In early June 2023, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) garnered a significant amount of attention from right-wing media when she publicly reported something she said she learned from the FBI. The claim suggested that President Biden and his son Hunter had received a bribe from a Ukrainian Business executive. However, it was later clarified that the FBI was concerned about releasing an unredacted copy of an interview with the informant who made that allegation because it might reveal the informant’s identity, putting him at risk due to his connections to dangerous individuals.
Last week, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging the informant, Alexander Smirnov, with lying to government officials specifically about the bribery claim. Evidence presented in the indictment made a strong argument that the informant never had the conversation in which he was told about a bribe because, at the time the conversation allegedly occurred, he had never met the person who had made the allegation. It was also suggested that Smirnov was motivated by hostility to Biden’s candidacy. The filing articulated some of those alleged contacts, including with people linked to Russian intelligence. Smirnov allegedly introduced a false claim about Hunter Biden to the Justice Department, suggesting that the Russians were attempting to influence the U.S. Election.
The allegation about Hunter Biden visiting the Kyiv hotel was apparently relayed to Smirnov only after the full documentation of his Biden-bribery allegation was made public by congressional Republicans. The revelation from this week’s Smirnov filing suggests that the Trump-led effort to pretend Russian influence hasn’t happened is so blinkered that it ends up putting Republicans in rhetorically embarrassing positions.
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