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Because who needs facts?
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The biggest story of the week, the month, and perhaps the rest of 2024 should be the fact that Republicans predicated their entire impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden on information provided to them by an agent of the Russian government.
Instead, yet another Russian incursion into American politics directly facilitated by Republican officials is falling flat.
Let's take a moment to review the situation with national security expert and ABC News analyst Asha Rangappa, who tweeted, "For real, can we recap: Sitting members of Congress initiated IMPEACHMENT PROCEEDINGS against a U.S. President based on information passed to them by an agent of Russian intelligence. Same members refuse to pass aid to Ukraine. Same members defend Trump."
It's not just that congressional Republicans like House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer and veteran GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa spouted disinformation from a Russian mole: It's that the claim made by the Russian mole was laughable on its face.
As The Bulwark's Tim Miller recounted on "The Next Level" podcast, "This idea that Joe Biden is a master criminal, and he has like a web of bank accounts that are so ... complex ... it would take the FBI and the CIA 10 years to unravel Joe Biden—Joseph Robinette Biden's scheme?"
Miller recalled thinking, no way, "This is crazy."
But not congressional Republicans. They made the claims of FBI informant Alexander Smirnov central—indeed, indispensable—to their case against Biden.
In May, Comer told Fox News his committee was demanding the FBI release information it had gleaned from Smirnov.
"This is a very crucial piece of our investigation," Comer said.
Grassley took to the Senate floor to pressure the FBI to release the FD-1023 form supposedly detailing "a criminal bribery scheme" that included President Biden and his son, Hunter. Grassley claimed that information came from "a highly credible, long serving FBI confidential human source."
Oops, just kidding.
But now that Smirnov has been indicted and revealed as a Russian agent, Republicans are trying to triage their impeachment inquiry instead of backing away from their disgraced probe of an American president whom they are smearing for political gain.
Comer told Newsmax Wednesday that Smirnov "wasn't an important part" of their investigation "because I didn't even know who he was."
Republicans are also scrubbing references of Smirnov from their investigatory materials, according to reporting from The New Republic's Tori Otten.
Totally absent from this Republican debacle is any sense of contrition for their roles serving as stooges of the Kremlin in spreading a mountain of lies about a sitting U.S. president.
Comer, Grassley, and others should be fighting off calls for their resignations after betraying the country.
Instead, the impeachment show must go on for Republicans. Otherwise they will have no means by which to uncover and spread more Russian disinformation about their political rival, Joe Biden.
Democratic voters know Joe Biden is old and MAGA voters like to pretend that Trump isn't just as long in the tooth. Both men were old the last time we did this and the only thing that’s changed is Biden is now a successful incumbent, while Trump is busy juggling trials and indictments.
Campaign ActionWith a government shutdown looming, 13 Republican senators, led by Utah Sen. Mike Lee and Texas’ pretend cowboy Sen. Ted Cruz, released a letter they said they sent to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell demanding he make a big stink about holding an impeachment trial for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Lee even posted a copy of the letter with some vaguely legible signatures to his X (formerly Twitter) account. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is expected to dismiss the bogus bit of political theater.
The Republican-led House was able to impeach Mayorkas after one embarrassing failure of an attempt, making it the first time a Cabinet official has been impeached in 150 years. The Senate GOP members making hay out of the impeachment process continue to remind the public how Democratic officials proved (and Republican officials admitted) the entire exercise was disingenuous.
The letter, which was signed by Sens. Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Eric Schmitt, Rick Scott, Ron Johnson, J.D. Vance, Roger Marshall, Josh Hawley, Mike Braun, Tommy Tuberville, Ted Budd, Cynthia Lummis, and Marsha Blackburn, contains a lot of what we have come to expect from the do-nothing Republican Party. The general pantomime of the GOP around the impeachment of Mayorkas involves an imaginary belief that the GOP is strong on border security. It is fitting that conservative senators like Lee, who voted against the bipartisan border security deal, would also spend their time trying to create a political theater production of impeachment instead of making the hard compromises and decisions needed to get things done.
Senators like Cruz have used their party’s disarray to take shots at current leaders like McConnell. On Sunday, Cruz told Fox News that “if Republican leadership in the Senate doesn’t like the criticism, here’s an opportunity to demonstrate some backbone.” Cruz and Lee are joined by self-promoters like Sen. Josh Hawley, who has had his own public spats with Republican leadership in recent months.
