GOP House Rep. Ken Buck slammed fellow House Republicans James Comer and Jim Jordan this week over an informant’s false bribery allegations against President Joe Biden, RadarOnline.com can report.
In a surprising development to come after a key witness in the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into President Biden was arrested last week, Congressman Buck claimed that House Republicans knew the witness’s allegations were most likely false.
The witness, Alexander Smirnov, was arrested by federal authorities last week and charged with lying to the FBI in connection to his allegations against President Biden and Hunter Biden.
Smirnov made headlines in 2023 when it was reported that he told both the FBI and the House Oversight Committee that President Biden and President Biden’s son Hunter each received a $5 million bribe from an executive working for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
The now-arrested witness claimed that the $5 million bribes were paid out during the older Biden’s tenure as vice president and that the bribes were allegedly paid to persuade then-Vice President Biden to end an ongoing investigation into Burisma in 2016.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer called Smirnov’s bribery claim a “crucial piece of our investigation” into President Biden, while House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan called Smirnov’s false claims “the most corroborating” piece of evidence in the ongoing probe.
But according to Congressman Buck, House Republicans knew that Smirnov’s bribery allegations were most likely false as far back as July 2023.
He also condemned his party’s impeachment efforts against Biden in September and noted that “Republicans in the House who are itching for an impeachment are relying on an imagined history.”
Flash forward to Wednesday, and Buck stood by his “imagined history” point regarding the ongoing Biden impeachment efforts.
“It’s even more of an imagined history now,” House Rep. Buck told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Wednesday night. “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 and how it proved at the time Vice President Biden’s complicity in receiving bribes,” he continued. “It appears to absolutely be false and to really undercut the nature of the charges.”
“We’ve always been looking for a link between what Hunter Biden received in terms of money and Joe Biden’s activities or Joe Biden receiving money,” Buck acknowledged. “This clearly is not a credible link at this point.”
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The GOP lawmaker from Colorado then indicated that Comer and Jordan knew Smirnov’s bribery claims were not corroborated information but went public with the information anyway to fuel their investigations into Joe and Hunter Biden.
“That’s what it appears,” he told Collins. “I certainly didn’t have any evidence outside the statement itself that it was credible.”
“As a prosecutor for 25 years, I never went to the public until I could prove the reliability of a statement,” Buck continued. “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,” he concluded, “if there is more evidence before going forward.”
As RadarOnline.com previously reported, House Republicans officially approved an impeachment inquiry into President Biden in December 2023.
The party believes President Biden committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” by improperly benefitting from his son Hunter's foreign business dealings.
