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(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Pour one out for Rep. Jamie Comer, whose dreams of GITTIN’ THEM BIDEN BOYS slipped a little further away yesterday when one of his primary sources got indicted for lying to the FBI about millions of dollars in bribes to Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
For years, Republicans have claimed that then-Vice President Biden’s public pressure on Ukraine to fire its wildly corrupt public prosecutor Viktor Shokin was a plot to help his son’s business interests. This was debunked back in 2019 when Rudy Giuliani first vomited it out. Nonetheless, Sen. Chuck Grassley and Comer, who is somehow the chair of the House Oversight Committee, have made it the focus of their unending impeachment efforts, hyping Alexander Smirnov as the linchpin of their claims.
“For the better part of a year, I’ve been pushing the Justice Department and FBI to provide details on its handling of very significant allegations from a trusted FBI informant implicating then-Vice President Biden in a criminal bribery scheme,” Grassley fumed in July when he published internal FBI documents documenting Smirnov’s allegations. “What did the Justice Department and FBI do with the detailed information in the document? And why have they tried to conceal it from Congress and the American people for so long?”
Turns out, the FBI was investigating the claim. And oopsie doodle, it turned out to be bullshit.
Smirnov was a longtime FBI source who told his handler in March of 2017 about a recent meeting with officials from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Smirnov made an offhand comment in about Hunter Biden being on Burisma’s board, memorialized at the time as “a brief, non-relevant discussion about former [Public Official 1]’s son, [Businessperson 1], who is currently on the Board of Directors for Burisma Holdings.” Nothing more was said about the matter until June of 2020, when Smirnov’s handler reached back out to him “at the request of the FBI’s Pittsburgh Field Office (hereafter “FBI Pittsburgh”).
Over at Empty Wheel, Marcie Wheeler disambiguates the language of the indictment, which blandly describes Scott Brady, the US Attorney in Pittsburgh, as having been tasked with “receipt, processing, and preliminary analysis of new information provided by the public that may be relevant to matters relating to Ukraine.” In reality, Bill Barr tapped Brady to investigate Biden in the lead up to the 2020 election and used him as a clearinghouse for the false claims about Hunter Biden masterminding a billion-dollar fraud scheme that Rudy Giuliani was trying to make happen as he shambled all over Ukraine.
Smirnov, who had repeatedly told his handler that he hated Biden, suddenly remembered that in 2015 and/or 2016, he’d had “two purported meetings and two purported phone calls with various Burisma executives where Businessperson 1 and Public Official 1 were discussed.”
This time, rather than a passing reference to Businessperson 1 being on Burisma’s Board, the Defendant claimed that Burisma executives at two meetings in 2015 and/or 2016, during the Obama-Biden Administration, told him that they were paying Businessperson 1 to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” and later that they had specifically paid $5 million each to Public Official 1, when he was in office, and Businessperson 1 so that “[Businessperson 1] will take care of all those issues through his dad,” referring to a criminal investigation being conducted by the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General into Burisma and to “deal with” the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General. In describing the phone calls, the Defendant claimed that Burisma Official 1 said he was “pushed to pay” Public Official 1 and Businessperson 1, had text messages and recordings that show he was coerced to make such payments, and it would take investigators ten years to find the records of illicit payments to Public Official 1. The Defendant made these statements to the Handler in June 2020, when Public Official 1 was a candidate for President of the United States and the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties.
The problem with this was that is was all obvious horseshit. Smirnov claimed to have been in Vienna in 2015 to meet with Burisma officials, but his passport proved otherwise. He claimed that a particular associate was with him in a 2016 meeting with Burisma, but that associate never left the US between 2011 and 2017. And Smirnov claimed to have met with a specific Burisma official in 2016 when in fact their introduction was memorialized in a 2017 email.
So much for Republicans’ great white hope of somehow vindicating Trump’s request that the Ukrainian president “do us a favor, though” and investigate Joe Biden for taking a bribe to interfere in Ukraine’s domestic politics.
Is Chuck Grassley the slightest bit ashamed at having fomented lies about a guy he worked with in the Senate for decades?
LOL, nope! Here’s his statement from yesterday:
Today’s indictment confirms several points Senator Grassley has made repeatedly. The informant behind the FD-1023 was, indeed, a long-serving, trusted FBI source used by the agency for criminal investigations since the Obama administration. In fact, he was so trusted that the FBI provided him authorization to engage in illegal activity for investigative purposes.’
But, when presented with information from a source the agency so trusted, the FBI – as exposed by Senator Grassley – sat on the document for years, without performing due diligence. It’s clear that only after Senator Grassley made the FD-1023 public did the FBI investigate the allegations in the document.
Since October 2022, Senator Grassley has had a single aim: to ensure the DOJ and FBI investigated the FD-1023. Today’s indictment makes clear that, without Senator Grassley’s oversight and exposure of the FD-1023, the agency would have continued neglecting its duties and failing to provide the transparency the American people deserve. Congress shouldn’t have to threaten contempt to obtain an unclassified document.
After withholding information from Congress and the American people, and hiding behind the guise of protecting ‘sources and methods,’ the Department of Justice has now exposed their own source. Accordingly, this indictment isn’t enough – the public has a right to see all the underlying evidence supporting the Biden Justice Department’s case. The Biden administration must show its work.
Ah, well, at least they still have that weirdo Tony Bobulinski to fall back on.
United States v. Smirnov [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.
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