An Explosive Indictment of a Star GOP Informant
The arrest of the GOP’s key “informant” on false statements and obstruction calls Biden’s impeachment into doubt and raises some troubling questions.
An FBI informant named Alexander Smirnov—one who has been critical to the GOP’s wild claims about the “Biden Crime Family”—was arrested by federal authorities on Thursday in Las Vegas. Smirnov is charged with fabricating claims that Joe Biden sought $5 million in bribes from Burisma, a Ukrainian company where Hunter Biden once served as a paid board member.
There are three significant aspects to this story, two of them widely reported, and one far less.
First, the indictment. The DoJ alleges Smirnov falsely told the FBI that Hunter Biden, then a paid board member of Burisma, had demanded a bribe to call off an investigation by Ukraine’s top prosecutor. But that was a complete lie, according to the indictment. The claimed meetings actually never took place, and physically could not have, but Smirnov nevertheless represented to the FBI that they had. He now faces up to 25 years in prison on two counts of false statements and obstruction.
Second, the weaponization. Representative James Comer (R-KY) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) repeatedly cited Smirnov’s false claims as evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Joe Biden. Yet they had been told numerous times by the Justice Department, that the information was untrustworthy. With Thursday’s indictment, a key basis of their Biden impeachment drive lies in tatters.
Third, some questions. The Smirnov false report had been shelved long ago. But Rudy Giuliani dredged it up and fed it to the DoJ through a dedicated channel set up by former Attorney General Bill Barr. Yet somehow the indictment carefully excised all references to Giuliani and Barr from its allegations. Literally, they took Giuliani’s name out of the text of a public article cited in the filing. Why?
Let’s review the indictment, the weaponization, and these lingering questions around this very big story—one that is so tangled and so disturbing on multiple levels.
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The indictment
Alexander Smirnov’s FBI handler knew to be wary of Smirnov’s wild claims. During the 2020 campaign, Smirnov boasted in a series of text messages that he had information that would put Joe Biden in jail.
Specifically, Smirnov claimed that the owner of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, had paid Hunter and Joe Biden $5 million in bribes. To bolster this extraordinary claim of serious criminality by the Bidens, Smirnov told his FBI handler that he had spoken personally to Zlochevsky and been told directly about the bribes given to the Bidens.
There were many red flags on this wild account. First, Zlochevsky already had told one of Rudy Giuliani’s associates, Lev Parnas, in a written response to his inquiry that “no one from Burisma ever had any contacts with VP Biden or people working for him during Hunter Biden’s engagement.” While this isn’t by itself conclusive, with so many people hunting around for any evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement, including Rudy’s hired guns at the time, it’s critical to note that none has ever been found.
Second, and more damningly, the dates of travel for the meeting claimed by Smirnov didn’t add up or match with any records. Nor did they fit the historical timeline. He claimed that conversations with Burisma executives happened in 2016 while Joe Biden was VP in the Obama Administration, for example. But the evidence shows Smirnov didn’t meet with anyone in Burisma until 2017. Unless he can time travel, that was a brazen lie.
“The Defendant’s story to the FBI was a fabrication,” the indictment alleges, “an amalgam of otherwise unremarkable business meetings and contacts that had actually occurred but at a later date than he claimed and for the purpose of pitching Burisma on the Defendant’s services and products, not for discussing bribes to [Joe Biden] when he was in office.”
A report about Smirnov’s unsubstantiated and ultimately false statements was generated and put into what’s called a FD-1023 form. And that form got shelved—until news of its existence made it to the head of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer.
The weaponization
Back in May, Comer and Grassley sought to leverage the bogus claims by Smirnov, recorded on the FD-1023 interview form, to press their false narrative that Joe Biden was corrupt and a criminal. They started by demanding the DoJ release the “evidence” they had of “an alleged scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions.” Their letter demanded Merrick Garland produce the “verifiable, valuable” evidence.
Grassley had seen the 1023. He made it his mission to slowly leak details of what was on the form. Then Republicans even threatened to hold FBI director Christopher A. Wray in contempt if he did not disclose the details of the interview form. Meanwhile, Grassley made public parts of the report, drip by drip.
The right wing media machine picked up the “story” (which was no story) and ran really far with it. Sean Hannity on Fox, in particular, delivered 85 segments discussing Smirnov’s claims as if they were true. Hannity even claimed they proved Joe Biden engaged in “public corruption on a scale this country has never seen before.”
Director Wray relented in July and complied with the release request. Grassley then put the form out in the public realm without revealing the informant Smirnov’s name. Rather than provide any caveats about the actual truthfulness of the claims, Grassley’s office called them “very significant allegations from a trusted F.B.I. informant implicating then-Vice President Biden in a criminal bribery scheme.”
