Jim Jordan Offers Startling Confession on Indicted Biden Informant

After trying and failing to salvage Republicans’ crumbling impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan at last, finally, conceded on Friday that Alexander Smirnov’s story might not be totally accurate.

“I don’t know, maybe the guy did lie,” Jordan said at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday.

The House Judiciary chair spent the better part of the week attempting to twist and tweak Smirnov’s testimony, insisting, as he had for months, that Smirnov’s allegations—that Biden had reaped millions off of a business deal between his son and the Ukrainian company Burisma—still held weight, and could prove the most viable pathway to successfully charge the sitting president. That is, even after Smirnov was indicted for lying to the FBI about those claims—and then reportedly admitted to prosecutors that the story had been drawn up with the help of top Russian intelligence officials and the whole thing was a bed of lies.

Still, Jordan couldn’t totally put the theory to rest at CPAC on Friday, attempting instead to distract from the dumpster fire probe by claiming the Department of Justice was operating under a double standard by arresting Smirnov for lying to investigators.

“But there sure is quite a contrast for—Christopher Steele can give false information about President Trump, and he continues to get paid. This guy, this Mr. Smirnov, can give false information—what they’ve said is false information—and he gets arrested,” Jordan added, referring to former British spy Christopher Steele and his private report of raw intelligence on Trump’s suspected ties to the Russian government, better known as the Steele Dossier.

Trump and his allies have attempted to claim that the dossier served as the basis for Trump’s impeachment inquiry. In reality, a Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee (which Jordan has sat on since 2019) helped prompt an FBI investigation with its memo on former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos.

The Ohio lawmaker’s confession also comes two days after one of his colleagues, Representative Ken Buck, revealed that Jordan and House Oversight Chair James Comer had both been warned ahead of time that the story sold by their primary witness was full of holes.

“Obviously, this witness—and 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 told Kaitlin Collins on CNN’s The Source.