Flawed Smirnov rap won't aid Hunter
DEMOCRATS have been slavering over the indictment of Alexander Smirnov, the trusted FBI paid informant of 13 years whom they’ve branded a Russian spy before he even goes to trial.
Hunter Biden used Smirnov as a crutch in his opening statement to the impeachment committee Wednesday, claiming “Smirnov . . . has made you dupes in carrying out a Russian disinformation campaign waged against my father.”
There’s barely a Democrat alive who doesn’t invoke Russia when the heat comes on. It’s a clue to their sweaty desperation.
Rep. Eric Swalwell’s tweet this week was among his most coherent: “Trump is Putin. Putin is Trump. Beating Trump this fall means beating Putin.”
There’s a lot to unpack in “Fang Fang” Swalwell’s Putin fetish, but we’ll resist the urge.
Rep. Jamie Raskin rushed out of Hunter-deposition hearing room after only an hour to cry “Smirnov,” who is so irrelevant, he wasn’t even a witness to the impeachment inquiry since nobody knew who he was. But according to Raskin, Smirnov was the impeachment inquiry’s “star witness.”
Raskin declared that the voluminous evidence the inquiry has unearthed of Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s corrupt schemes has “a very strong whiff of a Russian intelligence operation” and urged Republicans to “fold up the circus tent” because “this thing is over.”
Not so fast, big guy.
Sloppy setup job
If Smirnov, a Ukrainian-born Israeli American, survives jail until his trial in April, the facts should become clearer, but special counsel David Weiss’ court filings so far have a “very strong” whiff of a sloppy set-up job.
Smirnov’s formidable Las Vegas attorney, David Chesnoff, has promised to mount a vigorous defense. He told a judge in LA this week that Smirnov was pleading not guilty to making false statements to federal agents and creating a false and fictitious record.
Prosecution claims that he lied to the FBI “will be a highly contested part of this trial . . . This is going to be an interesting and complicated case” with Smirnov “contacting people around the world . . . who can refute allegations’ against him.”
Where the indictment appears to fall apart is in its central claim that Smirnov lied to the FBI because the dates when he claims to have met Mykola Zlochevsky and his underlings at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma don’t match travel records and statements from two witnesses. From the dates’ discrepancy, prosecutors made the leap to rejecting as false allegations that Zlochevsky paid Joe and Hunter Biden a combined $10 million.
But there is no evidence offered in the indictment that proves such a thing, one way or the other.
In fact, there appeared to have been no effort made to investigate the allegations, only to prove Smirnov a liar.
The indictment cites two witnesses who joined Smirnov in meetings or phone calls with Burisma, according to Smirnov’s report to his FBI handler in 2020, which was memorialized the oldfashioned way — in an FBI form called an FD-1023.
One was an American named “Associate 2,”, a former Smirnov business partner who owned a cryptocurrency firm. The other was a Ukrainian, Alexander Ostapenko, who worked “for the administration of President Zelensky,” and for Valery Vavilov, the founder of cryptocurrency business BitFury, said Smirnov.
Weiss says meetings or phone calls with Burisma never happened on the dates Smirnov allegedly told his handler, and his prosecutors have portrayed the discrepancies as deliberate lies by Smirnov.
Major mistake?
But the discrepancies may stem from an incorrect assumption by the FBI of what Smirnov meant when he said that he met Zlochevsky at a coffee shop in Vienna, Austria, “around the time” that Joe Biden “made a statement about [Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin] being corrupt and that he should be fired/removed from office.”
The FBI assumed Smirnov was talking about a speech Joe had given to the Ukrainian parliament on Dec. 9, 2015, and framed its entire timeline around that putative date. But Joe never mentioned Shokin in that speech and said nothing about firing or removing any prosecutor. All he said was: “The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform.”
Perhaps Smirnov meant, instead, the infamous speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington on Jan. 23, 2018, in which Joe said that he had threatened to withhold $1 billion in US loan guarantees for Ukraine unless the corrupt prosecutor was fired.
“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”
If Joe’s 2018 speech is what Smirnov meant, which seems likely, then the other dates that the FBI calculated from their initial erroneous assumption fall apart, and so does their case.
If my amended timeline is correct, then perhaps Smirnov did not lie, the FBI screwed up, and Weiss’ prosecutors never bothered to check the most basic facts in their indictment, and threw a valuable informant to the wolves. In the process, they will have done incalculable damage to the entire FBI informant program and left open the possibility that every conviction that Smirnov’s testimony helped secure will be overturned.