Former FBI informant admits to lying about Bursima and the Bidens

James Comer’s former star witness in the Hunter Biden investigation Alexander Smirnov pled guilty today in federal court to lying about a $5 million bribe that was supposedly paid by Burisma to Joe Biden in 2015. He made the allegations during the 2020 presidential election in June of that year, which was supposed to pair up with Rudy Giuliani’s “discovery” of the Hunter Biden laptop right before the election.

  Meidas Touch

If it does, it will come to a close quietly and without a single apology.  The question is whether the Bidens will go to court to recoup damages.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

MAGA won't believe it

Or if they do, they'll think it was a good owning of the libs.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The GOP will never let the truth get in its way

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, sent a letter to Chairman James Comer sharing the transcript of statements made by Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, to an associate of Rudy Giuliani’s directly contradicting allegations repeated in the FBI Form FD-1023 tipsheet, which the FBI made available to all Committee Members. Republican Committee Members identified Mr. Zlochevsky as the source of the information relayed to the FBI by a confidential human source (CHS) in the Form FD-1023. As part of the 2019 impeachment inquiry against then-President Trump, the Committee received a transcript created by associates of Mr. Giuliani recording statements by Mr. Zlochevsky that squarely rebut these allegations.

[...]

Specifically, Mr. Zlochevsky denied (1) that anyone at Burisma had ‘any contacts’ with then former Vice President Biden or his representatives while Hunter Biden served on the Burisma board, and (2) that former Vice President Biden or his staff ‘in any way’ assisted Mr. Zlochevsky or Burisma.

[...]

As both the FBI and Mr. Giuliani himself stated, the unverified, second-hand allegations in the June 2020 Form FD-1023 largely repeated allegations Mr. Giuliani shared previously with the FBI.

  House Dems

Of course, MAGA will not believe Zlochevsky. They believe Giuliani. At least until they find out Giuliani turned government witness against Trump.

Mr. Zlochevsky’s statements are recorded in a written document that was produced by Mr. Giuliani’s associate, Lev Parnas, to the House Committees overseeing former President Trump’s first impeachment inquiry in January 2020, including the Oversight Committee, and was made available to both Democratic and Republican Members. The Department of Justice has been in possession of the document since the FBI seized Mr. Parnas’ phone—including the document—pursuant to a warrant in 2019.

No evidence

Several Republicans said this week that they don’t know if there really are tapes of Joe Biden talking about taking a bribe.

[...]

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said lawmakers “don’t know if they’re legit or not, but we know that the foreign national claims he has them.”

[...]

“We don’t know for sure if these tapes exist,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said on “The Chris Salcedo Show” Wednesday when asked if Republicans would consider impeaching the president.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) suggested on a program called “The Conservative Circus” that not only might the tapes not exist, but also that the foreign national who spoke to the FBI informant might lack credibility.

[...]

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) revealed Monday that a tip the FBI received in 2020 said a foreign national who allegedly paid Biden $5 million has recordings of himself talking to Biden when he was vice president.

The audio purported to be a compelling new detail about the FBI tip, which Republicans have demanded be made public since learning of it last month.

At the same time, the uncertainty over whether the recordings actually exist is a reminder that while the tip came from a credible career informant, the informant’s source is someone else, and the underlying information, audio and all, remains unverified hearsay.

[...]

Burisma has been at the center of Republican attacks on Biden since 2019, when former President Donald Trump tried to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyrr Zelenskyy to announce a sham investigation into the Bidens. Joe Biden’s son Hunter served on Burisma’s board when Biden was vice president and advocated for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor, a dynamic that Republicans described as a conflict of interest. The reality is that the prosecutor hadn’t been investigating Burisma and that his ouster had been a priority of both the U.S. and other Western countries.

[...]

“The issue here is, is there any connection to President Biden? They have provided zero actual evidence to that effect,” [Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.)] told HuffPost.

   HuffPo

Biden-Ukraine Senate report - Part 2

A pro-Russian political party in Ukraine sought to partner with one of the most important witnesses in a Republican-led probe of the Biden family.

[...]

The offer of cooperation came in the fall of 2019 from a political party in Ukraine that is co-chaired by Viktor Medvedchuk, a friend and trusted ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Medvedchuk’s party made the offer to Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat and political operative, who has been a key witness in the year-long U.S. Senate investigation into the Ukraine connections of the Biden family. The party’s operatives, Telizhenko tells TIME, “offered me to help them with the Republicans much more closely, to be a back channel to Moscow.”

The offer, which Telizhenko says he turned down, marked the start of a complex influence campaign on the part of Putin’s allies in Kyiv, an effort that went further than has previously been reported. For over a year, agents and allies of the Kremlin in Ukraine have tried to feed information to President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and his Republican allies on Capitol Hill. The information passed through a variety of channels, including an indicted gas tycoon with deep ties to the Kremlin, and a Ukrainian lawmaker trained in a Russian spy academy.

[...]

