For the 2016 election, Democrats launched Russiagate 1.0: the Trump-Russia collusion hoax proven groundless by the Mueller investigation.
For the 2020 election, it was Russiagate 2.0. Biden campaign adviser Antony Blinken prompted former CIA Acting Director Mike Morell to concoct the “Dirty 51” letter falsely claiming that Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop was Russian disinformation.
That lie justified censorship of The Post’s accurate stories from the laptop of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s international influence peddling schemes.
Now that we’re heading into the 2024 election, we have Russiagate 3.0. Democrats pretend the impeachment inquiry has “utterly collapsed” because of the curious indictment last week of trusted FBI informant Alexander Smirnov on false statement charges after he allegedly told his FBI handler that Hunter and Joe each had received a $5 million bribe from the Ukrainians.
In a frantic effort to keep Smirnov in jail pre-trial, prosecutors for notorious Biden protector David Weiss, the Delaware US attorney, used language ripped straight out of the Russiagate textbook: “Smirnov’s efforts to spread misinformation about a candidate of one of the two major parties [Joe] continues.”
Now Smirnov is being used as make-believe vindication of the 51 former intelligence officials who signed the fake laptop letter to help Biden win the 2020 election.
Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA operations officer who claims to be a victim of the dubious “Havana syndrome,” pounced on the Smirnov story.
“It validates exactly what we were warning about,” he told NBC News. “The Russians were going to push this narrative of Hunter Biden and corruption, to hurt Joe Biden.”
No. Hunter’s “laptop from hell” was not Russian disinformation. It still isn’t. The FBI has had it in its possession since December 2019 and has authenticated it as real and valid for use in court.
The Dirty 51 are grasping at straws to try to justify their interference in the 2020 election. It wasn’t the Russians. It was Trump-deranged former CIA management who felt any means justified the ends if they could stop Trump winning a second term.
But now, as the laptop is augmented by whistleblower receipts and witness testimony, and as House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer unravels the complex web of corrupt foreign payments to the Biden family, the president’s praetorian guard is desperate. They are drowning in evidence of corruption while burbling, “There is no evidence!” Russia is all they have.
The joke is on Biden’s media handmaidens still pushing Joe Biden’s absurd lies.
No, the laptop is not a “Russian plant,” as he claimed. And, yes, Joe did talk to Hunter about his “overseas business dealings.”
Heck, he did a lot more than talk.
He made himself available for breakfasts, lunches, dinners, coffees, and pleasant chit chat on the speakerphone with Hunter’s foreign benefactors, all to oil the wheels of the family business — which was selling access to him, as he well knew.
“Look after my boy,” he told Kremlin-backed oligarch Elena Baturina and her husband, Yuri Luzhkov, the corrupt former mayor of Moscow, when Hunter activated the speakerphone at a Russian restaurant in Brooklyn called Romanoff on May 4, 2014.
They sure did. Just three months earlier, Baturina had wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, the firm cofounded by Hunter, his “best friend in business” Devon Archer, John Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz, and Jimmy Bulger, nephew of mobster “Whitey” Bulger.
Joe’s speakerphone spotlight
This latest chapter of Joe’s speakerphone diplomacy on behalf of Hunter’s finances comes courtesy of Jason Galanis, a former business partner of the first son who is serving 14 years in jail for his part in the $60 million Burnham securities fraud.
Archer and two other Burnham executives were convicted over the scheme. Hunter was vice chairman of the company but was deemed by prosecutors from the Southern District of New York to have had no involvement in the fraud, and Archer was not asked one question about him.
Galanis, who testified to Comer’s committee from an Alabama jail Friday, says he offered to provide SDNY prosecutors evidence of Hunter and Archer’s alleged involvement.
“The offer was rejected [and] the SDNY’s prosecution strategy was intended to protect Hunter Biden, and ultimately Vice President Biden,” he said.
Galanis recalls being “stunned” when Hunter put his dad on speakerphone with the Russians.
“Hunter called his father, said hello and ‘hold on, Pops,’ then put the call on speakerphone and said, ‘I am here with our friends I told you were coming to town, and we wanted to say ‘hello’ . . . It was clear to me this was a pre-arranged call with his father meant to impress the Russian investors that Hunter had access to his father and all the power and prestige of his position.”
The call to Joe was part of a well-established pattern in the Biden family business, as testified to by Archer and by Tony Bobulinski.
The then-VP was not just the brand his son and brother sold but the in-person deal-closer held out to foreign partners as “a potential board member [and] potential equity owner,” Comer told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo Sunday.
Galanis testified that in August 2014 Hunter angled for a post-vice presidency board seat for his dad on the Burnham joint venture with Harvest Fund Management, a $300 billion Chinese financial services company.
His claims need to be tested, but Democrats’ sneering at Republicans for taking testimony from a convicted felon ignores the fact that Hunter associated with a lot of shady characters.
Galanis alleges he is the “victim of a pattern of retribution” by the DOJ after he submitted information implicating Hunter in December 2020, after which he was sexually assaulted by prison staff in Pensacola, Fla.
Which brings us to Smirnov, 43, the Ukrainian-born, Russian-speaking Israeli-American dual national who has spent almost half his life in the US and has been one of the FBI’s highest paid informants for the past 14 years.
So determined is the federal government to keep him in jail that, after he was released by one judge in Nevada, prosecutors convinced another judge that he was a flight risk and had him arrested him at his lawyers’ office.
He is due in court Monday in Los Angeles, so the facts may become clearer. But there are key discrepancies between the indictment and what Smirnov told his FBI handler in 2020, as recorded in the infamous FD-1023 form that Senator Chuck Grassley released last year.
The indictment also doesn’t square with the due diligence done in 2020 by the US attorney in Pittsburgh, Scott Brady, who confirmed aspects of Smirnov’s story that prosecutors now call into question.
The $5 million pyramid
For instance, in the FD-1023, Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky is quoted by Smirnov as saying: “it cost [$5 million] to pay one Biden, and [$5 million] to another Biden.”
The indictment has Zlochevsky saying: “it cost [$5 million] to pay [Public Official 1 — Joe Biden] and [$5 million] to [Businessperson 1 [Hunter Biden].”
But Smirnov didn’t mention Joe.
Devon Archer speculates “one Biden” could be him since he was on the Burisma board with Hunter, who once told him “you are a Biden . . . You are part of a great family.”
Hunter was paid $4.1 million by Burisma from March 2014 to April 2019, and Archer $2.3 million. Hunter’s final take would have been over $5 million but his $83,333 monthly payments were slashed in half a few weeks after his father left office.
Archer’s Burisma takings didn’t hit $5 million because he had to step down from the board in 2016 before he was indicted in the Burnham case.
Smirnov also referred to Joe Biden as the “big guy” in June 2020, four months before The Post published emails from Hunter’s laptop in which the code name was used.
Discrepancies in dates of meetings between Smirnov and Burisma are portrayed as a deliberate lie by Smirnov, but could just as easily stem from a false assumption by the FBI. The more you look, the murkier it is.
Most curious is that the federal government prefers the word of a Ukrainian stranger, Alexander Ostapenko, over their own American spy, whose life FBI Director Chris Wray worried would be in danger if Republicans looked at his FD-1023.
Suddenly, this valuable American spy is a liar and national security threat due to his “extensive foreign ties,” including contacts with Russian intelligence for which the FBI paid him handsomely and which he reported back dutifully to his handler.
Now his life is of such little concern, that Delaware prosecutor Leo Wise has spewed into open court details of his contacts with Russian officials.
It doesn’t pay to cross the Bidens.