The government is set to shut down on March 1. House Republicans seem unable to chew gum and … chew gum. Senate Republicans who spent many decades in lockstep with McConnell’s leadership seem to have lost the ability to tie their shoes. The Senate is coming off of an 11-day recess. McConnell has not responded to inquiries from media outlets for his response to the letter as of the writing of this story.
Campaign ActionOhhhhh yeah! Democrats kicked ass and then some in Tuesday's special election in New York, so of course we're talking all about it on this week's episode of "The Downballot." Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard explain how Tom Suozzi's win affects the math for Democrats' plan to take back the House, then dive into the seemingly bottomless list of excuses Republicans have been making to handwave their defeat away. The bottom line: Suozzi effectively neutralized attacks on immigration—and abortion is still a huge loser for the GOP.
House Republicans aren’t even waiting for the Justice Department to respond to their demand for the transcripts of President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur. They are already planning the hearing with Hur probing into how old Biden really is. Hur has been preparing for his starring role.
Hur found no evidence against Biden in the documents-handling case he was investigating, which rose to a prosecutable level. But the former Trump official needed to do a solid for Republicans, so he added in a lot of gratuitous hits on Biden’s age in his report, which legal experts have called “a partisan hit job.”
According to Axios, Hur has been consulting with fellow former Trump official Sarah Isgur, who was Trump’s Department of Justice PR flak. Isgur has been helping him prepare to “navigate a congressional hearing.” Isgur has also been making the rounds of the Sunday shows and lying about Hur’s findings. Isgur said on ABC’s “This Week,” "They found evidence that (Biden) willfully retained national security information. And even probably beyond a reasonable doubt." The report actually said "we conclude that the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt," hinting at just how much of a set-up for the GOP his report was.
Biden’s team was quick to respond to Axios: “As Hur mounts his campaign, there will be another story to tell—of Hur and his deputy being two aggressive political prosecutors from the Trump administration who decided to gun for Biden in an election year for their own political futures as Republicans.”
That will be an easy case for Biden and the Democrats to make since the hearings are going to be spearheaded by two of the Republicans’ most rabid and buffoonish characters, Reps. Jim Jordan and James Comer. The chairs of the Judiciary and Oversight committees, respectively, will fight it out to see who can be the most outrageous and ridiculous in their probes to find out just how old Biden is.
The honed and smart team of Democrats led by Rep. Jamie Raskin will continue to make a mockery of the Republicans. Their “Truth Squad,” which includes Reps. Greg Casar, Jasmine Crockett, Maxwell Frost, Daniel Goldman, and Jared Moskowitz, has perfected their tactics to derail hearings and flummox Republicans. On these hearings, it’ll be a piece of cake.
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Campaign ActionHouse Speaker Mike Johnson has plenty of excuses for not taking up the Ukraine aid package the Senate passed early this week, saying that he’s just got too many serious issues on his plate to help in the fight for democracy against Russian totalitarianism. He told reporters Wednesday morning that “we have to address this seriously, to actually solve the problems and not just take political posturing as has happened in some of these other corners.”
Yes, he seriously accused Ukraine aid proponents of “political posturing” just hours after he led House Republicans in their second—barely successful—sham impeachment vote of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. By the way, that reporter’s question was spot on. Johnson effectively killed the original Senate bill that included a border security package by saying it would be dead on arrival in the House. Now he complains that the aid bill “has not one word about the border.”
Johnson also insists that he’s too busy figuring out how to avoid a government shutdown on March 1 and that it will take time for his team to “process” the Senate’s package. Guess what’s not on the House schedule this week? That’s right: Any appropriations bills to fund the government ahead of the looming deadline. Again, he was able to carve out more time to impeach Mayorkas and to force the Senate to deal with that just days before the government funding deadline.
The Senate is out until Feb. 26 and is going to have to deal with the Mayorkas impeachment as soon as they return. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer outlined the process in a statement, indicating that the House impeachment managers will “present the articles of impeachment to the Senate” as soon as they’re back in, and “[s]enators will be sworn in as jurors in the trial the next day.”
Which means two days of valuable Senate time will be wasted on this because the Senate will never vote to convict Mayorkas, but they have to deal with it anyway. They’ll dispense with it as quickly as the Senate can do anything, but they need every hour for the long process of passing the bills to keep the government from shutting down.
That process between the House and Senate is going nowhere fast because of all the poison-pill riders about abortion, contraception, and trans issues the House Republicans crammed into their spending bills.
