FBI informant’s flawed rap won’t help Hunter Biden in impeachment probe of family business

Miranda Devine Feb. 28, 20241/2

Hunter Biden noted Alexander Smirnov's name to the impeachment committee Wednesday, claiming "Smirnov… has made you dupes in carrying out a Russian disinformation campaign waged against my father."

Democrats have been slavering over the indictment of Alexander Smirnov, the trusted FBI paid informant of 13 years standing who they have 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 mean 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’ 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 set-up 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 Zlochevskyand 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 $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.

https://nypost.com/2024/02/28/opinion/fbi-informants-flawed-rap-wont-help-hunter-biden-in-impeachment-probe-of-family-business/

>>20494856

2/2

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 old-fashioned way in an FBI form called an FD-1023. One was an American named “Associate 2,” a former business partner of Smirnov’s 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 prosecutor 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 Rada on December 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 January 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, thenperhaps 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.

What a mess.

https://nypost.com/2024/02/28/opinion/fbi-informants-flawed-rap-wont-help-hunter-biden-in-impeachment-probe-of-family-business/

(Bongino and others say that FBI burns their sources constantly, FBI is losing sources constantly.)

Biden surrogate says it’s ‘racist’ to suggest migrant crime is rising

Melissa Koenig Feb. 29, 2024

A Democratic congressman has claimed it is “racist” to suggest migrant crime is rising following the death of nursing student Laken Riley as he campaigned for Resident Biden ahead of a Thursday event at the southern border.

“This immigrant crime narrative is racist,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) said in a press call organized by theResident’sre-election campaign Wednesday, according to the Washington Examiner.

“It is not true,” he insisted. “Donald Trump is out here saying we’re poisoning the blood of this country — and the facts don’t bear that out.“Immigrants, by and large, are committing less crime. So whenever this narrative comes forward, you know, it’s just an untrue narrative.”

The Biden administration has been facing criticism for its immigration policies and high-profile violent crimes across the United States that have been linked to migrants, even as the murder rate in major cities and the country as a whole dropped last year as the migrant crisis surged.

In Georgia, Venezuelan national Jose Antonio Ibarra, 26, is accused of bashing in Riley’s skull in a brutal attack on the University of Georgia campus.

And in New York City, police are trying to crack down on a Venezuelan gang known as Tren de Aragua, members of which are accused of beating cops and participating in a slew of robberies.

One issue hampering border officials’ ability to screen for known criminals at the border is a lack of available resources to check their backgrounds.“When somebody is arrested for crossing illegally, there are limited checks on their background,” Chris Cabrera, vice Resident of the National Border Patrol Council, told NewsNation.

“Their fingerprints are run against our records here in the United States, and not all countries share their records with us,” he explained.“So if we don’t have access to their records, if they haven’t committed any crimes here in the United States, then all we have to go by is what they say.

“Unfortunately, CBP [Customs and Border Protection] has no interest in closing that loophole,” Cabrera said. “And we’re going to continue along this path, unfortunately.”

But Biden tried to tout his efforts to tackle crime across the country on Wednesday, saying his administration’s investment in local police and crime-plagued cities under the American Rescue Plan brought down the nation’s homicide rate. “Since day one, my administration has been working with law enforcement, mayors and community leaders to do what we know works to keep people in the community safe,” he said, according to the Washington Times.

A few hours later, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters the administration could not specifically speak about the death of Riley, as it is an ongoing investigation.

She also declined to say if Biden would reach out to the family, but called the situation “heartbreaking,” the Washington Times reports.

TheResidentis expected to travel to the southern border for the second time in his administration.

He will travel to Brownsville, Texas, on Thursday, at the same time his likely opponent, former President Donald Trump, will be campaigning in Eagle Pass, Texas — about 300 miles away.

While there, theResident“will meet with US Border Patrol agents, law enforcement, front-line personnel and local leaders to discuss the urgent need to pass the Senate bipartisan border security agreement,” White House officials said. The package includes over $20 billion for border security, which will fund more Customs and Border Protection agents, as well as additional asylum officers and immigration judges.

Biden will be joined on the trip by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Rep. Vincente Gonzalez (D-Texas), local elected officials, as well as personnel from Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

https://nypost.com/2024/02/29/us-news/robert-garcia-says-its-racist-to-suggest-migrant-crime-is-rising/

(good to see NYP is using the correct title for the resident)

MSNBC legal analyst says First Amendment makes US ‘vulnerable,’ calls for ‘common sense’ speech restrictions

Alexander Hall, Fox News Feb. 29, 2024

MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade argued Monday that the United States’ “deep commitment to free speech” makes Americans uniquely susceptible to disinformation campaigns.

McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor, went on “The Rachel Maddow Show” topromote her new book, “Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America.” She said her “goal” with the book was to spark a “national conversation about truth and our commitment to it.”

She added, “I hope that by dissecting it, explaining it, and educating the public, we can all see disinformation for what it is so that we can begin to push back against it.”

When asked by host Rachel Maddowwhether America is just as susceptible to disinformation as other countries, McQuade argued thatit is even more vulnerable. (That’s because we have stronger objections and logic)

“Actually, Rachel, I think we’re more susceptible to it than other countries, and that’s because some of our greatest strengths can also be our Achilles Heel,” McQuade said. “So, for example, our deep commitment to free speech in our First Amendment. It is a cherished right. It’s an important right in democracy, andnobody wants to get rid of it, but it makes us vulnerable to claims [that]anything we want to do related to speech is censorship.”

MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade told host Rachel Maddow that Americans’ defense of free speech makes them uniquely susceptible to disinformation campaigns. MSNBC

She argued, “Of course, the Supreme Court has held that all fundamental rights, even the right to free speech, can be limitedas long as there is a compelling governmental interest and the restriction is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. But I think any time someone tries to do anything that might limit free speech, people claim censorship.”

McQuade held up as an example this week’s Supreme Court cases regarding state laws about how social media platforms moderate content. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow praised the book’s arguments and touted McQuade’s work as a “real public service and a pleasure.” MSNBC

“We need to have a conversation and common-sense solutions to these things,” she said. “Instead, we throw out terms like ‘censorship,’ call each other names, use labels and retreat to our opposite sides. We need to be pragmatic and come up with real solutions.”

https://nypost.com/2024/02/29/us-news/msnbc-legal-analyst-says-first-amendment-makes-us-vulnerable-calls-for-common-sense-speech-restrictions/

(How many times has the SC shot down limits to free speech, these people won't stop.)

American Airlines flight from NYC to Spain forced to land in Boston over cracked windshield

By Nicholas McEntyre Published Feb. 29, 2024

An American Airlines flight from New York to Spain was forced to land in Boston after the plane’s windshield cracked over two hours into the trip late Wednesday night.Flight 94 departed from JFK Airport at 7:28 p.m. and was scheduled to land in Madrid,but an Alert 2 was issued at around 9:46 p.m,NBC Boston reported, citing the Massachusetts State Police.

AnAlert 2 “indicates that an aircraft is having major difficulties” and “a difficult or crash landing may be expected,” according to the City of Phoenix Sky Harbor Response Aviation Emergencies procedures.

The plane wasflying over the Atlantic Oceanat the time it turned back to where it landed in Boston at 10:03 p.m., data from flight tracking website FlightAware showed.

The Boeing 777-200 returned to the US because of a “maintenance issue,” the airline confirmed to The Post in a statement. “The flight landed safely and the aircraft was taken out of service to be inspected by our maintenance team,” the statement read.

Passengers on the flight were given overnight hotel space and will depart for Madrid on a replacement aircraft on Thursday afternoon. “We never want to disrupt our customers’ travel plans and apologize for the inconvenience this has caused,” the statement added.

The plane was only two hours into the flight at the time it turned back around. FlightAware

Last month, a United Airlines flight from Las Vegas to DC was diverted to Colorado after its ownwindshield formed a crack in the middle of the flight. The United Airlines plane, a Boeing 737-800, was carrying 166 passengers and seven crew members at the time it landed safely at Denver International Airport.

A plane change occurred and all the passengers reboarded and departed to Dulles International again.

During the first week of the new year, Alaskan Airlines flight 1282 was forced to make an emergency landing after a side panel on the Boeing 747 MAX 9 blew off midflight creating chaos inside the cabin.

Initial reports from the US National Transportation Safety Boarddetermined four key bolts were missing from the door panel when it flew off.

https://nypost.com/2024/02/29/us-news/american-airlines-flight-from-jfk-to-madrid-diverted-to-boston-due-to-cracked-windshield/

(Have these airlines investigated the ground and mechanic crews to see if there is active sabotage on these planes? Missing bolts, cracks in wings, cracks in windshield, this sounds like domestic terrorism.)

My Advice to both of them, stick with your betrayal, don’t fake it

McConnell wrestles with difficult move: Endorsing Trump

Story by Al Weaver • 1d

Pressure is mounting on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) as he lays the groundwork to do what was unthinkable just a year ago: endorsing former President Trump for president in 2024.

Trump’s victory in South Carolina on Saturday further strengthened his grip on the GOP and has put McConnell in a bind. He held out as long as he could before it emerged Monday that his and Trump’s teams are discussing a possible endorsement.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/mcconnell-wrestles-with-difficult-move-endorsing-trump/ar-BB1j29iC

Romney on voting for Trump over Biden: ‘No, no, no, absolutely not’

Sarah Fortinsky Thu, February 29, 2024

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said Wednesday he would “absolutely not” vote for former President Trump over President Biden in November, pointing to Trump’s foreign policy views and his character.