Medvedchuk and the political party of which he is co-chairman, Opposition Platform – For Life, also attempted to air their unsubstantiated claims of corruption against Biden in the Ukrainian parliament. They failed to get enough votes to open a parliamentary inquiry in Kyiv. Instead these claims about Biden found a far more prominent platform in the U.S. Senate.

[...]

In the fall of 2019, when Telizhenko received the offer of help from the pro-Russian political party in Ukraine, he had already been working with Giuliani for several months on an effort to dig up political dirt on the Biden family.

Telizhenko got in touch with Giuliani that spring with help from another U.S. lawyer aligned with President Trump, Victoria Toensing, a Republican stalwart and Fox News pundit [who, along with her husband Joe DiGenova, is the attorney for Dmitry Firtash, accused Russian mobster and Putin ally].

[...]

Over the past year, Telizhenko has repeatedly aired his claims about corruption in the Biden family while appearing on Giuliani’s YouTube channel and podcast. The claims are drawn from Telizhenko’s past work as a diplomat in the Ukrainian embassy in Washington, his employment with a DC lobbying firm and his stint in the office of the prosecutor general of Ukraine. While serving in these positions, Telizhenko claims to have witnessed signs of corruption and conflicts of interests involving the Biden family and other Obama Administration officials.

With help from Giuliani, these claims also found their way to the U.S. Senate, where Johnson and his staff have had repeated contacts with Telizhenko for over a year.

[...]

Russian allies in Ukraine made repeated efforts to lend credibility to these claims of corruption against Biden. Some of these efforts involved Medvedchuk, a personal friend of the Russian President. Putin is the godfather to Medvedchuk’s teenage daughter, and their relationship serves as a primary channel of Russia influence in Ukraine.

[...]

Medvedchuk’s political party approached Telizhenko, who was then working both with Giuliani and Senator Johnson in their efforts to investigate the Biden family. “They tried to go through me to get to Donald Trump or his team,” says Telizhenko. He turned down the offer to work with Medvedchuk, he says, because it would “toxify” his work with Giuliani. “I don’t do the Russians,” Telizhenko added.

  Time

Want to buy a bridge?

“I never discussed this idea with Putin or other senior Russian officials, because I see it as an internal matter for Ukraine,” Medvedchuk wrote. He also denied any attempt to set up a “back channel” to Moscow for President Trump’s associates. “The situation with corruption in the United States of America never interested me. That is an internal matter of the USA.”

How about THIS bridge?

Johnson defends his repeated contacts with Telizhenko. At the start of this year, the Senator prepared a subpoena for Telizhenko to testify before his committee. The Ukrainian even rented an apartment near Washington as he prepared to deliver that testimony and meet with Johnson’s staff. In March, however, the FBI reportedly warned lawmakers in a briefing that Telizhenko could be a “conduit for Russian disinformation about the Bidens,” according to the New York Times. Johnson then shelved his plans to have Telizhenko testify.

[...]

The report released Wednesday details repeated contacts between Telizhenko and the Obama administration National Security Council. The claims of Russian attempts to influence his work, says the Senator, are all part of a Democratic effort to tarnish his reputation. “Because I am investigating corruption in the Obama administration, and they are afraid of what the results of that investigation is, so what they are doing is they are targeting me, trying to destroy me, so that any results of my investigation will be marginalized,” he told a Wisconsin broadcaster last month.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Senate report "clears" Joe Biden in son's Ukraine ties

A report released Wednesday by Senate Republicans found that the role of Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma was "awkward" and at times "problematic" for U.S. officials dealing with the country, but provides no new evidence and found no instance of policy being altered as a result of his role.

"The extent to which Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board affected U.S. policy toward Ukraine is not clear," the report finds.

  ABC

Weaseling out of actually clearing the Bidens, so Trump and his campaign can continue publicly calling Biden corrupt.

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, who led the investigation as chair of the Homeland Security Committee, had openly said he hoped the election-year probe would hurt the Democratic nominee and help President Donald Trump while Democrats had decried the effort as purely political.

Johnson's investigation, carried out in conjunction with GOP Sen. Charles Grassley, who heads the Senate Finance committees, purportedly sought to determine whether Hunter Biden's role on the board of Burisma was an improper conflict of interest with U.S. anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine while Joe Biden served as vice president.

"The Obama administration knew that Hunter Biden’s position on Burisma’s board was problematic and did interfere in the efficient execution of policy with respect to Ukraine," the GOP report found, without drawing a conclusion on the extent of the impact of Hunter Biden's role.

[...]

In their response to Johnson's and Grassley's report, the ranking Democrats on the committees, Sens. Ron Wyden and Gary Peters, issued a separate report stating that Republicans found "no evidence" of wrongdoing by Vice President Biden and "no evidence" of alterations to U.S.-Ukraine policy to assist Hunter Biden.

[...]

[S]enior Democratic aides said that in interviews with at least ten individuals as part of the probe, no witnesses testified to Hunter Biden's position on the board of Burisma as having any direct impact on U.S. policy in Ukraine.

Which won't keep them from being accused repeatedly until Trump dies. And maybe not even then, since his two idiot sons will still be around.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.