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Joe Biden on Friday demanded that impeachment proceedings against him be dropped after a key witness was charged with fabricating a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme involving the president, his son Hunter, and a Ukrainian energy company. Republicans insist that Biden and his family corruptly used his foreign connections to enrich themselves but have struggled to produce evidence.
This week it emerged that an FBI informant had been accused of lying about payments from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. ‘He is lying,’ said Biden when he was asked for his response Friday. ‘It should be dropped and it’s just been an outrageous effort from the beginning.’
Alexander Smirnov, 43, is accused of making a false statement and creating a false record for statements he made to the FBI in 2020 and, if convicted, faces a maximum of 25 years in prison. He was arrested on Thursday at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas after arriving in the United States and appeared in federal court later that day.
Court filings show Smirnov told the FBI that in March 2017 he had a conversation with the owner of Burisma about acquiring a business in the U.S. He alleged that executives associated with Burisma paid Hunter and his father $5 million in 2015 and 2016, and that an executive claimed to have hired the younger Biden to the board to ‘protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.’
But prosecutors say Smirnov had routine contact with Burisma executives in 2017, after Biden was no longer vice president and had no ability to influence policy. Smirnov ‘transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against Public Official 1, the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his candidacy,’ the indictment said.
Democrats seized on the development as evidence that Republicans were operating in bad faith. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, said: ‘ 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.’
Rep. James Comer, chairman of the committee, who has led the impeachment push played down the significance of Smirnov. ‘To be clear, the impeachment inquiry is not reliant on the FBI’s FD-1023,’ he said in a statement, referring to the form that documented Smirnov’s allegations. The charges against Smirnov were filed by Special Counsel David Weiss.
Biden delivered his response after a speech on the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. ‘We don’t know exactly what happened, but there is no doubt that the death of Nalvany was a consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did,’ he said at the White House.
