How Comer and company learned to love Russian disinformation
The Biden bribery smear was obvious Kremlin bullcrap. Republicans don't care.
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On Valentine’s Day, Republicans got a surprise love note from Special Counsel David Weiss.
Despite being tasked with taking down Hunter Biden, and by proxy his father, the prosecutor had just indicted the GOP’s star impeachment witness Alexander Smirnov. Instead of a box of chocolates and a 2024 attack ad tied up in a nice bow, Republicans got humiliatingly pantsed. Again.
Smirnov claimed to have been told by officials at the Ukrainian oil company Burisma that they bribed both Joe and Hunter Biden in 2016, supposedly confirming allegations Trump and his minions have been making since 2019, despite round after round of debunking.
But a cursory glance at the informant’s travel records proved that Smirnov hadn’t even met the officials in question until spring 2017, disproving his claim that he’d talked to them “around the time” Biden spoke about Ukrainian domestic policy in January 2017. Worse still, Smirnov was laundering obvious Russian propaganda through Trump’s allies at the FBI to congressional Republicans themselves.
And the cherry on top?
Smirnov was still passing Russian disinfo to the FBI on the eve of his arrest.
It all goes back to Rudy and Russia
After five years of this nonsense, roughly everyone in America has heard some version of the Burisma/Biden backstory. But briefly: in January 2018 Biden delivered a blustering speech in which he recounted threatening to withhold foreign aid from Ukraine in the late days of the Obama presidency if that country didn’t fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. Shokin, the so-called “Diamond Prosecutor,” was shockingly corrupt, and at the time it was the consensus of the entire US government, along with our Western European allies and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that Shokin had to go.
But that didn’t bother Peter Schweizer, a Breitbart editor who ginned up the fake “Uranium One” smear of Hillary Clinton. In 2017, he repurposed the lie for Joe Biden. This time, the story was that Biden had gotten Shokin fired to protect Burisma, a company which employed Hunter Biden as a board member.
In reality, Shokin had let the investigation of Burisma go dormant by 2016. But that didn’t stop Rudy Giuliani, then Donald Trump’s lawyer, from spending 2019 traipsing around Ukraine trying to prove that this fabrication was true — or at least to find someone willing to say it was true so he could dirty up Biden and ensure his loss in 2020.
Unsurprisingly, Shokin was willing to play ball with Rudy as he tried to make fetch happen. But so were a whole host of other Ukrainians, many of whom had ties to the Kremlin. One of them was Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker, who’s pictured below showing Giuliani “evidence” in December 2019.
And here’s how Donald Trump’s own Treasury Department referred to Rudy’s buddy when it announced in September 2020 that it was sanctioning him for election interference:
Derkach, a Member of the Ukrainian Parliament, has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services. Derkach has directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed, or otherwise been complicit in foreign interference in an attempt to undermine the upcoming 2020 US presidential election. […]
From at least late 2019 through mid-2020, Derkach waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning US officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election, spurring corruption investigations in both Ukraine and the United States designed to culminate prior to election day.
The announcement went on to note that “between May and July 2020, Derkach released edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to discredit US officials.” And that is where Smirnov comes in.
The informant vows to make some evidence
Alexander Smirnov, a dual US-Israeli citizen with business interests and connections in Eastern Europe, served as a confidential human source (CHS) for the FBI since at least 2010.
In March 2017, he told his handler that he’d pitched officials from Burisma on a business opportunity. The conversation, which was memorialized in a standardized intake document known as a Form 1023, contained this brief note referring to Hunter Biden’s role at the company:
During this call, there was a brief, non-relevant discussion about [Public Official 1]'s son, [Businessperson 1], who is currently on the Board of Directors for Burisma Holdings [No Further Information].
In May 2020, as Giuliani laundered Russian propaganda to help Trump get reelected, Derkach released a heavily edited recording of Biden discussing Shokin with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Smirnov jubilantly texted his handler that the “bribe of Biden should soon be in the news” and that the then-candidate was “going to jail.”
“For sure yes … I’ll try to prove it to you bro,” Smirnov gabbled, linking his plans directly with the lies Giuliani and his Kremlin-backed buddies were spewing.
