The case House Republicans had against Hunter Biden never seemed like much. But it turned out to be even less than that after the events of last week.

After much advance hype from their friends in conservative talk shows and other media, Republicans were ready to play their gotcha cards. A supposedly reliable FBI informant was ready to testify that President Joe Biden and his son Hunter had secretly accepted millions of dollars from Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma.

MAGA allies of Donald Trump sounded as tickled as Elmer Fudd closing in on Bugs Bunny, certain they had that “wascally wabbit” right where they wanted him this time.

But, alas, not quite. Not even close.

Republicans — including House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer of Kentucky, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio, impeachment resolution author Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and platoons of right-wing media pundits in the hinterlands and on the airwaves — eagerly dived into the congressional hearings. But their impeachment bid suffered an embarrassing setback when the key witness, Alexander Smirnov, was charged with lying to the FBI in 2020 about purported bribes paid to President Biden and his son. That information became a leading justification for opening an impeachment inquiry into the Bidens.

It was a little less than a year ago that these Republicans were whetting the public’s appetite about the then-unnamed FBI informant and the smoking gun against the Bidens that he offered. Fast-forward to February and Smirnov was in handcuffs, charged with feeding the Justice Department false information, potentially on behalf of the Russian government. He pleaded not guilty to the charges.

So, what are the MAGA House members to do now? We know what they’re not about to do. They’re not about to let a lack of facts get in the way of an opportunity to embarrass the Bidens and, by association, please the MAGA multitudes including the master MAGA man, former president Trump.

Seeing your star witness exposed as an alleged Russia disinformation agent is hardly the most auspicious way to launch your serious inquiry. But they launched it anyway.

After months of delays, Hunter Biden testified behind closed doors Thursday on Capitol Hill. After more than six hours of testimony, his lawyer, Abbe Lowell, told reporters the supposed impeachment inquiry’s questions from Republicans focused almost entirely on the son’s past admitted personal failings, not the father’s involvement.

That’s a bad sign of what we might expect from this inquiry. Yet it also is sadly emblematic of the decline in seriousness we’ve come in recent years to associate with impeachment, a process by which a president can be removed from office if convicted by the U.S. Senate of treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.

Since Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the 1990s and more recently Trump’s two impeachments, we have seen the MAGA forces redefine a process meant to determine one’s fitness for office into a game of scorekeeping to see who can get the most votes on the floor.

Against that backdrop, I thought the competency and credibility of the committee looked bad enough to make Hunter Biden look good, at least by comparison with the scandalized and debauched version we’ve been hearing about in breathless news reports and gossip. If the committee wanted to get into his background and character, he sounded ready for them. After years of battling addictions and generating controversies, he turned his recovery narrative into a lovely endorsement of his dad.

“During my battle with addiction, my father was there for me,” he said. “He helped save my life.”

Then he included a sharp verbal elbow to the ribs of the Republican-led committee: “What he got in return for being a loving and supportive parent is a barrage of hate-filled conspiracy theories that hatched this sham impeachment inquiry and continue to fuel unrelenting personal attacks against him and me.”

“Sham” inquiry? Too harsh? Considering the dubiously politicized process that he and his family have been put through, that sounded about right to me.

E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.

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