On Monday, Feb. 26, the GOP’s star witness in their Joe Biden impeachment fantasy, Alexander Smirnov, was ordered to be held without bail pending trial for lying to the FBI. A woman outside the downtown LA courthouse, dressed in a Tyrannosaurus rex costume, held a sign echoing Judge Otis Wright’s decision: “I’ll take my Smirnov on ice.”
According to a second court document, the FBI now has evidence that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story about” Hunter Biden. What’s more, “the misinformation he is spreading is not confined to 2020. He is actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November. In light of that fact there is a serious risk he will flee in order to avoid accountability for his actions.”
In short, the GOP’s Biden impeachment fantasy has been fueled by Russian disinformation. They’re acting as Vladimir Putin’s puppets.
But — T-Rex costumes aside — the real judicial circus happened two days later, when the Republican supermajority Supreme Court agreed to hear Donald Trump’s preposterous claim of presidential immunity from prosecution, almost ensuring that Trump’s trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election — originally scheduled to start on March 4 — will not be completed before election day.
Delay, delay, delay has been Trump’s strategy all along, given the overwhelming evidence against him, and judges he appointed are helping him along. The 42-count stolen document case has been repeatedly delayed by Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida. And now SCOTUS is doing the same with the election subversion case.
Special Counsel Jack Smith first asked the Court to take the case on Dec. 11, after Trump appealed Judge Tanya Chutkan’s Dec. 1 immunity ruling to the DC Court of Appeals. After Trump’s lawyers filed a brief arguing against him, Smith called their argument “misguided,” saying “The public interest in a prompt resolution of this case favors an immediate, definitive decision by this Court,” in his Dec. 21 response. But SCOTUS speedily rejected Smith’s request the next day.
Only now, more than two months later, after a unanimous, iron-clad appeals court ruling basically settled things, SCOTUS has changed its mind. In a one-page order, it said it will hear the case seven weeks in the future, during the week of April 22. With 88 days needed for pre-trial preparations and proceedings and 90 days for the trial itself, the earliest it can conclude would be mid-October — if SCOTUS ruled immediately, the day after the hearing, with no further delay — which no one expects will happen. Thus, it’s all increasingly likely the trial won’t conclude before election day. It might not even begin before then.
“It is an unmistakable sign from the MAGA majority of the Trump-created Court that they are with him, that they are going to use their power to make sure that he does not face trial in an election year for attempting to end American democracy,” said MSNBC host Chris Hayes. “Everyone has always understood, the substance of his legal claim here was meritless,” Hayes said. “The point was never to win on the merits. The point was to make a time-consuming Hail Mary pass to attempt to escape accountability.”
Ellie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation magazine, echoed that assessment. “They are corrupted political actors who act in bad faith,” he said on MSNBC an hour later. “There are six Republicans — not conservatives, Republicans — on the Supreme Court who view it as their job to help the Republican Party,” he said. “Until we do something about that, until we take away that power, until we draw the line on them there, they will continue to do this. They will help Trump. They will take away abortion rights. They will end affirmative action. They will liberalize gun rights. They will do all of it until we stop them. And somebody needs to start listening in the higher echelons of the Democratic Party, because we will keep losing every day if we allow these six Republicans in robes to rule over all of us.”
Democracy In Peril
To put things in a broader context, “Today is an excellent day to remind all of you Americans that the Brazilian electoral court banned Bolsonaro from running in the next election within six months from his attempted insurrection,” John Hopkins political science professor Filipe Campante wrote on Bluesky.
Here, in contrast, Trump has upped his attacks on the entire judicial system, which has seen a sharp rise in threats to the federal judicial system from his supporters. Serious threats to both judges and prosecutors have more than doubled over the past three years, Reuters reported on Feb. 13. The baseline threat level was primarily due to people upset about decisions in their own cases, while the increase comes from “people enraged because of politics.” At the same time, “election officials saw a barrage of threats from Trump’s supporters, as previously documented,” Reuters reported. What’s more, “Judges and prosecutors involved in the criminal and civil prosecutions of Trump have reported hundreds of threatening messages linked to those cases, according to court records and public statements by the targeted officials.”
The rise in violence is clearly driven in part by Trump, who has encouraged violence at his political rallies since he first began running in 2015. But there’s a much longer backstory. Rightwing hate radio has long engaged in eliminationist rhetoric, justified in terms of imagined conspiratorial threats, and directed at perceived social outgroups from a white Christian supremacist perspective. Trump’s rhetoric and campaigns have emboldened once-marginalized extremists most receptive to such messages, as reflected, for example, in the open presence of self-identified Nazis at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in late February.
Meanwhile, the mass base of Republican voters has become increasingly conspiracy-minded in their political outlook. Polls last year showed 60-70% of Republicans don’t think Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, despite a complete lack of evidence to support their views. Unsupported claims of Biden’s corruption reinforce the belief his presidency isn’t legitimate, and thus impeachment is warranted — bringing Biden down to the same level as Trump.
