Wednesday, February 28, 2024

THE SMIRNOV TURNOFF, DEVINE ED.

THE SMIRNOV TURNOFF, DEVINE ED.

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN BIDEN CORRUPTIONBIDEN JUSTICE DEPARTMENTFBI

Miranda Devine addresses “The Smirnov turnoff” in today’s New York Post column “New election year means another Russiagate as Biden, Dems try to smear impeachment probe.” Devine is of course the invaluable historian of The Laptop From Hell and the Biden family business. Here is the opening of her column:

For the 2016 election, Democrats launched Russiagate 1.0: the Trump-Russia collusion hoax proven groundless by the Mueller investigation.

For the 2020 election, it was Russiagate 2.0. Biden campaign adviser Antony Blinken prompted former CIA Acting Director Mike Morell to concoct the “Dirty 51” letter falsely claiming that Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop was Russian disinformation.

That lie justified censorship of The Post’s accurate stories from the laptop of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s international influence peddling schemes.

Now that we’re heading into the 2024 election, we have Russiagate 3.0. Democrats pretend the impeachment inquiry has “utterly collapsed” because of the curious indictment last week of trusted FBI informant Alexander Smirnov on false statement charges after he allegedly told his FBI handler that Hunter and Joe each had received a $5 million bribe from the Ukrainians.

In a frantic effort to keep Smirnov in jail pre-trial, prosecutors for notorious Biden protector David Weiss, the Delaware US attorney, used language ripped straight out of the Russiagate textbook: “Smirnov’s efforts to spread misinformation about a candidate of one of the two major parties [Joe] continues.”

Now Smirnov is being used as make-believe vindication of the 51 former intelligence officials who signed the fake laptop letter to help Biden win the 2020 election.

Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA operations officer who claims to be a victim of the dubious “Havana syndrome,” pounced on the Smirnov story.

“It validates exactly what we were warning about,” he told NBC News. “The Russians were going to push this narrative of Hunter Biden and corruption, to hurt Joe Biden.”

No. Hunter’s “laptop from hell” was not Russian disinformation. It still isn’t. The FBI has had it in its possession since December 2019 and has authenticated it as real and valid for use in court.

The Dirty 51 are grasping at straws to try to justify their interference in the 2020 election. It wasn’t the Russians. It was Trump-deranged former CIA management who felt any means justified the ends if they could stop Trump winning a second term.

But now, as the laptop is augmented by whistleblower receipts and witness testimony, and as House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer unravels the complex web of corrupt foreign payments to the Biden family, the president’s praetorian guard is desperate. They are drowning in evidence of corruption while burbling, “There is no evidence!” Russia is all they have.

The joke is on Biden’s media handmaidens still pushing Joe Biden’s absurd lies.

No, the laptop is not a “Russian plant,” as he claimed. And, yes, Joe did talk to Hunter about his “overseas business dealings.”

Heck, he did a lot more than talk.

He made himself available for breakfasts, lunches, dinners, coffees, and pleasant chit chat on the speakerphone with Hunter’s foreign benefactors, all to oil the wheels of the family business — which was selling access to him, as he well knew.

“Look after my boy,” he told Kremlin-backed oligarch Elena Baturina and her husband, Yuri Luzhkov, the corrupt former mayor of Moscow, when Hunter activated the speakerphone at a Russian restaurant in Brooklyn called Romanoff on May 4, 2014.

They sure did. Just three months earlier, Baturina had wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, the firm cofounded by Hunter, his “best friend in business” Devon Archer, John Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz, and Jimmy Bulger, nephew of mobster “Whitey” Bulger.

Devine has much more here.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/02/the-smirnov-turnoff-devine-ed.php

The Illegal Immigration Invasion Isn't Due to 'Incompetence.' It's the Plan.

The Illegal Immigration Invasion Isn't Due to 'Incompetence.' It's the Plan.

AP Photo/Andres Leighton

It's not like the people paying millions of illegal aliens to come to the U.S. for some social experiment don't know that what they're doing is national suicide; it's that they don't care that it's national suicide. That's a feature, not a bug. 

