Voronwë the Faithful wrote: ↑Wed Feb 21, 2024 12:02 am
Meanwhile, solid proof that the Russians have been behind the push to get Biden all along.
[
Tweet from Kyle Cheney: "JUST IN: Feds say in a detention memo that Alexander SMIRNOV -- charged with fabricating claims that Joe Biden was bribed by Ukrainians -- had high-level contacts with Russian intelligence operatives."]
This is properly being treated as a big deal in the press, but it's probably worse than it looks. The story now is that the FBI, the Dept. of Justice, and Congress were duped by a Russian agent, but Marcy Wheeler
argues, with evidence from House Republicans' own files, that some of them wanted to be duped and made it possible. Scott Brady was the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania for much of Donald Trump's presidency. As Wheeler has pointed out numerous times over the past four years, in 2020, Attorney General William Barr set up Brady's office as a portal "to scrutinize information that had been gathered in Ukraine by Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, relating to Trump's opponent in the 2020 presidential campaign Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Brady met with Giuliani in Pittsburgh to discuss the materials, and the arrangement raised concerns within the FBI and DOJ about the agencies being drawn into a politicized investigation." That's Wikipedia's summary. Well, Brady testified to James Comer's committee, and he said, under oath, that his team had vetted Smirnov's claims, by e.g., checking whether Smirnov was in the cities he claimed when he received the information he was sharing about Hunter Biden.
The Dept. of Justice filing yesterday says that Smirnov was not in those cities at those times. And the DOJ should have known that. It's possible that Smirnov's FBI handler was lying, and Brady didn't know it. But somebody in the U.S. government seems to have been covering for Smirnov in order to smear Joe Biden.
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Edited to add:
Voronwë the Faithful wrote: ↑Wed Feb 21, 2024 7:28 pm
Don't you mean that he implied that it really was cocaine?
Grr. Yes. Fixed. Thanks.