The Russian Connection
Which is where Smirnov comes in. Fox host Sean Hannity did 85 segments based on Smirnov’s allegations, and then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy invoked them when he initiated the House’s impeachment inquiry last September, saying, “Even a trusted FBI informant has alleged a bribe to the Biden family.” Altogether, Fox has mentioned Biden in the context of bribery almost 2,900 times over the past year, according to the Internet Archive Television News Archive, peaking 98 times in one day on June 9, 2023. Smirnov wasn’t responsible for all that coverage, but — although anonymous at the time — he was far and away the most crucial source of so-called evidence.
And now it turns out he was feeding Russian disinformation to the FBI, GOP lawmakers, Fox hosts and viewers. To its credit, the FBI at least tried to stem the flow. But all the rest have been hyped up Russian dupes — or worse, willing co-conspirators to deceive the American people.
According to the indictment from Hunter Biden Special Prosecutor David Weiss, in June 2020, three years after first mentioning Biden while reporting on contacts with Burisma, Smirnov “reported, for the first time, two meetings in 2015 and/or 2016, during the Obama-Biden Administration, in which he claimed executives associated with Burisma” admitted to hiring Hunter Biden to “‘protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,’ and later that they had specifically paid $5 million each” to Hunter Biden and his father.” But the indictment reveals that multiple lines of evidence show that Smirnov had no contact with Burisma before 2017, before Biden left office as Obama’s VP. So all his bribery claims were lies. They were floated in 2020 with the clear intention to interfere in the 2020 election.
The indictment contains text messages between Smirnov and his FBI handler, starting on May 19, 2020, laying the groundwork for his accusations, with names redacted, but clearly identifiable. The second message, 20 minutes after the first, said “Biden going to jail”. A minute later he wrote, “Dems tried to impeach Trump for same. Even less. All those politicians same shit. Jail for all of them. Plus bribe of Biden should be soon in the news.” His handler was skeptical, to say the least. “I’ll try to prove it for you bro,” Smirnov responded. And that’s just what he tried to do.
Explanation of Russian intelligence agencies’ involvement was included in the second filing, Feb. 20, in support of Smirnov’s detention without bail. His contacts in those agencies “are extensive and extremely recent,” as well as high-level, and working with them, “Smirnov’s efforts to spread misinformation about a candidate of one of the two major parties in the United States continues.”
One of his Russian contacts “Smirnov has described as a high-ranking member of a specific Russian foreign intelligence service.” Another “has been described by Smirnov in a number of ways, including as the son of a former high-ranking Russian government official, someone who purportedly controls two groups of individuals tasked with carrying out assassination efforts in a third-party country, a Russian representative to another country, and as someone with ties to a particular Russian intelligence service.”
This is all rather embarrassing to Republicans and Fox TV hosts, who love to pretend Russian campaign interference is a liberal conspiracy theory. But no one involved here is a liberal. We have a Republican FBI director, a Republican special prosecutor, and a Republican federal judge (appointed by George W. Bush) all agreeing that Smirnov is a Russian agent, not to be believed. It’s now the third straight presidential election that Russia has tried to interfere in to help elect Donald Trump.
What’s more, it’s the same sort of disinformation that Trump tried to extort from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2019, which lead to his first impeachment, when he said, “I would like you to do us a favor, though,” when Zelenskyy was asking about military aid. Trump tried to get Zelenskyy to open an investigation into the same bogus claim of Biden protecting Barisma. (He also asked about a Rudy Giuliani-promoted conspiracy theory that it was actually Ukraine that hacked the Democrats in 2016, and then tried to frame Trump and Russia for it.)
The Hunter Biden Letdown
Three days after Smirnov’s detention hearing, Hunter Biden gave a seven-hour closed-door deposition to Congress, the transcript of which was released later that day. It again underscored the utter lack of evidence of any wrongdoing by Biden’s father, who had nothing to do with his businesses, as he stated repeatedly.
But a line of question by California Democrat Eric Swalwell highlighted the far more serious corruption of the Trump family that’s somehow been totally normalized. He asked Biden if his father had done anything like Trump, including operating a hotel where foreign nationals spent millions while he was in office, employing family members in the Oval Office, having a family member receive 41 trademarks from China, being fined $355 million by a state, and trying to install as a daughter-in-law or other family member as party chair. Biden answered in the negative every time. “I don’t think that anyone in my family would be crazy enough to want to be the chairperson of the DNC,” he added in response to the last question.
Finally, Swalwell asked, “Anyone in your family ever strike a multibillion dollar deal with the Saudi Government while your father was in office?”
“No,” Biden replied.
Republicans remain undeterred, and will continue their bogus impeachment investigation, asking Hunter Biden to publicly testify in the coming weeks. The point isn’t to find evidence of wrongdoing, but simply to keep talking about it, creating the illusion of a false equivalence (even as Trump is literally running for president to keep himself out of prison). And a media that covers conflict far more than substance will surely help them in doing that.
In the end, Chris Hayes said, after the Supreme Court delay announcement, “Today is the starkest proof yet that in the zero-sum battle between MAGA and democracy, there was and is only one thing that could ever truly could stop Donald Trump. And that is we the people. Americans voting against him. A majority. Voting against what he stands for and what he wants to do.”
Or, as North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper said on MSNBC’s The Last Word, “The choice is going to be ‘Do you want a president who wakes up every morning thinking about the American people? Or do you want a president who wakes up every morning thinking about himself?”