Another Reminder Why House Republicans Are America
Post# of 123677
Turns out, the FBI's Hunter Biden informant was lying. The Party of Trump doesn't seem to care.
By Charles P. PiercePUBLISHED: FEB 21, 2024 3:53 PM EST
Smirnov probably shouldn't have been allowed out on supervised release. I mean, what if Uncle Vlad decides that he might become inconvenient and decides to send him a nice hot bowl of plutonium noodle soup?
Tom Williams//Getty Images
Oh, this gets better and better. From NBC News:
A former FBI informant who allegedly fed the bureau false information about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign said that some of the information he spread came from “officials associated with Russian intelligence,” prosecutors said in a filing Tuesday... Prosecutors said in their filing Tuesday that Smirnov “is actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November.”...Smirnov, according to prosecutors with special counsel David Weiss' office, "provided false derogatory information to the FBI" about the Bidens, including the false allegation that officials with Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that employed Hunter Biden, had paid the Bidens $5 million each and that it would take investigators 10 years to find the fake payments.
Ratfckers will fck rats. That's just science. But how about all of his suckers in the Congress of the United States? They've got their story and they're sticking with it.
House Republicans have spent the days since the indictment downplaying the impact it had on their impeachment inquiry, with House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., saying their case "is not reliant" on the false claims. Comer had threatened to hold the FBI director in contempt over the summer, ultimately convincing the bureau to show members of the Oversight Committee an "FD-1023 form" that documented the false statements Smirnov allegedly made to his FBI handler in 2020, though the bureau emphasized at the time that the existence of the form did not mean the claims were vetted. One of the Republicans who viewed the form quickly proclaimed that Joe Biden was "100% guilty" of bribery.
Lord above, they were riding high. Having been read into what the FBI now alleges was Smirnov's fcking of the rats, congressional Republicans were turning cartwheels down the halls of the Capitol back in June of 2023.
“This is the biggest political corruption scandal, not only in my lifetime, but I would say the past 100 years,” Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., chair of the House Republican Conference, told “Fox & Friends” Friday, vowing “to make sure we follow the facts.”
Sure, Elise. Teapot Dome. Watergate. Iran-Contra. All kindergarten stuff. Hell, all of the vaporous charges against the Bidens wouldn't add up to what the previous administration* did before noon on an average Tuesday.
After viewing the 1023 in a secure room at the U.S. Capitol last week, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., said it shows Biden is “100% guilty” of bribery and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., told The Daily Caller that Biden “should be prosecuted.” But there’s no indication that any of the allegations in the document have been independently verified. Asked about the alleged recordings earlier this week, Comer told Newsmax, “We don’t know if they’re legit or not, but we know the foreign national claims he has them.”
Then, Comer traded the family cow for a bag of magic beans and went merrily on his way to another wingnut green room.
And then there's Rep. Jim Jordan, who has been dealing from the Burisma deck since the House Judiciary Committee was hearing the case for Impeachment 1 against the previous president*. It always was Jordan's go-to What About? through that whole exercise. And, when the Republicans took back the House, and Jordan ascended to the Judiciary chairmanship, the Burisma business went from being a defensive weapon to being an offensive one.
The defendant's now-debunked claims in 2020 — including that the Ukrainian energy company Burisma hired Hunter Biden for protection "through his dad" and that Hunter and Mr. Biden were paid millions by the company — were memorialized in an FBI document known as an FD 1023.
That document and the claims within it that federal prosecutors now say are false have been central to congressional Republicans' investigation of Mr. Biden and his son. They have pointed to the document's allegations of bribery as evidence of misdeeds. The charges against Smirnov appear to blunt those claims as he is accused of "transform his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against" Hunter and Mr. Biden.
Smirnov probably shouldn't have been allowed out on supervised release. I mean, what if Uncle Vlad decides that he might become inconvenient and decides to send him a nice hot bowl of plutonium noodle soup? (In case you missed it, there was another "mysterious" murder of a Russian dissident on Tuesday, this time in Spain.) I hope the FBI squeezes him for every ounce of information about how Russian intelligence seduces all the rats who, after all, cannot fck themselves.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politic...ian-intel/