I doubt it
After the exposure of the big confidential informant who claimed Biden had taken 5 million dollars in bribes from the Ukrainian government this wee, there is some hope that the Biden impeachment probe may collapse. It’s possible. It’s also quite likely that it won’t for all the reasons Susan Glasser lays out in the New Yorker:
“Smirnov’s allegations were the foundation of the entire impeachment drive,” Raskin told me. Without them, “the impeachment investigation has ended in substance if not actually in form . . . the whole project lies in ruins.”
But I am not fully convinced. In today’s Congress, the fight, somehow, must always go on. For years, Trump and his backers have fed elaborate conspiracy theories about the President and his son to their base. This particular trope about Biden and Ukraine and the bribe that wasn’t is unlikely to die off swiftly. Raskin readily admitted that some Republicans in Congress were likely to keep pressing the matter even after its source had been discredited—“like Confederate soldiers lost in the woods somewhere,” still fighting on long after the war was over. In the way of conspiracy theories, he fears that Smirnov’s takedown may soon end up being portrayed as just another deep-state plot to cover up Biden’s crimes. I suspect it will not be long before this prediction comes to pass.
“We were warned that the credibility of this statement was not known and yet my colleagues went out and talked to the public about how this was credible and how it was damning,” Representative Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican who has started occasionally challenging his party in public, said this week. Of course, they were warned. We all were. The point was not the veracity of the accusation but the fact that Republicans had an accusation to make.
Political memory in America is shockingly attenuated. In 2019, Trump was impeached by a Democratic-controlled House for demanding that Ukraine help him politically by digging up dirt on Biden. In the “perfect” phone call that Trump himself publicly released, he pushed Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to open an inquiry into Biden, referring to allegations that Biden had “stopped the prosecution” of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that had paid Biden’s son to serve on its board, at a time when the then Vice-President was helping oversee U.S. policy toward Ukraine. This is the same conspiracy theory that Republicans have been pursuing in the current impeachment inquiry into Biden, all these years later. It did not matter to them when the charge was dismissed as unproved Russian disinformation back in 2019, and, I fear, it will not matter to them now that this latest iteration of the tale, with its own Moscow angle, has been discredited too. The circus tent is not coming down; it has taken up permanent residence.
I’m afraid she’s right. I don’t know if they’ll have the votes when it comes down to it. There are a bunch of House seats up for reelection in districts that Biden won in 2020 and they may not be as keen. But I’ll be shocked if they fold up the tent completely. After all, Dear Leader wants his pound of flesh and I really doubt they have the brass to defy him.
Also, who knows what new “evidence” their friends in Russia will provide?