The House GOP-led impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden has been an epic flop since it was first announced by then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy in September 2023. It has failed to find any incriminating evidence that would warrant impeaching Biden for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Instead, what the clown show led by House Oversight Committee chair James Comer and House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan has revealed is that the purported Biden-Burisma scandal was was likely a Russian disinformation plot from the very beginning promulgated by Rudy Giuliani,
The first bombshell dropped in February when it was revealed that the House GOP’s much ballyhooed key witness in the impeachment inquiry, Alex Smirnov, had been indicted by Special Counsel David Weiss, for allegedly lying to his FBI handler that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid Joe and Hunter Biden $5 million each around 2015. Weiss had previously indicted the president’s son on gun and tax charges.
But to make matters worse for the GOP, federal prosecutors filed a court document that claimed that Smirnov had admitted to passing along bad information about the Bidens from “officials associated with Russian intelligence.”
“Smirnov’s efforts to spread misinformation about a candidate of one of the two major parties in the United States continues. What this shows is that the misinformation he is spreading is not confined to 2020. He is actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November.”
Now this should have been sufficient cause for Comer and Jordan to drop their sham impeachment inquiry. But instead a defiant Jordan said Smirnov’s arrest “doesn’t change the fundamental facts” and fell back on the original Biden-Burisma corruption claim first put forth by Giuliani in 2019.
Jordan regurgitated the claim that Vice President Biden had pushed to oust Ukraine’s prosecutor general Viktor Shokin because he was investigating Burisma whose board members included Hunter Biden.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democratic member of the House Oversight Committee, totally debunked that claim in a detailed fact sheet. It cited Ukrainian officials who said that Shokin wasn’t investigating Burisma at the time of Biden’s intervention. Raskin also emphasized that the vice president was leading “a bipartisan international coalition to address and root out corruption in Ukraine.” Shokin was removed as prosecutor general by the Ukrainian parliament in March 2016.
“The false claim that Vice President Biden called for Shokin’s firing to help his son was created and perpetuated by Rudy Giuliani,” Raskin wrote.
It turns out that Smirnov’s lies about the Bidens and Burisma were just the poison fruit from a poison tree.
A second bombshell dropped when Democrats brought in Ukrainian-American businessman Lev Parnas, who assisted Giuliani in his efforts to dig up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden, to testify at the March 19 hearing of the House Oversight Committee which was part of the Biden impeachment inquiry.
Parnas submitted a written opening statement, which everyone should read, in which he observed “what we are facing now is the culmination of a much larger plan for Russia to crush Ukraine by infiltrating the United States.”
At the hearing, Parnas gave an abbreviated version of his written statement. He said that he had been tasked by Giuliani “acting on behalf of” Trump in November 2018 with a mission to dig up dirt on the Bidens to help secure the 2020 election for Trump.
Parnas admitted to his past wrongdoings. The Florida businessman had earlier come to the attention of Trump and Giuliani as a major GOP donor. His mission for Giuliani came to an end in October 2019 when he was indicted on charges of business fraud and campaign finance violations for using money from a wealthy Russian to make illegal donations to politicians.. He was sentenced to 20 months in prison.
Parnas told the committee that he had found “zero evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine’ and that “no credible source has ever provided proof of criminal activity … No respectable Ukrainian official has ever said that the Bidens did anything illegal,”
And he then added the coup de grace:
“The only information ever pushed on the Bidens in Ukraine has come from one source, and one source only: Russia and Russian agents. The impeachment proceedings that bring us here now are predicated on false information spread by the Kremlin. … Everything was for the ultimate benefit of Donald Trump and thereby Vladimir Putin.”
And what have we learned about Giuliani since Trump was acquitted in February 2020 in his first Senate impeachment trial. His impeachment resulted from allegations that the president abused the power of his office by withholding vital military aid to Ukraine in an effort to pressure Ukrainian officials to smear his political rivals.
Giuliani has destroyed whatever credibility he once had by embracing baseless election fraud conspiracy theories that resulted in defamation lawsuits filed against him by Dominion Voting Systems and two Georgia election workers. Giuliani is facing criminal racketeering charges in Georgia for allegedly helping Trump’s efforts to overturn Biden’s victory in the state in 2020.
So it would be entirely consistent with Giuliani’s modus operandi to promulgate, perhaps unwittingly, Russian disinformation about Biden-Burisma to help Trump win the 2020 election.
And let’s consider what was happening before Giuliani tasked Parnas with helping dig up dirt on the Bidens? Just Security published a detailed timeline on “Trump, Giuliani, Biden, and Ukrainegate.”
