saltwind 78 wrote:
An indicted FBI agent admitted that he received much of his information on President Biden's son from a Russian intelligent agent. This revelation puts much of the evidence against Hunter Biden in the false column.
COMMENTARY: More on FBI informant Smirnov that doesn’t add up
In breaking news Tuesday evening, Alexander Smirnov, the longtime FBI informant whose alleged lies relating to Biden bribery were immortalized in that “1023” is now being said by Special Counsel David Weiss to have ties with Russian intelligence. Those ties, he says, were “involved in passing a story about Hunter Biden that has been critical to congressional Republicans’ efforts to investigate the first family.”
Actually, as we’ll get to below, it’s not so critical. But Democrats want us to believe it is. And mainstream media is running with the “Russia” theme. Note the headline on ABC NEWS…
https://abcnews.go.com/US/hunter-biden-informant-charged-lying-high-level-russian/story?id=107389985The filing by Weiss sounds suspiciously like yet another of the intelligence community’s “Russian disinformation” tales: "Smirnov's efforts to spread misinformation about a candidate of one of the two major parties in the United States continues," the filing states. "What this shows is that the misinformation he is spreading is not confined to 2020. He is actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November.”
Aside from the now-tired references to “Russian disinformation,” there’s something about this story that just isn’t right. For years, this individual was a highly-paid and utilized confidential human source (CHS) for the FBI. As recently as last summer, they were refusing to release the “1023” because, they claimed, it would compromise a valuable source. Did they still not know last summer that he had lied to them in 2017? About something so consequential?House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer of Kentucky said, “When asked by the committee about their confidence in the confidential human source, the FBI told the committee the [CHS] was credible and trusted.” Smirnov, he said, “had worked with the FBI for over a decade and had been paid six figures.” Of course, Smirnov was also well aware that lying to a federal agent is against the law.
So, “Did Smirnov really lie about this or not?” is just the first of the questions we have. Why did the DOJ not charge Christopher Steele with the same crime, when he seemingly committed it with his “dossier” falsely tying Trump to Russia? And why did they wait years to charge Smirnov with lying, or even just to change their tune on the matter of his reliability?
We all understood when the “1023” story broke that the notes of an FBI agent in such a report constitute raw intelligence that still requires investigation and verification. Without that next step, it wasn’t solid evidence of the Biden family’s wrongdoing, yet the media and Democrats (same thing) are now talking as if all the evidence the committee has gathered had just gone away somehow. Au contraire. Plenty of evidence is there, mostly in the form of financial records and sworn testimony.
So...drop the impeachment inquiry? Are they kidding?
It’s easy to speculate, so let’s. Perhaps Smirnov used to be a trusted source but was found out by the Russians and compromised somehow, made to pass along certain information. But why would Russia want him to pass along a story damaging to Biden, when we now have good reason to believe that Putin really did NOT want Trump in the White House due to his unpredictability. (Note: this is just the opposite of what our intelligence community was telling us.) Again, it doesn’t make sense.
FOX NEWS reports that Smirnov has been released from custody in Las Vegas after turning in his passport; he’s wearing an ankle monitor. If he disappears, the one way to find out if Burisma founder Mikola Zlochevsky really said he “paid $5 million to one Biden and $5 million to another Biden” is to hear it from Zlochevsky himself.