WASHINGTON ― A central piece of evidence in the impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden may have just evaporated.

The Justice Department on Thursday announced that an FBI informant was lying when he said a Ukrainian oligarch told him he’d bribed Biden.

Special counsel David Weiss, the U.S. attorney prosecuting the president’s son Hunter Biden on gun purchase and tax delinquency crimes, announced that FBI informant Alexander Smirnov has been charged with making a false statement and creating a false record related to the bribery allegation.

Republicans brought Smirnov’s claims to light last summer as part of their investigation into alleged corruption in the Biden family. House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) threatened the FBI director with contempt of Congress if he refused to hand over a document recording Smirnov’s bribe claim.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wound up obtaining and publishing the file. In the document, an FBI agent said his confidential source had reported that in June 2020, Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, which previously employed the president’s son, had paid Hunter and Joe Biden $5 million in bribes.

The supposed bribe fit with allegations that then-President Donald Trump made in 2019 that, as vice president in the Obama administration, Joe Biden had pushed for the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor in order to protect his son.

For months, Republicans have claimed the bribery allegation had come from a credible source. According to the Justice Department, the allegation had been made up.

“As alleged in the indictment, the events that Smirnov first reported to the FBI Agent in June 2020 were fabrications,” the Justice Department said in a press release.

Smirnov had, in fact, been in contact with Burisma executives, the department said, but “transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts” into bribery allegations against Biden, whose candidacy for president he opposed.

When FBI agents followed up with Smirnov last September, he allegedly “repeated some of his false claims, changed his story as to other of his claims, and promoted a new false narrative after he said he met with Russian officials.”

Republicans have continuously cited the supposed bribe as they interview witnesses in their impeachment inquiry. On Monday, they spoke to an executive from a Democratic consulting firm that represented Burisma.

Democrats, for their part, have been dubious about the bribe claim from the start. After a closed briefing, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said Justice Department officials told lawmakers they didn’t think the allegation merited a full investigation. But Comer said the claim hadn’t been disproved and that President Biden was actually under investigation for bribery.

“Today, FBI officials confirmed that the unclassified FBI-generated record has not been disproven and is currently being used in an ongoing investigation,” Comer said last June.

The investigation indeed continued.

Smirnov could face up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.