On top of all that, Johnson—who just spent an embarrassing week and a half of floor time impeaching one of Biden’s cabinet members—is now demanding that Biden take him seriously and have a face-to-face meeting with him on the Ukraine bill. A White House spokesperson told NBC that Johnson “needed to wrap the negotiations he has having with himself and stop delaying national security needs in the name of politics.” Biden is not included to help Johnson out of this one.
“That body language says: ‘I know I’m in a tough spot. Please bail me out,’” one Democrat involved with the supplemental aid package told NBC.
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Campaign ActionThe U.S. House voted Tuesday to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, with the Republican majority determined to punish the Biden administration over its handling of the U.S-Mexico border after failing last week in a politically embarrassing setback.
The evening roll call proved tight, with Speaker Mike Johnson’s threadbare GOP majority unable to handle many defectors or absences in the face of staunch Democratic opposition to impeaching Mayorkas, the first Cabinet secretary facing charges in nearly 150 years.
In a historic rebuke, the House impeached Mayorkas 214-213. With the return of Majority Leader Steve Scalise to bolster the GOP's numbers after being away from Washington for cancer care and a Northeastern storm impacting some others, Republicans recouped — despite dissent from their own ranks.
Johnson had posted a fists-clenched photo with Scalise, announcing his remission from cancer, saying, “looking forward to having him back in the trenches this week!”
The GOP effort to impeach Mayorkas over his handling of the southern border has taken on an air of political desperation as Republicans struggle to make good on their priorities.
Mayorkas faced two articles of impeachment filed by the Homeland Security Committee arguing that he “willfully and systematically” refused to enforce existing immigration laws and that he breached the public trust by lying to Congress and saying the border was secure.
But critics of the impeachment effort said the charges against Mayorkas amount to a policy dispute over Biden's border policy, hardly rising to the Constitution's bar of high crimes and misdemeanors.
The House had initially launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden over his son’s business dealings, but instead turned its attention to Mayorkas after Trump ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia pushed the debate forward following the panel’s months-long investigation.
The charges against Mayorkas would next go to the Senate for a trial, but neither Democratic nor Republican senators have shown interest in the matter and it may be indefinitely shelved to a committee.
Border security has shot to the top of campaign issues, with Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination, insisting he will launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” if he retakes the White House.
Various House Republicans have prepared legislation to begin deporting migrants who were temporarily allowed into the U.S. under the Biden administration’s policies, many as they await adjudication of asylum claims.
“We have no choice,” Trump said in stark language at a weekend rally in South Carolina.
At the same time, Johnson rejected a bipartisan Senate border security package but has been unable to advance Republicans’ own proposal which is a nonstarter in the Senate.
Three Republican representatives broke ranks last week over the Mayorkas impeachment, which several leading conservative scholars have dismissed as unwarranted and a waste of time. With a 219-212 majority, Johnson had few votes to spare.
Mayorkas is not the only Biden administration official the House Republicans want to impeach. They have filed legislation to impeach a long list including Vice President Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
Never before has a sitting Cabinet secretary been impeached, and it was nearly 150 years ago that the House voted to impeach President Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary of war, William Belknap, over a kickback scheme in government contracts. He resigned before the vote.
Mayorkas, who did not appear to testify before the impeachment proceedings, put the border crisis squarely on Congress for failing to update immigration laws during a time of global migration.
“There is no question that we have a challenge, a crisis at the border,” Mayorkas said over the weekend on NBC. “And there is no question that Congress needs to fix it.”
Johnson and the Republicans have pushed back, arguing that the Biden administration could take executive actions, as Trump did, to stop the number of crossings — though the courts have questioned and turned back some of those efforts.
“We always explore what options are available to us that are permissible under the law,” Mayorkas said.
Last week's failed vote to impeach Mayorkas — a surprise outcome rarely seen on such a high-profile issue — was a stunning display in the chamber that has been churning through months of GOP chaos since the ouster of the previous House speaker.
One of the Republican holdouts, Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, who had served as a Marine, announced over the weekend he would not be seeking reelection in the fall, joining a growing list of serious-minded Republican lawmakers heading for the exits.
At the time, Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, who had been hospitalized for emergency abdominal surgery, made a surprise arrival, wheeled into the chamber in scrubs and socks to vote against it — leaving the vote tied, and failed.
“Obviously, you feel good when you can make a difference,” said Green, describing his painstaking route from hospital bed to the House floor. “All I did was what I was elected to do, and that was to cast my vote on the issues of our time, using the best judgment available to me.”
Republicans are hopeful the New York special election will boost their ranks further, but the outcome of that race is uncertain.
