WASHINGTON — Republicans on Tuesday removed references to a discredited FBI informant in a letter to potential witnesses in President Joe Biden’s impeachment inquiry.
Republican press requests typically detail the basis for the investigation, including a passage describing a conversation between a trusted confidential source and a Ukrainian gas company executive about bribes to Mr. Biden.
The Justice Department announced last week that an American informant named Alexander Smirnov fabricated the allegations, but Republicans now appear to have removed all mention of the matter from impeachment documents.
On Tuesday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) issued a letter requesting an interview with former State Department official Amos Hochstein. , I included a sentence about this informant. An hour later, the speaker sent another version of the same letter, but omitted the part about the informant, a House Democratic aide said. HuffPost reviewed both versions of the document.
Ann Aides to the impeachment inquiry said the letter was drafted before the indictment and the demands remain in effect.
The informant’s false information is based on the main corruption allegations that Republicans have pursued against Biden, including a Ukrainian gas company that employed his son as a director in 2015 and 2016, when Biden was vice president. He confirmed that he expelled the Ukrainian prosecutor to protect Burisma.
Current and former State Department officials, including Mr. Hochstein, have repeatedly debunked the Biden-Burisma case and, in hours of testimony in 2019 and 2020, have said that the prosecutor’s change is a growing concern within the State Department and among allies in Europe. The prosecutor explained that this reflected a broad consensus: It was corrupt.
But last year, Republicans obtained and released raw FBI files from June 2020 in which Smirnov’s officers were accused of paying Burisma executives $5 million in bribes each to Hunter and Joe Biden. Smirnov’s conversation with Mykola Zlochevsky was explained.
As the Republican Party states in a number of letters requesting interviews, “This confidential source, who is described as ‘highly reliable,’ says that the Burisma executive was ‘using his father to expose us to all kinds of He hired Hunter Biden to ‘keep him out of trouble.’ ”
Mr. Smirnov told FBI officials that Mr. Zlochevsky was sending the funds through secret channels and that it would take years for investigators to compile information. Republicans used subpoenas to scrutinize thousands of pages of bank records of the president’s sons and brothers in search of nonexistent bribes.
Mr. Smirnov’s credibility was not in question until prosecutors followed him up last year to confirm his 2020 report, but Republicans have questioned one of his claims: as an English speaker. The Bidens’ claims that an unknown Mr. Zlochevsky recorded his conversations with Mr. Smirnov may not be true.
Comer said the impeachment inquiry will continue to focus on Joe Biden’s unproven involvement in his son’s business dealings, despite losing the best supporting evidence against the Bidens.
Lawmakers met with the president’s brother, James Biden, on Wednesday, and Hunter Biden is scheduled to take a deposition next week. It is unclear whether articles of impeachment against the president will be passed by the House of Representatives.