Turns out Republicans were even deeper into Kremlin disinformation about the Bidens than we knew
For awhile now I’ve been patiently waiting for the House Republican smear campaign against Joe and Hunter Biden to blow up in the Republicans’ faces. After all, the claims they were making about the Bidens were obviously untrue, and these House Republicans are idiots. Things always blow up in idiots’ faces sooner or later. Not always soon enough. But the bigger the idiots, the more quickly things tend to detonate.
Sure enough, it’s now happened โ and not in a small way. It’s not just that House Republicans’ claims about Joe and Hunter Biden have been proven false. It’s that they’ve turned out to be Russian disinformation from a guy who’s since been arrested for lying about the whole thing to the Feds. It’s now a nightmare for House Republicans. But wait, it just got even worse.
It turns out the Republicans haven’t merely been smearing the Bidens based on the discredited claims of one alleged foreign agent of Russia. They’ve apparently been basing it on the discredited claims of two alleged foreign agents of Russia. How is that even possible?
Back in 2019 when Donald Trump was still in office, a former KGB agent gave a thumb drive of Russian disinformation about Hunter Biden to Trump’s then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to a surreal new report from Business Insider. Given how eager Trump was to smear Hunter Biden heading into the 2020 election, there will now presumably be an investigation to determine whether Trump and/or his people used this KGB disinformation as part of their 2020 messaging. There will also be questions about whether Trump or his people may have given this KGB disinformation to Trump’s allies in the Republican House, and whether they’ve used those lies as part of their attacks on the Bidens.
It’s not just that House Republicans like Jim Jordan and James Comer are now stuck having to explain why they’ve spent years smearing the Bidens based on sourcing they should have known was false. It’s now getting harder by the day for these House Republicans to make the claim that they didn’t know the false information was coming from the Kremlin.
It would take a lot, and I mean a lot, for criminal charges to stick against members of Congress for simply making false accusations โ even knowingly false accusations โ against the President. But if it can be proven that these House Republicans knew that the false information was being fed to them by the Kremlin… let’s just say that House Republicans will be lucky if this remains merely a political problem for them and not a criminal one.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report