In their seemingly unrelenting fixation in taking down a Democratic president, Republicans in Congress failed to learn earlier lessons, ignoring important warning signs of looming trouble ahead for their case. The crash and burn of their “highly credible” FBI source, Alexander Smirnov, was the final embarrassing blow — one that could have been avoided had they used better judgment.
The Justice Department’s arrest of Smirnov in February for purveying false allegations about the Bidens allegedly taking bribes from a Ukrainian oligarch that may have been passed to Smirnov by Russian intelligence sources — memorialized in a raw, unverified FBI FD-1023 — was bizarrely similar to another episode that occurred just one year earlier. In that case, DOJ arrested an alleged agent of China’s interests, Gal Luft (another “very credible” Republican source), for allegations about Biden family corruption. Luft is still on the lam.
What is it about gullible Republican politicians and their clueless staff who vouch for and over-hype the bona fides of these informants without proper caution and vetting? These Republican sleuths were easy targets, apparently not mindful enough of the very basic adage, “once bit, twice shy.”
Even before the 2020 elections, Republicans such as James Comer (Ky.), Jim Jordan (Ohio), Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) were confident they were on the scent of big-time Biden family corruption. Back then, Comer and Jordan, still in the House minority, preached their Biden corruption reporting to the conservative media echo choir. Still in the Senate majority, Grassley and Johnson collaborated as committee chairmen on a lengthy report into Hunter Biden’s sketchy dealings with foreign entities, including Ukraine — some of which, they claimed, were potentially criminal.
That report got a little too close to the heat. The two chairmen were hammered publicly by Democrats and media for spreading Kremlin disinformation just before the 2020 elections. Even former Chairman of the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee Richard Burr, and its current chairman, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), robustly warned them that their investigation could benefit the Kremlin. The chairmen were taken aback and defended themselves vigorously.
Thereafter, and now before the 2024 election, instead of using more caution to avoid being accused again of aiding the Kremlin, Grassley has doubled down, by championing the release of the unverified FD-1023 about the alleged bribery scheme involving Joe and Hunter Biden. On July 20, 2023, Grassley took to the Senate floor and disclosed the document to the public, saying he received the document from “brave whistleblowers.”
Just one month prior, I had written an opinion piece about how Grassley’s oversight focus had strayed far afield from his traditional, empirical-based oversight of federal agencies run amok, to instead investigating Democratic presidents and presidential candidates without a sufficient, verifiable predicate.
In that piece, I specifically warned about his ultra-risky “dalliance with an FBI FD-1023 document” because it was unverified. I compared it to the Steele Dossier, compiled during the 2016 elections, that would have aided Hillary Clinton and Democrats because of unverified allegations it contained about then-candidate Donald Trump, and against which Grassley had railed for months because it was unverified and therefore lacking credibility. I noted the curious twist of fate for Grassley in the event the FD-1023 turned out to be another Steele dossier.
Lo and behold, not only is the comparison fair, now some have suggested the possible need for a 2024 election interference inquiry, given questions surrounding whether Smirnoff was part of a Russian disinformation operation. Grassley would be ground zero for such an investigation because he was the recipient of the document before he broadcast it to the world and for posterity. No doubt, the feds would want to learn the identity(ies) of the “brave whistleblower” conduits of the document, and if they had ties to a possible Russian disinformation operation.
Meanwhile, the Comer and Jordan committees themselves had been marshaling witnesses and documents for a series of hearings since January 2021, purporting to show political bias by the Deep State and the Biden administration against conservatives and corruption by “the Biden crime family.” Those hearings did not pan out, to be charitable.
The last big one, conducted in September by Comer to review evidence for impeaching President Biden, laid a proverbial egg when his main witness, law professor Jonathan Turley, as well as Comer’s other witnesses, admitted the evidence collected up to then by the Republicans was insufficient to prove their case. Since then, the House seems to be at a dead end.
Shortly after news broke of the Smirnov arrest, Fox News analyst Jessica Tarlov summed up the overall Republican oversight efforts against Biden best when she said, “This is the path that they’ve chosen to take, and honestly I’m surprised that they have this high of a threshold for humiliation. Every witness they have called has decimated their argument.”
Normally, congressional staff wouldn’t come within a 10-foot pole of these kinds of murky investigations. In 19 years as a Senate investigator, hardly a month would go by when I wouldn’t have someone at my door peddling this kind of fabulist codswallop about the president or vice president, or maybe a Cabinet member. They were provocateurs with an agenda. After going through the motions so routinely for so long, you could spot them a mile away.
Your answer to them was always the same: No documents, or audio/visual tapes or smoking guns, then have a nice day. And FD-1023s or other unverified and uncorroborated documents won’t suffice.
Sometimes, the best advice for gullible congressional gumshoes is to stick to those very basic, common-sense adages in your gut. Here’s one if you’re going to take on the president without a factual, verifiable predicate: “You mess with the bull, you get the horns.”
Kris Kolesnik is a 34-year veteran of federal government oversight. He spent 19 years as senior counselor and director of investigations for Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). Kolesnik then became executive director of the National Whistleblower Center. Finally, he spent 10 years working with the Department of the Interior’s Office of Inspector General as the associate inspector general for external affairs.