By Mike Huckabee
April 11, 2024
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There is much that former FBI confidential source (CHS) Alexander Smirnov could tell us about the alleged bribery of the Bidens by Burisma Holdings founder Alexander Zlochevsky, but Smirnov is currently charged with making false statements and is still being held without bail on the pretext that he’s a flight risk. He’s probably slapping his forehead right now for ever getting involved with the FBI, no matter how much they were paying him to inform for them.
Smirnov, you’ll recall, is the CHS whose conversations with Mykola Zlochevsky were immortalized in a “1023” (FD-1023), notes an agent took during the CHS’s debriefing. According to those notes, Zlochevsky had told Smirnov he “paid $5 million to one Biden and $5 million to another Biden. This would have been while Joe Biden was Vice President. According to these notes, Smirnov also said that Hunter was on the Burisma board and the Bidens were paid big money so that VP Joe would use his influence to end the criminal investigation into Burisma being conduced in Ukraine by their lead prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Which is exactly what happened.
Where is Zlochevsky, by the way? Has anyone ever tracked him down? Does the DOJ have him tucked away in a safe house? Or is he hiding from the U.S. government in a secret underground lair? No one seems to be asking about Zlochevsky right now --- weirdly, even the FOX NEWS Digital Exclusive story about this on Wednesday didn’t contain one mention of the name “Zlochevsky” --- so we thought we’d bring him up, considering he’s THE direct source concerning Ukrainian bribes paid to the Bidens for a quid pro quo. How is his health these days?
Of course, you know the story of how then-VP Joe Biden got Shokin fired by threatening to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee if the president didn’t do it. You know this because Biden himself was dumb enough to brag about it on camera in front of a live audience. Even with such a high price, it seems Burisma executives got their money’s worth, as Shokin was indeed fired. A recorded phone call between Joe Biden and the then-president of Ukraine made it clear that Shokin had done nothing wrong, that his firing was only to make sure the money went through.
During his interview in June 2020, Smirnov told the FBI about conversations he’d had with Burisma executives years earlier, in which he said they admitted they’d hired Hunter Biden to sit on their company board “to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”
Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin are tired of being kept in the dark about how the FBI followed up (or didn’t) on what Smirnov had told them, and, on Tuesday, they sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Special Counsel David Weiss, and FBI Director Chris Wray demanding that Garland’s office make Smirnov’s handling agent and that agent’s superiors available for interviews. Their goal: to find out what steps the Bureau and DOJ took to investigate Smirnov’s FD-1023, as it alleges a criminal bribery scheme involving Joe Biden and Ukraine. The senators have been asking the FBI for information relating to this for over a year and a half.
Brooke Singman of FOX NEWS Digital obtained a copy of the letter. “Since October 13, 2022,” it reads, “Congress has requested from the Justice Department and FBI information and records relating to the FD-1023 to better understand what steps, if any, the Justice Department took to investigate the document.”
Of course, information from a “1023” is not verified. It’s the FBI agent’s notes of what a CHS tells him during an interview, the type of material that would go into someone’s “raw” FBI file. But the CHS is expected to tell the truth when he offers it; that’s supposedly why Smirnov has been charged. He has entered a not-guilty plea and faces trial later this month.
Democrats have rejoiced at this, saying (wrongly) that Smirnov’s testimony was the “centerpiece” of the Biden family finance scandal, and that without it, there’s “no evidence.” Anyone who believes that at this point has to be on more drugs than Hunter ever was.
The letter from Grassley and Johnson reflects the confusion shared by virtually everyone who has looked at the Smirnov story: why would investigators treat a CHS this way if he had been so dependable in the past? “The federal indictment of Smirnov leaves many questions unanswered,” it reads, “including how the Justice Department and FBI could use this Confidential Human Source for approximately 14 years, pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars, use his information in investigations and prosecutions, and then ultimately determine he’s a liar.”
The letter also points out that top DOJ officials, including former U.S. attorney Scott Brady, testified that the FD-1023 was “vetted against sources of Russian disinformation” and that DOJ officials “found that it was not sourced from Russian disinformation.”
Gee, are they sure? So many things turn out to be Russian disinformation, at least according to the FBI! (Sarcasm alert. There may be more.)
In July 2023, Grassley and Johnson released the FD-1023, and it was only then that the FBI spoke to Smirnov again, in September. They never even told Congress they’d re-interviewed him.
Grassley said this is “a prime example of the train wreck that ensues when you let partisan politics get in the way of your constitutional duty, and when the government stiff-arms Congress and the American people” with their “colossal transparency failures.”
And the sad truth is, another strongly worded letter is not going to get us transparency from this DOJ. Really, can you imagine Merrick Garland reading the letter from these two senators and at the end springing to his feet saying, “Oh, my gosh! I didn’t realize I was creating such a frustrating environment for my dear Republican friends in Congress. I’d better do what they say. I’ll get on this right away and fulfill all their requests, and let the chips fall where they may for the Biden family, and for the Justice Department, too!”
Told you there would be more sarcasm. A change of heart from Garland will not happen. And if Obama holdover Lisa Monaco, Garland’s second-in-command, ever heard him talking like that, he’d be hidden away so far from the American people, he’d be harder to talk to than either Alexander Smirnov or Mykola Zlochevsky.
RELATED: Speaking of the lack of transparency from our own “Justice” Department, Congress is also dealing with Garland’s decision not to release President Biden’s audio of the interview he had with Special Counsel Hur’s team, the one that made Hur doubt his ability to get the conviction of “an elderly man with a poor memory.” House Republicans will have to decide whether to hold Garland in contempt. He certainly should be. He’s quite contemptible.
Here’s Florida Rep. Byron Donalds on NEWSMAX, accusing Garland of obstruction of justice “on behalf of the President of the United States” for refusing to release it. The only thing that can be done with an AG who obstructs justice is to impeach and remove him from office. (Unfortunately, we can’t throw him in prison for refusing to cooperate with Congress, the way Garland’s DOJ did to Trump aide Peter Navarro.)
And since we don’t have the power to do that, it’s going to take the November election to make any difference. Vote like our whole system of justice depends on it, because it does!
https://www.newsmax.com/
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