Will Democrats Really Shrug Off The GOP's Latest, Biggest Betrayal?

Republicans teamed up with Russian intelligence to smear Joe Biden; they inflicted serious political damage on him over YEARS; Democrats can't let bygones be bygones

(Photo by Russia Foreign Minister Press Ofice /Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

What did Republicans know and when did they know it?

It’s the question that should be on the lips of every Democrat within spitting distance of a microphone, but predictably, infuriatingly, is not. 

To recap quickly: Last week, David Weiss, the Trump-appointed prosecutor who has investigated, charged, and jerked around Hunter Biden, indicted Alexander Smirnov, the one witness who claimed to have evidence that the younger Biden really was trotting the globe soliciting bribes on behalf of his father. Turns out, Smirnov made it all up! 

That development, taken in isolation and at face value, was a huge, embarrassing blow to Weiss and to congressional Republicans, who have plastered Smirnov’s allegations all over the media and used them to justify a decision they’d already made, at Donald Trump’s behest, to impeach Joe Biden. 

But that wasn’t the end of it. DOJ then took the surprising step of trying to keep Smirnov confined before trial, and when a judge got in the way, prosecutors revealed that Smirnov’s lies stemmed from his work as a Russian intelligence agent. It’s not just that Republicans (in DOJ and on Capitol Hill) tried to frame Biden based on lies. It’s that the lies were part of a familiar Russian operation, encouraged and abetted by Trump himself for nearly a decade now, to slime his opponents ahead of elections. 

Today it’s the 2024 election, but Smirnov first seeded his lies ahead of the 2020 election, when DOJ was controlled by Trump, and his corrupt attorney general Bill Barr. 

Somehow Smirnov’s Russian intelligence contacts eluded all of these Republicans for four years. Unless of course they didn’t.

JAGOFFS, SMIRNOV

So far, the significance of the second revelation has eluded both the mainstream media and the Democratic Party. Or perhaps they are eluding it. They are fixed instead on what the Smirnov revelations mean for the impeachment going forward, agape in wonderment that a Russian disinformation campaign could get a U.S. president halfway to impeachment.

They haven’t considered, or don’t want to contemplate, the possibility that the term “Russian disinformation campaign” is a misnomer when high-ranking Republican officials in America are in on it. 

In a best case scenario, all of the Republicans who abetted the Russian op did so as blind but useful idiots, so hungry for a pretext to smear Biden that they didn’t bother to check their sources and—whoopsie daisies—four years later it turns out their main one was a Russian intelligence agent. 

The far likelier scenario is that at least some of these Republicans knew—just as they know Russia wanted to help Trump in 2016, and that the Trump campaign worked cooperatively with those sources to sabotage that election. 

We know they received warnings from the FBI that their Biden investigations were Russian disinformation targets, and that the false information was flowing from Russian intelligence through Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, into the highest echelons of the GOP. But those warnings would have been superfluous to those who already knew they were working with Russian spies in an effort to frame Biden. 

Did Donald Trump know? Did Bill Barr? Did Jim Jordan? Did James Comer?

What did they know? When did they know it?

RASKIN PURPOSE

The discrediting of the impeachment is notable, but it’s mostly irrelevant. Even the most gullible reporters in Washington understood that the impeachment inquiry was a farcical propaganda and revenge play to begin with. 

But if the story ends there, it’ll be a huge gift to Republicans and a huge blow to the public—our right to know, and our right to choose our leaders freely. 

Some Democrats seem at some level to grasp this.

Others will tiptoe up to the generous interpretation—that Republicans committed an error rather than a crime. 

But most Democrats, including those we think of as tribunes for Trump accountability, have said nothing at all or seen fit only to move on from the whole messy ordeal—that this is the death knell for impeachment and nothing more. They haven’t realized or are trying to avoid the conclusion that this is the opening of a new scandal (or, if you prefer, a reopening of an old one).

“I want to assume the best and give them the benefit of the doubt,” House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki this week. “Let’s say they really didn’t know whether or not this is true, and now it’s overwhelmingly likely it’s a lie, it’s a conspiracy theory made up by Russian intelligence, pumped through Smirnov into America, and then they picked it up and they’ve been running with the football ever since. But it should be over now. They should close down the circus, it’s over. What will they do? Will they just move on to a new lie, a new conspiracy theory someone feeds them, or will they say, ‘Hey you now what we gave it our best shot but it’s over and why don’t we look at something that’s really affecting the American people, like gun violence.’”

