‘This Was The Guy’ Comer ‘Was Relying On’: Tapper Reacts to Indictment of Man Who Allegedly Lied About Bidens
CNN anchor Jake Tapper reacted with awe to the news that former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov had been charged with lying to the Bureau about President Joe Biden’s alleged involvement in shady business dealings with Burisma Holdings.
Smirnov, whose allegations were cited by Republicans in Congress as part of their impeachment inquiry into Biden, was arrested on Thursday and charged with “lying to the FBI and creating false records.”
Reacting to the news on his show The Lead, Tapper declared:
This was the individual that had claimed that he had been told by somebody who ran Burisma that Joe Biden himself was going to get $5 million for all these shady dealings. This is the guy that Senator Chuck Grassley was insisting that this FBI report be revealed to the public. This was the guy who basically provided hours’ worth of content on Fox, especially in primetime. This was the guy who James Comer, the guy who runs the House Oversight Committee, was relying on as a major source of information, and the FBI is saying, “The guy’s a liar, in fact so much so we’re charging him with a crime.”
CNN senior justice correspondent Evan Perez weighed in, “Correct, Jake. I mean look, again, what the Republicans are saying is that one of the reasons why they were relying on him is that they believed he was credible, that the FBI was using him as an informant, and that that gave him credibility.”
He continued, “What we’re seeing though in these documents in this indictment is that all of that was fictitious. He came up with this story after Joe Biden became the presumptive candidate for the Democrats in 2020.”
Tapper then compared the situation to the many allegations made against Brett Kavanaugh during his nomination to the Supreme Court in 2018.
“It reminds me to a degree of during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings when all these people were making wild allegations, false allegations about the man that is now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh,” said Tapper. “And then there was this move to just like release all this information. Well, allegations are not facts, and just because somebody has reported something to the FBI doesn’t mean it’s true.”
He concluded, “We saw all this wild stuff released about Brett Kavanaugh, who was unfairly smeared by a lot of this. Here we have apparently the same situation except it’s against Joe Biden.”
Watch above via CNN.