“No. No, no, absolutely not,” Romney told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “The Source” when asked whether he would support Trump over Biden.

Romney explained there are “two factors” — policy and character — he is using to decide “who I want to have as the leader of my country and the person who is the example of the president for my kids and my grandkids.” He said are both vital but that character is most important.

“What America is as a nation, what has allowed us to be the most powerful nation on Earth, and the leader of the Earth is the character of the people who have been our leaders,” Romney said. “Past presidents, but also mothers, fathers, church leaders, university presidents, and so forth.”

“Having a president who is so defaulted of character would have an enormous impact on the character of America,” he added. “And for me, that’s the primary consideration.”

https://news.yahoo.com/romney-voting-trump-over-biden-140041294.html

'Britain will be unrecognisable!' Suella Braverman slams 'appalling' migration stats and warns of 'national disaster'

WATCH: Sunak says we need a deterrent to stop illegal migration

GB NEWS By Millie Cooke Published: 29/02/2024

The former Home Secretary warned: 'This cannot go on' Suella Braverman has slammed the latest migration statistics, dubbing it a "national disaster".

She urged the Government to do more to cut down on arrivals to the UK, warning: "We don’t have enough homes, GPs or schools to support this level".

Fresh migration statistics were published this morning, showing that health and care visas for foreign workershave almost doubled to 146,477 in the last year.

Family members joining their relatives via this route accounted for 73 per cent of the 279,131 work dependent visas that were granted in the year up to December 2023, new figures from the Home Office show.

The UK granted asylum to 62,336 people in 2023, the highest level ever recorded. The figures also showed that some 45,434 asylum seekers are still being housed in taxpayer-funded hotels, despite Rishi Sunak's pledge to stop using them. They also reveal that just two per cent of small boat arrivals have been returned since 2018.

The asylum backlog, however, has fallen. The number of cases awaiting an initial decision has fallen by 28 per cent since December 2022. At the end of

December 2023, there were 95,252 cases waiting for an initial decision. In total, there were 67,337 new asylum applications in the UK in 2023, 17 per cent lower than in 2022.

The number of people being housed in hotels has fallen 18 per cent since September 2023, when 56,042 were in the taxpayer-funded rooms. Reacting to the figures on X, the former Home Secretary said:"1.4 million people were granted visas here last year. Asylum approvals at a record high. Work and student visa numbers, including many dependents, are appalling.

In December, the Government announced that it will tighten several criteria for legal migration."This cannot go on: we don’t have enough homes, GPs or schools to support this level. "The PM must adopt policies I pushed for that would have prevented this national disaster: we need a cap on overall numbers.

"Britain will be unrecognisable if this carries on. It’s not what the British people, including me, voted for."

In December, the Government announced that it will tighten several criteria for legal migration, including preventing care workers from bringing over their families, raising salary thresholds for most skilled workers and increasing application fees.

Home Secretary James Cleverly unveiled a five-point plan to curb legal migration, in a move which he said would cut migration by up to 300,000. He claimed the move will cause the "biggest ever reduction" in migration.

https://www.gbnews.com/politics/suella-braverman-migration-figures

Biden Confronts Deep Voter Concerns About His Age in Swing States

By Jordan Fabian February 29, 2024

This is a special Washington Edition, the newsletter about money, power and politics in the nation’s capital. Today, White House correspondent Jordan Fabian outlines the results of the latest Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll.

More Than a Number (Yes, it's the death nell for Bidan)

President Joe Biden is grappling with tough challenges, from foreign wars to a southern border in crisis. Yet none is trickier than his age.Eight in 10 voters in key presidential swing states said Biden, 81, is too old, a new Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll found. That’s almost double the share that said the same about his likely Republican opponent, Donald Trump.

Even core groups of Biden’s 2020 coalition, which he must reassemble to win in November, harbor those concerns.Majorities of Black voters, young voters and women said he is too old, the survey shows. Seven in 10 voters who say they plan to vote for Biden again said he fits that description. Read the full story here and the complete poll results here.

At 77, Trump is not much younger than Biden. Yet voters are more likely to describe him as mentally fit or in good health.

Thinking about the two frontrunners in the November 2024 election for US president, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, please indicate which candidate is described best by each item below.

Share of respondents who said: Source: Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll

Note: Poll of 4,955 registered voters conducted Feb. 12-20 in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, with a margin of error of +/- 1 percentage point. Combinations of two or more response groups may appear to be slightly more or less than their component groups' counts due to rounding. Similarly, individual lines may not appear to add up to 100% due to rounding.