Raskin is a good man and an extremely valuable member of the Democratic caucus. He has in the past tried to persuade Democratic leaders to dig deeper into Trump’s corruption, and even did so himself, exposing proof, without the benefit of subpoena power, that Trump received millions in payments from foreign governments while he was president. 

But here even he seems content for this to end with the impeachment inquiry and a vain plea for bipartisanship. Assume the best of Republicans (!!!), and call a truce rather than judo-flip it into a scandal for Republicans. 

Raskin is of course limited by the fact that he’s in the minority. But he could call for the investigation to be turned inward. Why was Trump world in bed with this guy? If Comer can’t or won’t claim total ignorance, Raskin could demand his recusal as oversight committee chair. If Comer refuses to investigate, Raskin can decry the coverup. He has a loud megaphone, right now.

But if we can’t count on even the best of House Democrats, help will probably not be coming.

Any or all of the four Democratic members of the Gang of Eight congressional leaders who receive regular intelligence updates—Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Mark Warner, and Jim Himes—could simply issue a statement demanding a counterintelligence briefing from DOJ on the threat to the election, and the involvement of U.S. persons. Did the FBI deliver any so-called “defensive briefings” to the Republicans who amplified Smirnov’s false allegations? 

So far none of them has weighed in. And below them, we will apparently run into a problem, as we always do, with the fact that the Senate committee chairs of jurisdiction are old, tired, and uninterested in Trump accountability. Is Dick Durbin even aware that an enormous scandal is unfolding right under his nose? Is Richard Blumenthal?

Or, alternatively, what are they so scared of?

The fact that Bill Barr lied about the Mueller report, and that Trump bypasses questions about it by saying “Russia, Russia Russia!” isn’t any kind of checkmate. The fact that Democrats, as Schatz hinted, feel like it’s cringe-inducing to make an issue of the Russia-Trump nexus isn’t justification for letting it fester without comment. Yet Democrats are behaving as though Trump’s corrupt relationships with foreign powers, and his solicitation of election interference, are some kind of third rail rather than an urgent threat to their power, and to the United States writ large. 

This is madness. In the past two weeks alone, Trump has:

• failed to say anything meaningful about the murder of Vladimir Putin’s dissident-rival Alexei Navalny; 

• invited Russia to attack NATO allies; 

• encouraged Republicans to further obstruct aid to Ukraine. 

Do Democrats have such little faith in themselves and the facts that they believe it’ll all come to naught the minute Trump shrieks “NO COLLUSION!”? Don’t answer that question.

HUNTER?! HARDLY KNEW ‘ER!

It’s worth dwelling on the Republican mens rea here, not just to drive home that President Biden has been exonerated, but because his name has been run through the mud for years now on the basis of lies and bad faith and GOP lust for power. 

How many points has the GOP’s HUNTER BIDEN CRIME FAMILY LAPTOP BURISMA propaganda blitz shaved off Biden’s approval since 2021? How badly has it eroded his well-earned edge over Trump on the issue of ethics?

Those margins were stolen from him, and Democrats should have enough pride and dignity to try to reclaim them. 

Maybe they investigate more and find that most Republicans were well-compartmented enough not to realize Smirnov was the tip of the spear of Russian election subversion. Maybe this time there really is “no collusion.”

If so, that’s fine. It’s quite bad enough. It exposes one of America's two main political parties as so primed for scorched-earth partisanship, and so at home with Russian saboteurs, that it can be used this way. And it throws the GOP response to this “surprise” revelation into stark relief. When they realized their political strategy was actually coterminous with a Russian info-op, did they disavow it and drop it immediately? They did not! Instead Republicans have deleted some embarrassing passages from impeachment websites and document demands but seem intent on plowing ahead like nothing strange happened. Fox News simply neuralized its audience as though its hosts hadn't spent hundreds of prime time hours pumping out the lie.

They should not be allowed to walk away from it like this, and Democrats should not absolve them with an unrequited olive branch of bipartisanship. Republicans will not discredit themselves with their conduct alone. Mainstream political media will not treat this as a scandal if Democrats don’t act like it’s one. If it’s allowed to disappear into the news cycle, the new expectation, already half-established, is that Republicans can, without consequences, be willing dupes to any shady characters who want to manipulate our elections, so long as it’s to help them. 

And more likely, we’ll find out some of them weren’t merely dupes.

UPDATE: Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY) framed the question correctly here, though it’s not just DOJ that must investigate. As laid out above, Senate Democrats and Democrats in the Gang of Eight must as well.