Last summer, we wrote about an explosive allegation by a trusted FBI confidential informant who claimed Burisma executives had paid a $10 million bribe to Joe and Hunter Biden. The accusation, we noted, was relayed by a man the Bureau had paid and relied upon for years. At the time, my response entailed "highlight[ing] the serious nature of the informant's allegations, while also remaining healthily skeptical and asking more questions. One central question was whether any of the CHS' statements in the document were ever corroborated. If not, was that because they weren't investigated, or because they were probed and found to be unreliable?" Days ago, the informant in question was arrested and charged with lying about this matter:
An FBI informant has been charged with fabricating a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden, his son Hunter and a Ukrainian energy company, a claim that is central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress. Alexander Smirnov falsely reported to the FBI in June 2020 that executives associated with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden $5 million each in 2015 or 2016, prosecutors said in an indictment. Smirnov told his handler that an executive claimed to have hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” according to court documents. Prosecutors say Smirnov in fact had only routine business dealings with the company in 2017 and made the bribery allegations after he “expressed bias” against Joe Biden while he was a presidential candidate..Smirnov, 43, appeared in court in Las Vegas briefly Thursday after being charged with making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record
If this man invented the whole thing, he deserves his punishment -- though that will be awkward for the FBI, given their reliance upon him as a trusted and compensated source for years. And while his specific bribery allegation was definitely a bombshell at the time (largely ignored by many of the media sources now rushing to report about the demise of a story they'd refused to cover), I don't agree that it's a lynchpin of the Biden family enrichment scandal being investigated by House Republicans. More on that in a moment. If the evidence leads where the government says it will, I'll happily concede that Smirnov's story is totally fabricated and the bribery tale is off the table. For now, however, some people remain skeptical. Miranda Devine, who was well ahead of the curve on the Biden family scandal, and Hunter Biden's laptop in particular, discussed these developments on my radio show this week:
Here's part of her latest New York Post column:
[Biden] 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 on 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.” [Democrats] have created a straw man out of Smirnov, pretending he was the “lead informant” of the impeachment inquiry. But he was no such thing. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) 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] 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.
Again, we will return to the serious and substantiated accusations against the Bidens shortly, but recall that the Weiss investigation reportedly refused to even look into the Smirnov allegations, some details of which were said to have been confirmed -- not debunked -- by FBI agents in the Pittsburgh office, who'd initially assessed them. Attorneys for the highly credible career IRS whistleblowers are calling into question Special Counsel Weiss' objectivity and motives in this episode:
But even if you'd like fully discard all of Smirnov's claims, the whistleblowers' evidence remains. So do the bank records showing huge payments flowing into multiple Biden family members' accounts from overseas sources, via numerous shell corporations. And so does the consistent and unchanged testimony of various Biden business associates -- including Devon Archer, and especially Tony Bobulinski. The latter affirmed his firsthand knowledge of the Bidens' scheme under oath in Congressional testimony. He also noted that after bringing his allegations and evidence to federal investigators, he was never contacted again:
How is this possible? It's possible if the Biden DOJ was determined to not really investigate any of this. The Wall Street Journal editorial board makes several crucial points on all of this:
Remember Tony Bobulinski? He’s the former Hunter Biden business partner who exposed details about the Biden family business in 2020 but was ignored by the press. Last week he testified before the House Oversight and Judiciary committees, and he confirmed how the Bidens sold political influence and the family “brand.”...He has provided dozens of emails, text messages and business and financial documents to back up his testimony...He says Joe Biden was also central to the [China/CEFC] deal. Mr. Bobulinski says he met the then former Vice President in early May 2017 in Los Angeles in the context of the CEFC deal. Hunter arranged a meeting with his father, though Mr. Bobulinski says he was “coached” by his partners that “this is going to be a high-level meeting. We’re not going to go into a lot of detail” about CEFC. This was prelude to an email chain in mid-May that discussed shares in the new business venture, including “10 held by H for the big guy.” Mr. Bobulinski says “the big guy—100 percent—is Joe Biden.” He told the committees that “not once did anybody else that was on that email chain” question this phrase because everyone knew “who they were talking about.”
Mr. Bobulinksi provided the committee with texts and emails in which Hunter and Mr. Gilliar refer to Joe’s involvement in the deal. Mr. Gilliar warned Mr. Bobulinski in late May in a text: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u are face to face, I know u know that but they are paranoid.”... He points to “stacks of evidence that Joe Biden showed up at meetings, shook hands, participated in phone calls,” including claims he was on at least 20 Hunter business calls. Joe Biden “was calling to demonstrate the Biden brand to whoever was in that meeting, whether it was the Ukrainians, the Romanians, the Russians, Colombians, Chinese, whoever it was. That’s all he had to do.” Mr. Bobulinski says. “Just him being on the phone is evidence of involvement and enabling the transaction.” Mr. Bobulinski first tried to tell his story in the days before the 2020 election, but the press closed ranks around the Bidens. He told the House last week that he gave a voluntary interview to the FBI in October 2020, but the FBI never followed up. He was also never contacted by U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who is investigating Hunter. He says he was warned by Mr. Walker in October 2020 to stop talking because his claims were “going to bury us.”