They don't like the colonial power that the U.S. was way back when, and this is the payback. They know only what their woke teachers cribbed from Howard Zinn, and now they're "making a difference!" by ruining their own country because it deserves to be a Third World hell-hole. 

You can't have complete strangers from entirely different cultures come to the United States in numbers that eclipse the populations of 36 states and expect unity and kumbaya. No, what you'll get is a new caste system. What you'll get are no-go zones featuring Muslim men raping "infidel" women on New Year's, more "honor" killings, and a complete disruption again in undereducated American men chasing fewer jobs for less money.

Parents will worry, if they don't already, about their kids going to the same school as kids who cannot read and write in their own language much less English, and knowing that their child's advancement will go at the speed of the slowest kid. More kids means less spending per pupil. Where are all those teachers' union swells crying about smaller classroom sizes? Oh, that's right. They got their COVID raises and are keeping calm until it's time for the next contract negotiation. 

The NGOs and government adjacent activists are being given money by the feds and the U.N. to pay these chaos tourists $372 million of mostly our money with an eye toward increasing that amount in 2024. Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies says these payments are made by credit cards, vouchers, and envelopes of cold cash to people who just days before were counting their money in rubles or yuan. 

These people are given free health care, housing, and rent support, depending on their background and gender. It's all part of the plan. And you? You're not. You, my friend, are collateral damage.

"If you build it they will come," goes the "Field of Dreams" quote. And if you pay them they will come, too. 

Since Texas has cut off a major conduit for illegal immigration, much of the flow has been diverted by the cartels and NGOs to California's San Diego County. El Cajon's Mayor Bill Wells attributes a lot of the illegal immigration flooding his city to the incompetence of government. It's not. It's the plan.

This is what happens when you put your entire government into the service of an international cabal of despots at the United Nations and sit back and watch, as Joe Biden has done. 

What does Joe Biden have to worry about? These masses won't come to Rehoboth Beach and change his life. He couldn't care less. 

See my interview with Bensman a while back for the Adult in the Room Podcast if you need more insight into what this illegal immigration is doing to America's border. If you prefer Rumble because you like free speech you can find that link here.

RNC Security Officer Who First Responded to J6 Pipe Bomb Claims Official Story 'Makes No Sense'

RNC Security Officer Who First Responded to J6 Pipe Bomb Claims Official Story 'Makes No Sense'

AP Photo/John Minchillo

The director of security for the Republican National Committee recently called into question the official explanation of the pipe bomb that was discovered on Jan. 6, 2021, saying that it "makes no sense whatsoever." Let's be real: not much that happened that day makes sense. The official narrative of events has proven to be less than accurate. 

And if everything was as cut and dried as the narrative the Democratic Party and many talking heads make it out to be, with Trump supporters twisted into caricatures of "right-wing extremism," then why on earth has so much video evidence emerged since the incident to show that police officers on the scene allowed individuals into the Capitol building and even escorted some of them around? 

Something smells fishy about the whole situation, but if you dare question the narrative, you get slapped with the "conspiracy theorist" label. That particular phrase was created to shame and silence anyone who questioned an official story coming from the government. Keep that in mind.

According to the Daily Wire:

Kenneth Capolino, a former Capitol Police officer who went on to work as the RNC’s director of security, was the man who personally alerted Capitol Police to the bomb near the RNC and managed the emergency response.

Capolino told The Daily Wire, in his first public remarks on the incident, that it looked like a stereotypical IED, or improvised explosive device, that is used by law enforcement in training sessions. “Any of the IED awareness training I’ve been to with law enforcement, that’s like the quintessential training device,” he told The Daily Wire. “That’s exactly what it looks like.”

His firsthand account adds to questions about the purported pipe bombs, which went undetected for a long period of time outside both the RNC and its Democrat counterpart, the Democratic National Committee. The bomb plot is by far the most dramatic part of January 6, but the FBI has made no progress in determining who planted them — and Democrats investigating the plot appear to have gone out of their way to avoid mentioning their existence since.

Capolino states that any law enforcement official who came across the device would immediately be able to identify it. 

“They set up scenarios like that so you know what to look for, so they have to make training devices,” he said. “There was so much about January 6, but nothing about the pipe bombs, which I thought was so, so strange.”

