden was “put on the board of Burisma, gets paid a million dollars a year,” Jordan said during an exchange with CNN’s Manu Raju. The second fact, according to Jordan, was “he’s not qualified to be on the board. He said so himself in an interview,” an apparent reference to Hunter Biden saying he was hired because of his family name.
Jordan said the third fact concerned executives at Burisma asking Hunter Biden, “Can you weigh in with D.C. and help us deal with the pressure we are facing from the prosecutor?” He was alluding to testimony by Devon Archer, who also served on the board of the company. “Fact number four, Joe Biden then goes to Ukraine” days after a call was made and “conditions the release of … American tax money on the firing of the prosecutor who was applying the pressure” to Burisma, Jordan added.
Raju asked a follow-up question, pressing Jordan on his prior assertion that an FBI-generated FD-1023 form with Smirnov’s claims that Burisma executives paid $5 million in bribes to the Bidens was the “most corroborating” evidence for GOP investigators in their impeachment inquiry. “It corroborates but it doesn’t change those fundamental facts,” Jordan said.
The Ohio Republican made similar points in another exchange with reporters outside the deposition of James Biden, a brother of President Joe Biden, for the impeachment inquiry. Hunter Biden is expected to testify before congressional investigators next week.
A top Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), said on Tuesday that the impeachment investigation “essentially ended … with the explosive revelation that Mr. Smirnov’s allegations about Ukrainian Burisma payments to Joe Biden were concocted along with Russian intelligence agents.” He also called on House Republicans to “fold up the tent to this circus show. It’s really over at this point.”
The House Oversight Committee, which under Chairman James Comer (R-KY) is spearheading the impeachment inquiry, said the FBI and Department of Justice “have a lot of explaining to do about their reliance on the informant whose allegations were included” in the FD-1023 form.
Three questions were posed in a post to X: “Why did they use this informant, who officials claimed was highly credible, since 2010?”; “Why did they pay the informant six figures?”; and “Why did the DOJ sit on serious allegations from the informant whom the FBI deemed highly credible for years before investigating the claims?” The panel added, “The American people deserve answers.”
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