The numbers show the depth and breadth of voter concern that Biden is no longer fit to serve as commander-in-chief, which have often has overshadowed his achievements and proven to be a problem for his campaign staff. It’s not as if they can turn back the clock. (What achievements?)

Biden has tried a number of ways to prove to Americans he’s up to the task. He’s parried age concerns with humor, including during a Monday appearance on NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers, in which he turned the tables on Trump by saying his predecessor couldn’t remember his wife’s name at a recent event. (LIE, what humor?)

The president’s team is also betting that, given a choice between an older man and chaotic one, voters will choose the former. There may be something to that theory: almost six in 10 swing-state voters described Trump as dangerous.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-02-29/biden-confronts-deep-voter-concerns-about-his-age-in-swing-states

“Craven” and “Insurrectionists”: MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Others Denounce the Supreme Court for Granting Review of Presidential Immunity

Supreme Court Feb. 29, 2024 Jonathan Turley

Yesterday, the Supreme Court granted review of the presidential immunity question, but set an expedited schedule for the review of the question with oral argument scheduled for April. Former president Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that “Legal Scholars are extremely thankful for the Supreme Court’s Decision today to take up Presidential Immunity.” As I mentioned last night in the coverage, legal scholars are hardly doing a conga line in celebration. Indeed, this morning had the usual voices attacking the Court as “craven” and partisan for granting review in the case. Despite the Court (including three Trump appointees) repeatedly ruling against Trump and conservative causes in past cases,the same voices declared that the Court was a cabal of politically compromised lickspittles.

MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow was outraged on the air and denounced “the cravenness of the court.” She noted that the Court took a whole two weeks to consider the question, ignoring the usual schedule of months of such deliberation. She added:

• “Obviously, pushing all of the cases that they can push to a point where Trump will be standing for election before any of us have heard the verdicts in any of those cases. Got it. It is the timing…This is BS, and you are doing this as a tactic to help for political friend, partisan patron. For you to say that this is something the court needs to decide because it is unclear in the law is fragrant bullpucky and they know it and don’t care that we know it. That is disturbing about the future legitimacy of the court.” (This is where Maddow shows the educated public that she’s nuts and knows nothing about the law or the SC)

• Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner dismissed the review as a political effort to do Trump “an enormous favor.” Kirschner also said that it was “clear” the court “sold American democracy down the river” to help Trump.

• Mary Trump, the niece of the former president, declared that “the Supreme Court of the United States just reminded us with this corrupt decision that the insurrection did not fail–it never ended.”

In other words, the Supreme Court itself is now part of the “insurrection.”It is that easy. Once you start to remove people from the ballot by declaring a riot an insurrection, even courts become insurrectionists by allowing for a review of lower court rulings.

For years, liberal law professors and pundits have filled themedia with dire predictions that the Supreme Court was about to carry out a long-planned “coup” and “power grab” — one even wrote that the court could be on the brink of establishing “one-party rule” in the United States. These commentators often ignore the countervailing cases where conservative justices voted against conservative causes and immediately return to these sensational claims whenever the Court is seen as a hinderance of their agenda, even in the simple act of granting review of a long-debated constitutional question…

The case will be set for oral argument during the week of April 22, 2024. Petitioner’s brief on the merits, and any amicus curiae briefs in support or in support of neither party, are to be filed on or before Tuesday, March 19, 2024. Respondent’s brief on the merits, and any amicus curiae briefs in support, are to be filed on or before Monday, April 8, 2024. The reply brief, if any, is to be filed on or before 5 p.m., Monday, April 15, 2024.

There are a variety of reasons why the Court could have put this on the calendar for further argument. While I still believe that Trump will not be able to secure a majority on his sweeping immunity theory, some justices may be concerned over the D.C. Circuit opinion and the lack of clarity on when a president is protected for actions taken in office. It is possible to uphold the lower court in its outcome but change the rationale or analysis.

The Court has not been particularly eager to reenter this area of constitutional law, but it may now be prepared to lay down new precedent and bring greater clarity for future presidents.

https://jonathanturley.org/2024/02/29/craven-and-insurrectionists-msnbcs-rachel-maddow-and-other-denounce-the-supreme-court-for-granting-review-of-presidential-immunity/

>>20495528

Just in case you wanted to read this insurrectionist order, here it is:

"The application for a stay presented to The Chief Justice is referred by him to the Court. The Special Counsel’s request to treat the stay application as a petition for a writ of certiorari is granted, and that petition is granted limited to the following question: Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office. Without expressing a view on the merits, this Court directs the Court of Appeals to continue withholding issuance of the mandate until the sending down of the judgment of this Court. The application for a stay is dismissed as moot."