On Tuesday, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) included the paragraph about the informant in an interview request letter to former State Department official Amos Hochstein. An hour later, according to a Democratic House aide, the chairman sent another version of the same letter, but without the paragraph about the informant. HuffPost reviewed both versions of the document.

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The informant’s false information supported the main corruption allegation Republicans have pursued against Biden, namely that as vice president, in 2015 and 2016, he pushed out a Ukrainian prosecutor in order to protect Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that employed his son on its board.

Current and former State Department officials, including Hochstein, have repeatedly debunked the Biden Burisma story, explaining during hours of testimony in 2019 and 2020 that ousting the prosecutor reflected a broad consensus within the State Department, as well as among European allies, that the prosecutor was corrupt.

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Smirnov told his FBI handler that Zlochevsky said he’d used secret channels to send the money and that it would take investigators years to put the pieces together. Using subpoenas, Republicans have sifted through thousands of pages of the president’s son’s and brothers’ bank records in search of the nonexistent bribes.

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