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Smirnov vowed to “get those other recordings of Biden’s son telling to Boriama [sic] that his dad will take care of Shokin,” promising to “meet with the guys as soon as I will be able to fly.”
Barr’s man in Pennsylvania
Meanwhile, multiple organs of the Trump administration were trying to wield the power of the federal government to take down the president’s electoral opponent.
Attorney General Bill Barr tasked David Weiss, then the US Attorney in Delaware, with investigating Hunter Biden specifically. And Barr tasked Scott Brady, the US Attorney in Pittsburgh, as Rudy Giuliani’s personal disinformation concierge.
Brady tried very hard to obscure this reality when he was interviewed by the House Judiciary Committee in October 2023, insisting that his mission was to address concerns from “any member of the public.” Unfortunately Sen. Lindsey Graham was blabbing in real time to CBS that “the Department of Justice is receiving information coming out of Ukraine from Rudy" via “a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it's verified.”
RELATED FROM PN: Hunter Biden hands the hapless James Comer another L
And it’s clear that Brady, who was instructed by Main Justice to interview Giuliani personally, understood his remit perfectly well.
In response to Russian disinformation laundered through Rudy, Brady went CTRL+F-ing through the FBI’s files for mentions of “Hunter Biden” and “Burisma.” And so, in June 2020, “at the request of the FBI’s Pittsburgh Field Office” — AKA, Scott Brady — Smirnov’s handler reached back out to see if his CHS had any more to say about the presidential candidate and his son.
And boy did he ever!
Smirnov’s lies
In the in the thick of the presidential campaign in the summer of 2020, Smirnov suddenly remembered that he’d met with officials from Burisma in both 2015 and 2016, including the company’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. And at those previously forgotten meetings, the Burisma execs had bragged about paying millions of dollars in bribes to both Joe and Hunter Biden to get rid of Shokin.
Here’s a bit of the Form 1023 from June 2020:
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.
It’s not clear exactly what happened inside the FBI as a result of Smirnov’s claims, but the indictment strongly implies that Smirnov’s handler knew immediately that his source was blowing Russian-scented smoke.
Smirnov’s own travel records proved that he hadn’t been in Kyiv and Vienna in 2015 and 2016 when he said he met the Burisma executives, and the associate Smirnov says he took on the trip didn’t leave North America at all during the years in question. Moreover, emails showed that Smirnov was introduced to the Burisma officials in 2017, when Biden was already out of office.
So everyone inside the agency, including Scott Brady, simply ignored Smirnov’s obvious fabrications until 2023, when congressional Republicans went looking for a reason to impeach President Biden.
Republican lies
In July 2023, Sen. Chuck Grassley and House Oversight Chair James Comer published the Form 1023 in which Smirnov had attempted to confirm the Russian propaganda laundered by Giuliani and Brady.
“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 vamped.
“The FBI’s Biden Bribery Record tracks closely with the evidence uncovered by the Oversight Committee’s Biden family influence peddling investigation,” Comer yapped in agreement. “In the FBI’s record, the Burisma executive claims that he didn’t pay the ‘big guy’ directly but that he used several bank accounts to conceal the money. That sounds an awful lot like how the Bidens conduct business: using multiple bank accounts to hide the source and total amount of the money.”
Smirnov’s transparent attempt to manufacture proof of Russian lies meant to interfere with the 2020 election quickly became the focus of an impeachment timed to interfere in the 2024 election.
“Smoking gun: The D-1023 form showing proof that Joe and Hunter Biden were involved in the $5,000,000 bribery scheme with a Burisma executive has been released by Senator Chuck Grassley,” tweeted House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith, who has led the impeachment effort along with Comer.
“The impeachable offenses, I think the key thing is in Burisma,” Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan said in December.
In January, Comer, Jordan, and Smith crowed to Sean Hannity that the Smirnov 1023 was “the most corroborating evidence we have.”
House Republicans even invited Brady in to testify that he’d tried to get Weiss to investigate the Smirnov allegations, but everyone in the FBI was just too nice to Hunter Biden, and so the whole thing got buried.
