(New York Post) Joe Biden and his Praetorian Guard in the media are cock-a-hoop about the indictment last week of FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, a US-Israeli dual national accused of having lied to the FBI when he claimed Hunter and Joe Biden each were paid a $5 million bribe by the owner of corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
For more than three years, Joe Biden has refused to address the avalanche of evidence about his family’s corrupt influence peddling while he was VP.
He has refused to address evidence that he was involved in son Hunter and brother Jim’s lucrative shakedown of shady characters in the world’s most corrupt countries — where he was in charge of US policy.
He has lied point-blank when confronted, claiming to have no knowledge of Hunter and Jim’s business dealings, despite dozens of proven instances when he met Hunter’s foreign business partners, and spoke to them at least two dozen times on speakerphone.
But now, like a drowning man, the president suddenly has seized on the Smirnov indictment as vindication, making a rare live statement at the White House Friday to assert that the impeachment inquiry against him is destroyed, and demanding that House Republicans drop their investigation, saying it was “an outrageous effort from the beginning.”
Democrat hitmen Jamie Raskin and Dan Goldman have been hitting the airwaves to spin the Smirnov indictment into an absurd new Russia hoax, and Hunter’s pricey lawyer Abbe Lowell in a new court filing Tuesday declared that Smirnov has fatally tainted the case against Hunter and is proof that the president’s son is being unjustly prosecuted because of his last name.
‘Straw man’
They have created a straw man out of Smirnov, pretending he was the “lead informant” of the impeachment inquiry.
But he was no such thing.
Smirnov wasn’t any kind of informant.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer could do nothing with Smirnov’s allegation, other than publicize it, because the FBI kept the informant secret, as well as the existence or otherwise of any “investigation.”
The Smirnov indictment doesn’t mean Joe and Hunter are in the clear.
Far from it.
The evidence against them is overwhelming.
Comer’s inquiry was well advanced before Smirnov’s allegation came onto the radar last July.
He had gathered evidence through bank records of millions of dollars from China, Russia, Ukraine, Romania and Kazakhstan being laundered through multiple shell companies for the Biden family, and jaw-dropping testimony from Hunter’s former business partners of Joe’s meetings with Hunter’s foreign benefactors right before big payments dropped.
The modus operandi of Biden corruption was well established.
And that was even before the IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler testified to Congress about the corrupt interference by the DOJ on the Hunter Biden investigation that dragged on for five years in Delaware before US Attorney David Weiss authorized a sweetheart plea deal in which Hunter would cop to no felony and get blanket immunity against future prosecutions.
Shapley and Ziegler showed that Weiss could have charged Hunter on the felony tax and gun charges in 2019.
Instead, Weiss tried to let Hunter off scot-free and allowed the statute of limitations to run out on the most serious charges — having to do with Ukraine and Burisma that would have led investigators to Joe Biden’s door.
Smirnov is an FBI problem.
He was the bureau’s “trusted,” well-paid, long-term informant, paid by one estimate hundreds of thousands of dollars over 14 years.
The indictment states he has testified in multiple cases that likely led to convictions.
Smirnov was authorized by the FBI to commit crimes, the indictment says, which puts him in an elite category of informant only used in national security or serious organized-crime cases.
Smirnov’s bribery allegation against the Bidens first emerged in what is called an FD-1023, an FBI record of information provided by a confidential human source.
Vetting allegations
Then-Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady was tasked by then-Attorney General Bill Barr on Jan. 3, 2020, to vet allegations about Biden corruption that had been pouring into the DOJ including from then-President Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani.