That is strange. Pipe bombs are serious explosives that can do a whole lot of damage to both people and property. Given that a pipe bomb could be seen as an act of terrorism, why wasn't anyone talking about it? Why does it seem as if Democrats were attempting to bury the lede, as we say in journalism?

Capolino found the pipe bomb in question just a few moments before protestors started entering the Capitol building. The device was hooked up to a 60-minute egg timer, but it had been in its location since the previous night. Almost like it was part of a setup of some kind, right?

“I was two feet from it. Why would someone construct a device with a one-hour kitchen timer, place it [at] 8:30 p.m. the night before, if they intended for it to detonate 16 hours later?” Capolino then asked.

Though referred to in the media as the RNC bomb, it was actually at the neighboring Capitol Hill Club, a Republican hangout. Capolino said his guards would have found it during their hourly sweeps if it was on RNC property.

A similar bomb was found minutes after the RNC bomb was detected, directly in front of the DNC beside a bench, raising questions about how the DNC would not have located it for seventeen hours, despite a bomb-sniffing dog that walked by it. Kamala Harris, at the time a U.S. Senator and the vice-president elect, was at the DNC, meaning there would likely be extra security in place, Capolino explained.

Capolino then revealed that there was no way the Secret Service would have allowed the area of the DNC premises to go unswept before the vice president entered and that if "anyone was patrolling the DNC that should have been found at like 9 p.m.”

But Capolino said that whether or not it was a real bomb, the FBI’s story that it was placed at 8:30 p.m. on January 5 is true, at least for the Capitol Hill Club. He personally retrieved, reviewed, and handed over to the FBI, RNC footage showing the suspect. “We have the guy walking through the back alleyway at that time,” he said.

As Capolino has already pointed out, there are a lot of weird things about this whole situation. For example, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) identified some surveillance footage that clearly shows police officers, after a passerby notified them about the DNC bomb, meandered around and didn't do anything to clear the area or seal it off from the general public. They even allowed children to walk in front of it, which is a huge no-no if the bomb is live. When the Daily Wire asked the DNC if they evacuated staff from the building after finding the explosive device, they refused to answer. 

Why the silence on something of that nature? Seems like such a small thing to be secretive about. Unless, of course, they didn't evacuate the premises because they somehow knew in advance that the bomb wasn't real. Gee, I wonder how they would be made privy to such information? 

And even worse, it took the FBI two whole years to finally investigate to see if anyone in the area had information about the bombs. Why the long wait? By that time, folks aren't going to remember if they noticed anything or not, and that's probably the point. 

Capolino said that although he provided video to the FBI immediately after the event, the FBI showed up at the home of the security officer who was manning the booth six months ago to reinterview him, and asked for his supervisor’s information, “but I never heard from them.”

The FBI initially released only a couple of grainy pictures of the suspect, despite the existence of many more videos and photos. The still photos made it impossible for people to identify the suspect by the way he walked, Capolino said.

“I’m the last one to speculate, but it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t at all,” he stated.

Almost eight months later, the bureau released footage revealing that after the suspect placed the explosives, he circled back to the Capitol Hill Club, where he waved to a cop who drove by.

The FBI has arrested more than 1,200 people for charges as minor as trespassing at the Capitol on January 6, using high-tech techniques like “geofencing” cell phone records. But despite video showing the suspect using a cell phone on January 5, an FBI official told Congress that it could not find the suspect in cell phone records, perhaps because a batch of cell phone data had gone missing.

Journalist Julie Kelly reported that the Capitol Hill resident who found the bomb near the RNC, Karlin Younger, worked for an FBI contractor. The news outlet Public on Monday quoted a security analyst questioning Younger’s demeanor in the video of her discovering the bomb, saying she “never expressed any worry” and “leaned down and placed her ear near the device to listen if the timer was ticking.”

Younger then approached the guard shack at the RNC and asked to see the individual in charge. The guard in the shack called for Capolino.

“I spoke to her and she said, ‘I was taking out my garbage and I see this weird pipe thingy with wires coming out of it,’ so I ran over there and there it was next to the garbage cans,” he explained.

Capolino snapped a photograph of the bomb and walked toward the Capitol South Metro station because he knew an officer would be there. He showed the officer the photo. 