It shows that in July 2018, Trump already feared Biden as his most formidable opponent in the 2020 presidential race, and the following month polls were showing that Biden would beat Trump. Biden did not formally announce his candidacy until April 25, 2019.
Giuliani admitted that he was handed a dossier that led him to pressure the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation into the Bidens’ involvement with Burisma. Jane Raskin was one of Trump’s defense attorneys in the 2020 Senate impeachment trial..
Both Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his successor Volodymyr Zelenskyy came under intense pressure to announce an investigation into Biden-Burisma, according to the Just Security timeline. If either had done so, Biden’s presidential campaign might have been derailed, which would have served the interests of both Trump and Putin.
Giuliani was also asking that the Ukrainian government investigate baseless allegations that it was Ukraine, rather than Russia, that interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
Federal prosecutors did not reveal any information about the identities of the Russian intelligence operatives who fed disinformation to Smirnov.
But we know the identities of many of the Ukrainians who helped Giuliani in his efforts to dig up dirt on the Bidens.
Three of them stand out because they were indicted by the Ukrainian government in November 2023 for treason on behalf of Russia. They are Member of Parliament Oleksandr Dubinsky, ex-lawmaker Andriy Derkach and former prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulyk, The Washington Post reported.
The Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, and the State Bureau of Investigation, accused the three of belonging to an organization controlled by Russia’s military agency, the GRU, which allegedly “carried out subversive informational activities in favor of the Russian Federation.”
The SBU, in a statement, said:
“The main task of this organization is to destabilize the socio-political situation in Ukraine and discredit our state in the international arena. For this, the members of the group received money from the military intelligence of the Russian Federation.”
The Center for European Policy Analysis reported that the three allegedly received more than $10 million from the General Staff of the Russian Ministry of Defense to spread propaganda and discredit an unnamed U.S. presidential candidate in 2019. They were also accused of funding private security firms in Ukraine that were pre-assigned to assist a Russian invasion when needed.
Derkach and Kulyk have fled Ukraine, the SBU said. Dubinsky was arrested and ordered held in custody.
In September 2020, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Derkach for running an “influence campaign” against Biden and said he was “an active Russian agent for over a decade.” Then on Jan. 11, 2020, the Treasury Department sanctioned Dubinsky, Kulyk and five others for being part of “a Russia-linked foreign influence network associated” with Derkach.
Derkach, whose father was a KGB agent, studied at the Russian FSB intelligence service (formerly KGB) academy in Moscow in the 1990s. He was a parliament deputy for the pro-Russian Party of Regions that backed ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was forced from power in the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution.
The National Intelligence Council, in an unclassified March 2021 report on “Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections,” specifically mentioned Derkach:
We assess that President Putin and other seniorRussian officials were aware of and probably directed Russia’s influence operations against the 2020 US Presidential election. For example, we assess that Putin had purview over the activities of Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator who played a prominent role in Russia’s election influence activities. Derkach has ties to Russian officials as well as Russia’s intelligence services.
The report added that Derkach and his associates “took steps throughout the election cycle to damage US ties to Ukraine, denigrate President Biden and his candidacy, and benefit former President Trump’s prospects for reelection. We assess this network also sought to … falsely blame Ukraine for interfering in the 2016 US presidential election.:
Dubinsky, a parliament member from Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party and TV presenter, promoted the debunked allegation that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
And Kulyk, a former prosecutor, compiled a seven-page dossier in English that accused Hunter Biden of corruption that The New York Times wrote in Oct. 2019 “helped set off a political firestorm that led to the impeachment investigation of President Trump.“ Kulyk was fired from his job as a prosecutor a month later.
Dubinsky and Derkach held a news conference in Kyiv in November 2019 calling for an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma. In December 2019 they each met in Kyiv with Giuliani who was working on an “expose” on corruption in Ukraine that The Washington Post called “a stunning piece of propaganda.” Giuliani’s reports aired on the right-wing One American News Network the same week that the House voted to impeach Trump.
Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election despite the Russian disinformation smear campaign directed against him. But Comer, Jordan and other MAGA cohorts along with right-wing media are still pushing Putin’s propaganda, despite all the red flags.
In his testimony, Parnas had this warning:
“Sadly they are still doing this today as we approach the 2024 elections. We cannot separate this conspiracy from the Russia-Ukraine war because Trump has no intention to keep aiding Ukraine. Without the support from the United States and NATO, millions in Ukraine will suffer and die. If we allow Russia to defeat Ukraine, eventually that suffering will reach American shores.”