It was a new low in dirty politics and disinformation. In fact, the claims had already been found to be unsupported and unreliable and, as we now know, the informant was blatantly lying in order to push his own political biases against Joe Biden.
But the damage had been done. Much of the GOP base had it drilled into their heads that Biden is a criminal and that he took bribes, when there is zero evidence in support of this. Rep. Comer plowed ahead with an impeachment inquiry into Biden, fueled by ginned-up MAGA outrage over this now wholly debunked report.
The drive to impeach Biden has, as a consequence of Thursday’s indictment, hit a major obstacle. Yet again. In fact, and rather incredibly, this is now the second “star witness” of the House GOP who has been indicted. The first, Gal Luft, who repeatedly accused the Bidens of corruption, was charged with arms trafficking, acting as a foreign agent for China, and violating Iran sanctions. He has now jumped bail and is on the run, meaning he’s unlikely to appear as a whistleblower witness for the GOP.
It’s truly hard to keep up with the many bizarre twists and failings of the GOP-led House inquiry into the Bidens.
Some questions
Eagle-eyed legal sleuths such as Marcy Wheeler, who publishes the EmptyWheel newsletter, took note of some interesting absences from the indictment.
Notably, the indictment glosses over the origin story of how the FD-1023 interview report made its way out of the dusty shelves of the Bureau in D.C. and into the hands of the House investigators, who then weaponized it, as discussed above.
It turns out, Rudy Giuliani was heavily involved. This sadly should come as no surprise, given how deeply he was also involved in obtaining and weaponizing Hunter Biden’s private photos and videos. What’s more surprising is that Rudy was originally greenlit to funnel information about Ukraine and the Bidens by none other than former Attorney General Bill Barr.
Barr mainlined Giuliani’s disinformation campaign by setting up a dedicated channel in the Pittsburgh office of the Justice Department in order to receive information coming from Giuliani & Associates.
Yet, as Wheeler notes in her write-up, the indictment curiously omits Giuliani’s name from the document, replacing it with a blank.
Perhaps it’s standard practice to omit names of unrelated or innocent parties, but Giuliani is hardly unrelated. He’s the reason we’re all here talking about this indictment. That is, the reason along with Bill Barr, so it’s doubly curious that the indictment also mischaracterizes the establishment of the Pittsburgh dedicated channel. It claims it was Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen who set it up, when in fact it was Barr.
It’s fair to ask why the indictment appears to be covering for Giuliani and Barr.
According to Hunter Biden’s attorneys, the effort to review and vet materials coming in through this special channel was headed up by U.S. Attorneys Richard Donoghue and Scott Brady. Donoghue’s role was taken over by Rosen in mid-2020. In the period leading up to the 2020 election, then President Trump leaned hard upon Donoghue, Rosen and Barr to do more to investigate the Hunter Biden claims, suggesting strongly that the entire effort was improperly politicized from the get-go. But Barr has a strong interest in distancing himself now from the actions demanded by this former boss.
Which brings us to today. There is the curious timing of the indictment, coming after all this time, and from the office of the same prosecutor, David Weiss, who is prosecuting Hunter Biden. Some things to consider:
In June of last year, Barr had insisted, in response to a claim by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), that the Smirnov investigation had actually never been closed down. He said that it had instead been “sent to Delaware for further investigation” in 2020—meaning to Weiss.
But that’s also a lie. According to yesterday’s indictment, Weiss claims that he only performed that investigation last year and quickly determined that Smirnov’s claims were false. The investigation wasn’t sent to him at all in 2020 as Barr falsely claimed. Why did Barr bother to invent a story about that?
I raise these questions because they suggest there is something deeper at work here, though what it is at this time isn’t yet clear. There are troubling gaps, and the timing of everything has me tilting my head a bit. So I’ve reached out to Marcy Wheeler, and we’re going to have a Q&A about it on The Big Picture, coming out on Tuesday. Be sure you’re subscribed:
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More to come soon!
Jay
This level of plotting seems eerily familiar in tone, although obviously not yet deed, to the kind of thinking that leads Putin to punk Tucker Carlson for not asking tough questions, then just hours later, killing his arch rival Navalny in an arctic prison.
Again, you earn a purple heart for digging into the weeds of these awful people.
Thank you for helping us understand this deeply disturbing and convoluted mess. Although Bill Barr has made attempts to rehabilitate his reputation, I have never trusted him for one minute, and this substantiates that feeling. James Comer and his team of nitwits are so in over their heads that it’s become comical. I wish they would put as much energy into actually doing something for their constituents as they put into their wild goose chase to hurt President Biden and his son. It sickens me that our tax dollars go to paying the salaries of these hopeless losers.