- “It’s been an outrageous effort from the beginning,” President Joe Biden said.
- He was reacting to the news that a key informant had been arrested and charged.
- Alexander Smirnov was arrested Thursday and appeared in court in Nevada.
Joe Biden on Friday demanded that impeachment proceedings against him be dropped after a key witness was accused of 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 their foreign connections to enrich themselves, but have struggled to present evidence.
This week it emerged that an FBI informant had been accused of lying about payments to Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company.
“He’s lying,” Biden said when asked for his response on Friday.
“It should be abandoned and it has been an outrageous effort from the beginning.”
Joe Biden on Friday demanded that impeachment proceedings against him be dropped after a key witness was accused of fabricating a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme involving the president, his son Hunter and a Ukrainian energy company.
Special counsel David Weiss accused a former FBI informant of lying about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden accepting a $5 million bribe from Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
Alexander Smirnov, 43, is accused of making a false statement and creating a false record of statements he made to the FBI in 2020 and, if convicted, faces a maximum of 25 years in prison.
He was arrested Thursday at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas after arriving in the United States and appeared in federal court later that day.
Court documents show that Smirnov told the FBI that in March 2017 he had a conversation with the owner of Burisma about acquiring a business in the US.
It alleged that executives associated with Burisma paid Hunter and his father $5 million in 2015 and 2016, and that one executive claimed to have hired the younger Biden for the board of directors to “protect us, through his father, from all types of issues”.
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 extraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and then into bribery accusations against Public Official 1, the presumed candidate of one of the two main political parties for the presidency, after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his candidacy,’ the prosecution said.
Democrats seized on the event as evidence that Republicans were acting in bad faith.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said: “It is an undeniable fact that Republican accusations against President Biden have always been a web of lies based on conspiracy theories, and I formally call on President Johnson, President Comer, and House Republicans to stop to promote this nonsense and end their doomed impeachment investigation. ‘
Rep. James Comer, chairman of the committee, which has led the impeachment effort, downplayed Smirnov’s importance.
“To be clear, the impeachment investigation does not rely on the FBI’s FD-1023,” he said in a statement, referring to the form documenting Smirnov’s allegations.
The charges against Smirnov were brought by special prosecutor David Weiss.
Biden delivered his response after a speech about the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
“We don’t know exactly what happened, but there is no doubt that Nalvany’s death was a consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did,” he said at the White House.
He added that he was contemplating new measures to punish Russia and Vladimir Putin’s regime.