Under questioning by Democrats, Brady admitted that he’d ignored all the news reports saying that Rudy was laundering Russian propaganda, as well as a document produced by House impeachment investigators showing that Zlochevsky had told Rudy that he’d never paid a bribe to Biden. Brady also made the patently false claim that he’d vetted Smirnov’s travel documents and found that they corroborated his allegations.
All of which was inconvenient — but not as inconvenient as having their star witness indicted for a hamhanded effort to corroborate Russian disinformation while framing Joe and Hunter Biden for taking bribes. Particularly since the indictment made it clear that Smirnov was not only concocting a story to confirm Russian disinformation, but that he was doing so while speaking to Russian officials:
When he was interviewed by FBI agents in September 2023, the Defendant repeated some of his false claims, changed his story as to other of his claims, and promoted a new false narrative after he said he met with Russian officials.
And in a recent memo to the court urging it to keep Smirnov in custody pending trial, prosecutors reported that when he was arrested on Valentine’s Day, “Smirnov admitted that officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story about [Hunter Biden].”
In fact, Smirnov claims to have extensive contacts with high ranking Russian officials, and in September he was still actively trying to sell his handler a Kremlin-concocted story about Hunter Biden being secretly recorded on a visit to a hotel in Kyiv — a city the president’s son has never visited.
Smirnov’s contacts with Russian officials who are affiliated with Russian intelligence services are not benign. At his meeting with FBI investigators in September 2023, Smirnov pushed a new story about Public Official 1 and Businessperson 1, as described in the indictment … Specifically, Smirnov wanted them to look into whether Businessperson 1 was recorded in a hotel in Kyiv called the Premier Palace. Id. Smirnov told investigators that the entire Premier Palace Hotel is “wired” and under the control of the Russians. Smirnov claimed that Businessperson 1 went to the hotel many times and that he had seen video footage of Businessperson 1 entering the Premier Palace Hotel. Id. Investigators know that Smirnov’s new story is false because Businessperson 1 has never travelled to Ukraine.
Russia, if you’re listening …
It’s clear that Smirnov’s allegations were always an attempt to upcycle Russian disinformation.
It started with Derkach, a Russian agent, feeding lies to Giuliani and the media. Smirnov vowed in 2020 to find evidence to support Derkach’s misinformation. In 2023, when the special counsel — under apparent pressure from congressional Republicans — reached out to Smirnov, the informant concocted a further story to support the Russian lies about Biden and Burisma.
And then, sensing a bottomless appetite for these fabrications, Smirnov reached out to his Russian security service contacts, who fed him yet another provably false story about the president’s son, which Smirnov dutifully passed along to the FBI. And if he hadn’t been arrested, Comer, Grassley, Jordan, and Smith would gleefully have trumpeted the hotel kompromat story as well. They just want to smear Biden. And they don’t care if they have to rely on Russian lies to do it.
RELATED FROM PN: The Hunter Biden indictment *is* the product of weaponized justice. But not in the way Republicans say it is.
Republicans are taking the implosion of their claims in stride.
Jordan simply reverted to the pre-Smirnov version of the story, repeating the falsehood that Shokin was investigating Burisma at the time he was fired, and omitting to mention that it was the international consensus that the prosecutor had to go.
Comer went from saying Smirnov’s allegations are “a very crucial piece of our investigation” last May to claiming “he’s a micro piece” now. With Smirnov disgraced, Comer is now relying on the jailhouse testimony of a guy convicted of swindling Native American tribes who claims to have a draft email from Hunter Biden proving that Joe Biden was “very keen” on joining the board of a “CCP-linked company” in 2014, in the middle of his second term as vice president. (Sounds legit!)
And Grassley, who served alongside Biden for years in the Senate, has now pivoted to congratulating himself on prodding the FBI to investigate Smirnov’s claims.
“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,” he bragged to the Iowa politics blog Bleeding Heartland.
Ah, well. Maybe the real impeachment was the Russian propaganda we laundered along the way.
That’s it for today
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We’ll be back with more Wednesday. Until then, thanks for reading.
Excellent piece. One nitpick: Kiev is the Russian spelling. Kyiv is the Ukrainian spelling. Language matters, even in the face of Russian kompromat.
When will there be consequences for the congressmen and senators who shared this Russian disinformation and pushed it into American discourse?