Key Witness Grassley Described as “Heroic” Indicted and Arrested for Lying
(WASHINGTON, D.C) – One of the biggest and most outrageous conspiracy theories – hit jobs, really – Republicans have pushed against President Joe Biden collapsed spectacularly Thursday in Washington.
Not so surprisingly to those who have been paying attention, standing in the middle of the smoking, blackened, partisan rubble is a face very familiar to every Iowan: Iowa’s senior US Senator Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
He owns a big share of the shame that the collapse of this conspiracy theory dropped on Capitol Hill Republicans this week.
Here’s what blew up: the Republican conspiracy theory that President Joe Biden, while serving as President Obama’s Vice President, and his son, each accepted a $5 million bribe from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
It blew up on Thursday when the confidential single source of the allegation – Alexander Smirnov – was arrested for making it all up. Everything.
David Weiss, the Special Counsel who worked with a federal grand jury of impartial citizens to bring the indictment, was appointed to the post by Donald Trump when Trump was president.
Let’s be clear: There was never any corroborating evidence to support Smirnov’s confidential claims. Yet, Republicans vouched for him for over a year – Grassley included – claiming he was “highly trusted” even though many didn’t even know who he was or what he had actually told the FBI.
Accuracy was never their game. Actual justice was never their goal. They had one interest: to smear Joe Biden.
House Republicans rode Smirnov’s information hard, making it the center pole of their absurd effort to impeach Biden in the House.
On the Senate side, Grassley was also pushing Smirnov’s lies hard.
Grassley once had a reputation in Washington as a competent and semi-independent investigator of waste, fraud, and corruption in the federal government. That reputation has dimmed considerably in recent years as he became more predictably partisan and increasingly followed the direction of party leaders.
Still, Grassley vouching for the significance and reliability of the confidential FBI source meant something to some in Washington. At one point, he even described the informant as “heroic.”
Grassley obtained and released the information the FBI received from Smirnov. He promptly accused the Justice Department and FBI of trying to hide the information from the American people, of burying it, and of doing so to protect the Bidens.
The Justice Department objected to the. release, saying revealing the information would compromise an ongoing investigation and reveal sources.
Grassley wanted to know what the Justice Department and FBI were doing with the information the confidential informant provided and why it was taking them so long to do whatever it was they were doing with that information.
“Why have they tried to conceal it from Congress and the American people for so long?” Grassley asked in a July 2023 press release after obtaining and releasing the information. “The Justice Department and FBI have failed to come clean, but Chairman Comer and I intend to find out,” Grassley said.
Comer, by the way, is a reference to US Rep. James Comer, the Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, who has rapidly compiled a reputation at his committee for making the Keystone Cops look like a precision drill team by promising huge revelations that consistently turn out to be over-hyped nothing-burgers, with no evidence at all.
To put it mildly, Rep. Comer is the last person any serious investigator would want to partner with on any project, but Grassley apparently missed the obvious on that front.
To answer Grassley’s question – what was the Justice Department and FBI doing with the information it received from the informant? – it turns out that what they were doing was what Grassley – if he had been on the up and up about this – should have been doing: vetting the information provided by the informant, checking its accuracy, and letting the accusations wait until he knew what he had, and therefore, knew what he was talking about.
When the Trump-appointed Special Counsel did that – vetted what Smirnov told the FBI, checked its accuracy, and looked for corroborating evidence, he promptly recognized it as a fraud and took it to a federal grand jury – made up of impartial citizens – which criminally indicted Smirnov for lying, making a false statement and making a false record.
Grassley’s response to this embarrassing public revelation of his sloppiness has been to call for more information from the Justice Department.
No.
What is needed is an apology from Senator Grassley to the President for puffing up a liar who was using his lies to push a political agenda to smear the president rather than providing actual facts.
At this point, I guess we must all ask a question. At age 90, Grassley is obviously in his last term as a US Senator. He has become an old man. He “speaks” to the press mainly through press releases and spokespeople, both of which are – in his judgment and that of his staff, apparently – better and safer choices than letting the senator respond himself to live questions at the moment, in real-time. He mostly reads what he has to say on the Senate floor and in committee meetings and even does that poorly.
If, in his final years in the Senate, Chuck Grassley wants to take a sledgehammer to whatever positive legacy he may have built over his 65 years in public office, why should it matter to the rest of us?
Just let him do what he’s going to do, right?
Actually, no.
These Grassley partisan car wrecks are occurring more frequently and inflicting increasing damage. Whether he’s spreading the “Obamacare means death panels for Grandma” lie; taking orders from party leaders to enable the theft of a Supreme Court appointment from President Obama, which resulted in ripping reproductive health care rights away from women; sounding suspicious like he’s ready to step in and do what needs to be done to keep Trump in the presidency on January 6, 2021 if Vice President Mike Pence can be moved out of the way; or pushing a fraud forward as a reliable witness without doing his basic homework to know whether that witness was credible or not; Iowa is diminished on the national stage, democracy is weakened, and our country is ill-served.
All taxpayers pay Senator Grassley handsomely to work in the Senate for all Iowans and Americans, not just his partisan keepers.
Iowans should tell him loudly and often that they expect him to do the former, not the latter.