by Frank Holmes, reporter
Joe Biden has never been known for being a steady hand—in office or walking across a stage—but his administration’s latest flip-flop lends credibility to charges that the president is guilty of selling access to his office.
The Biden administration arrested the man who informed agents that the head of the Ukrainian energy company Bursima bragged about bribing then-Vice President Joe Biden by employing his son, Hunter.
The Biden administration charged him with perjury, threw him in jail, and forced him to stay in jail until his trial…supposedly because he is a “flight risk” who would leave the United States.
But they haven’t always called him a liar.
The man the Biden administration accuses of perjury is someone the same administration called “highly credible” just one month ago.
A California federal judge ruled Alexander Smirnov—the former FBI informant accused of fabricating stories about bribes paid to President Joe Biden and his son Hunter—will remain in jail as he awaits trial, over concerns he would flee the country, multiple outlets reported. pic.twitter.com/2Q1K3XKhRH
— Forbes (@Forbes) February 26, 2024
The Horn reported about the allegations made by Alexander “Alexy” Smirnov in an official FBI document, known as FD-1023, who claimed Ukraine had given the Bidens $10 million. Smirnov filed the form on June 30, 2020, but the FBI did nothing about it—and then President Biden’s administration tried to quash it.
One of the ways they did that is by saying this Confidential Human Source (CHS) was so important that revealing his name would jeopardize several important investigations and possibly even get people injured, or killed.
Now, all of the sudden, he’s such a liar he needs to be locked in a cell? The two people leading the House investigation want to know what was behind the sudden change.
“Prior to the indictment, the FBI allowed Mr. Smirnov to serve as a CHS for over 14 years and earn a six-figure income, while maintaining ‘extensive and extremely recent’ foreign intelligence contacts,” write Reps. James Comer, R-Ky., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, to FBI Director Christopher Wray. “Until very recently, the FBI held Mr. Smirnov out as a ‘highly credible’ source whose outing could endanger national security.”
“Only after Mr. Smirnov reported that President Joe Biden accepted a bribe from a Ukrainian energy company in exchange for using his official position to oust the Ukrainian Prosecutor General did the FBI apparently take a hard look at this CHS,” they note.
It turns out, although they did not know Smirnov’s name, it was his allegations that spurred the House Oversight Committee and the House Judiciary Committee, which Comer and Jordan chair, to launch an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden—an investigation Wray has done all he can to derail.
“At each step in the investigation, the FBI represented to the Committees that the CHS was highly credible and that disclosure of information about the CHS could jeopardize national security” and “would hurt the FBI’s ability to ‘keep[] Americans safe,’” they write.
“In fact, just last month, the Justice Department denied the Judiciary Committee full access to a FD1023 dated March 2017, memorializing additional information received from Mr. Smirnov,
asserting the need to protect sensitive law enforcement information.”
At every stage of the investigation, the Biden administration shut them down, walled them off from Smirnov, and offered up “the apparently baseless assertions that release of his information would endanger Americans.”
The Republicans from neighboring states reminded FBI Director Christopher Wray, “You explained that it was important to protect the CHS’s identity not only for his personal safety, but also for the integrity of several investigations and prosecutions that relied on information that the CHS provided to the FBI.” Last June 1, Wray personally wrote that he had to keep people from knowing anything about this source in order to “protect the physical safety of sources and witnesses and the integrity of investigations.”
It wasn’t just Wray vouching for Smirnov. The man whose responsibility was to vet all Ukraine-related information provided by public sources, and who looked back to Smirnov’s testimony going all the way back to 2017, agreed.
Public statements calling Smirnov “highly credible” were “consistent with my understanding” of his testimony, Scott Brady, then-U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, testified last October 23.
After he and a team of his top people looked at the FBI whistleblower form, “We felt that there were sufficient indicia of credibility in this 1023 to pass it on to an office that had a predicated grand jury investigation.”
“Indicia of credibility” means the form meets numerous standards and measures of credibility.
And it wasn’t just Wray or the Biden administration; it was the entire Democratic Party stonewalling and misinformation apparatus.
The highest-ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee—Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who would be chairman instead of Comer if Democrats ran the House. On the day FBI Director Wray allowed some review of the information, Raskin talked in a press release about “the source, who has been described as highly credible by the FBI.”
The FBI might be freaking out, because intelligence analysts say the description of Smirnov sounds very much like one of the sources listed in the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation—the probe into Donald Trump’s alleged “collusion” with Russia.
That has analysts wondering if the FBI is going after Smirnov, because he knows where the bodies are buried in two Deep State set-ups.
What criminal cases relied on Smirnov’s testimony, how much they paid him, all the documents the FBI issued when it approved Smirnov as a confidential source and all the documents about when they started investigating him as a massive liar.
How did they come to such a difference?
They’re not the only ones who think the arrest smells fishy. “The timing of all this is highly suspicious,” said former Congressman Jason Chaffetz. “For years the Department of Justice doesn’t do anything, then all of a sudden they arrest him.”
The letter shows they may be aiming for someone else: the U.S. attorney who has protected Hunter Biden every step of the way. The letter requests “all documents and communications referring or relating to the request to U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s team to ‘assist’ with ‘an investigation of allegations’ related to the FD1023.”
David Weiss was the attorney who worked out the sweetheart plea bargain for Hunter that was so generous, the judge doubted it was even constitutional. He’s also the one Attorney General Merrick Garland handpicked as the special counsel to investigate the Biden administration’s influence-peddling scandals.
Everything has to be in by the close of business, 5 p.m. Eastern next Friday, March 15.
“This episode is just another example of how the FBI is motivated by politics,” Comer and Jordan conclude.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”