“A Big Russian Intelligence Op” flops on Capitol Hill. By Susan B. Glasser ![U.S. President Joe Biden at an event in a group of people. There is a blue and red tinted overlay on the image.]()
On Tuesday evening,federal prosecutors filed a court document that, in a couple dozen bizarre and ultimately explosive pages, effectively put an end to one of Donald Trump’s great election-year hopes—the impeachment of President Joe Biden. The filing revealed that Alexander Smirnov, a longtime F.B.I. informant who told investigators that Biden and his son Hunter had each received a five-million-dollar bribe from a Ukrainian energy company, had not only invented that claim but had also admitted to passing along bad information about the Bidens from “officials associated with Russian intelligence.” Smirnov first relayed the sensational and very much unconfirmed bribery claim in a 2020 interview with the F.B.I. This past summer, Republicans pursuing the President released a redacted version of the F.B.I. report that included Smirnov’s allegation. It was their smoking gun, their white whale—the only concrete example they had managed to turn up with a specific person attesting to an actual criminal act on the part of the President. Sean Hannity, the Fox News host and Trump confidant, mentioned the alleged Biden bribe in eighty-five segments in 2023, according to the watchdog Media Matters. (Eighty-five, it should be noted, out of three hundred and twenty-five segments on what Hannity, channelling Trump, likes to call the “Biden crime family”—an average of more than one per night!) On the evening when Senator Chuck Grassley made Smirnov’s now debunked claim public, Hannity somberly told his viewers that Biden had been “very credibly accused of public corruption on a scale this country has never seen before.” For months afterward, House investigators tried to find evidence of the alleged bribe in Biden’s finances. They couldn’t, of course. As we now know, it didn’t exist. | 
