Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., claimed that top Republicans were warned about the debunked Biden claims from a former FBI informant before he was indicted for making up allegations that the Bidens took bribes.
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“We were warned at the time that we received the document outlining this witness’s testimony – we were warned that the credibility of this statement was not known,” Buck said.
“And yet people, my colleagues went out and talk to the public about how this was credible and how it was damning and how it proved President Biden’s – at the time Vice President Biden’s – complicity in receiving bribes,” he said. “It appears to absolutely be false and to really undercut the nature of the charges.”
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“I certainly didn’t have any evidence outside the statement itself that it was credible,” he said. “And as a prosecutor for 25 years, I never went to the public until I could prove the reliability of a statement. And even then, the only one public statement a prosecutor makes is the charging document. Let’s see what the evidence is in this impeachment, if there is more evidence before going forward.”
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“I don’t know why Jim Comer and Jim Jordan thought that perhaps it was going to be Joe Biden’s brother that brought him down,” Fox News host Jessica Tarlov said Wednesday. “But 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 that they have called has decimated their argument.”
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Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said Wednesday that the “impeachment investigation essentially ended yesterday, in substance if not in form, with the explosive revelation” that Russia fed information to Smirnov.
“It appears like the whole thing is not only, obviously, false and fraudulent, but a product of Russian disinformation and propaganda,” Raskin said. “And that’s been the motor force behind this investigation for more than a year.”