House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Wednesday that the debacle of Republicans’ failure to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was merely a “setback,” a numbers game and not a colossal failure on his team’s account. “Sometimes when you’re counting votes and people show up when they’re not expected to be in the building it changes the equation,” he said. Those tricksy Democrats hiding their votes.
Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries was having none of that when he talked to reporters Wednesday. “It’s not our responsibility to let House Republicans know which members will or will not be present on the House floor on any other day or in connection with any given vote.”
He slammed Republicans for the political distraction:
What does the impeachment of Secretary Mayorkas have to do with the economy? Nothing. What does the impeachment of Secretary Mayorkas have to do with addressing the affordability issues in the United States of America? Nothing. What does the impeachment of Secretary Mayorkas have to do with fixing our broken immigration system and addressing challenges at the border? Absolutely nothing.It's incredible to me that instead of extreme MAGA Republicans pivoting to working with us in a commonsense way to solve real problems for the American people, their focus is on how do we get Steve Scalise back to Washington so we can continue to do the bidding of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump and impeach Secretary Mayorkas? That tells you everything we need to know about this do-nothing, chaotic, dysfunctional and extreme Republican majority.
That is what Johnson is focused on: Getting Rep. Steve Scalise—who is recovering from a stem cell transplant—back to work and bringing the resolution back to the floor just as he’s available. Johnson and his team are not going to address the issue that three of their members are opposed to this impeachment because it’s bullshit.
“People around here should take note of it because they’re losing a group of Republicans that are really important,” Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, one of those “no” votes on Tuesday, told The Hill. “The vote is a matter of numbers always. But I don’t think it’s a matter of numbers when you’re looking at the Constitution and whether it’s the right thing to do.”
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Campaign ActionMarjorie Taylor Greene gave a doozy of an interview with right-wing podcast host Charlie Kirk on Wednesday to commiserate about House Republicans’ failed impeachment vote Tuesday of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Greene has been big mad about the failed vote and, like many of her pro-impeachment colleagues, is looking for someone—anyone—to blame, including Democrats for trying “to throw us off on the numbers.”
But Greene has plenty of disdain for the Republicans who voted against the bill too. When Kirk asked why Ken Buck of Colorado, Tom McClintock of California, and Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin voted against impeachment, Greene seemed flabbergasted—but didn’t rule out the possibility that “they’re being bribed.”
Kirk fed the Georgia congresswoman the utterly baseless idea, asking, “Do you think these people are being blackmailed by the intel agencies? They might have had relations with certain people and pictures and compromised. Do you think that they're currently being blackmailed?”
And Greene took the bait.
You know, I have no proof of that, but again, I can't understand the vote. So, nothing surprises me in Washington, D.C. anymore, Charlie. Literally, nothing surprises me because—it doesn't make sense to anyone, right? Why would anyone vote no? Why would anyone protect Mayorkas unless they're being bribed, unless there's something going on, unless they're making a deal. You know, because you can't understand it. It makes no sense. And it's completely wrong to vote no on impeachment.
Greene also speculated that Buck, who is retiring, is “trying to get a job working for CNN like Adam Kinzinger.” She insisted that McClintock is clearly not a real “constitutionalist.” And after listing off all of Gallagher’s military intelligence and military bonafides, she concluded, “I can't understand why he made that vote. But he did.”
Greene might not understand it, but that doesn’t mean these Republican congressmen haven’t been clear and open about their reasons for voting against the impeachment stunt.
Gallagher explained his opposition in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, titled “Why I Voted Against the Alejandro Mayorkas Impeachment.”
“Creating a new, lower standard for impeachment, one without any clear limiting principle, wouldn’t secure the border or hold Mr. Biden accountable,” he wrote. “It would only pry open the Pandora’s box of perpetual impeachment.”
McClintock also explained his opposition in a speech on the House floor before Tuesday’s vote.
“Cabinet secretaries can't serve two masters. They can be impeached for committing a crime related to their office but not for carrying out presidential policy,” he said. “I'm afraid that stunts like this don't help."
On Wednesday, McClintock appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” to again defend his vote, and responded to Greene saying McClintock needs to “read the room.
“I suggest she read the Constitution that she took an oath to support and defend,” he said. “That Constitution very clearly lays out the grounds for impeachment,” he said. “This dumbs down those grounds dramatically and would set a precedent that could be turned against the conservatives on the Supreme Court or a future Republican administration the moment the Democrats take control of the Congress.”
Nevertheless, Greene “can’t understand” why her Republican colleagues weren’t on board with her impeachment aspirations. It must be a conspiracy.
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