“He immediately alerted USCP command center via radio, I used the guards that I had to set up containment while Capitol Police set up their quarantine, then we went into the building to evacuate while that was going on. Shortly after that was when the FBI used their bomb robot. I saw them manipulating the robot. I’m not sure what method of disposal they used for the device, but I believe they disrupted it,” he remarked.

Capolino then stated that after police shut down the area, they noticed a red pickup truck that was packed full of various weapons. It was located in a spot in front of the RNC and close to the Capitol South Metro, which means the area is highly trafficked by police. 

The owner of the vehicle eventually identified himself to law enforcement because the pipe bomb quarantine prevented him from retrieving his vehicle.

To Capolino, the pipe bomb and the truck full of weapons and Molotov cocktails directly outside of the RNC and next to Capitol office buildings were the most dramatic and dangerous elements of the day. Yet the pipe bombs were barely ever spoken of, and few even know the red pickup truck incident occurred.

The records show that Lonnie Leroy Coffman, a 72-year-old veteran of the Vietnam war and Alabama resident, parked the pickup truck containing “loaded firearms within arms-reach of the driver’s seat, including a 9mm handgun, a rifle, and a shotgun. Also inside the pickup truck and in its covered bed were hundreds of rounds of ammunition, large-capacity ammunition feeding devices, a crossbow with bolts, machetes, camouflage smoke devices, a stun gun, cloth rags, lighters, a cooler containing eleven… Molotov cocktails” modified to operate like napalm. Coffman also had a gun on his person.

How can anyone look at any of this and not think there's something off about the whole situation? Why, with all of these bizarre occurrences, does it make one a conspiracy theorist to ask questions and attempt to get to the truth? I'm asking a lot of questions because we don't have answers and explanations for what is going on, and we deserve to know. 

If the government plotted to make Trump supporters look like domestic terrorists to destroy a movement built on the idea of restoring this country to its former glory, those responsible should be held accountable. To pull off something of that magnitude, you would have to have powerful individuals in on it. 

Prosecutors charged Coffman with a total of 17 counts, then tossed all of them out except for one related to an unregistered firearm, which is a federal offense, and carrying a pistol without a required license, which violates city law. 

Why are they being so gentle with Coffman, who was armed to the teeth, yet protesters who possessed no weapons are having the book thrown at them in court? Even more strange is the fact there was never any explanation given for why the man had the weapons on him in the first place. 

Coffman received a sentence of 46 months behind bars. 

“This whole thing just doesn’t make sense,” Capolino stated about the whole pipe bomb fiasco. “People need to have all the information to find out what was actually going on. I don’t feel like the public is getting all the information.”

Will we ever get the truth of what happened that day? I hope we get answers, but I'm not holding my breath.

https://pjmedia.com/michaelcantrell/2024/02/22/rnc-security-officer-who-was-first-responder-to-j6-pipe-bomb-claims-official-story-doesnt-make-sense-n4926682

Journalist Nails What the Russian Collusion Antics Signify for the Democratic Party

Journalist Nails What the Russian Collusion Antics Signify for the Democratic Party

AP Photo/Chris Carlson

Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag didn’t miss the recent string of Russian collusion theories that we were subjected to this week. The Russians were using the House Republican majority to interfere in the 2024 election. Nancy Pelosi lobbed the ‘Kremlin is blackmailing’ Trump narrative again—all of which are tinfoil hat material. These theories have long been debunked, with Shellenberger, Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi recently publishing a series about how Moscow wanted Hillary to win, how the intelligence community laid the groundwork for the collusion hoax long before the FBI, and how this community of spooks, overall, has been engaged in a sustained campaign of targeting Trump supporters and trying to shape public opinion. Their illegal spy operations have been exposed, so why are Americans addicted to these Russian narratives? Like Hunter Biden with crack cocaine, they can’t get enough—and Shellenberger knows why. 

You could probably guess the answer, too. It’s that a healthy share of Americans remain convinced that Russia tinkered with our election when it was the CIA. Granted, the Kremlin crackpots are fewer in number than they were in 2019, but it’s enough to keep these zombies glued to MSNBC and CNN. Liberals still snort these fake narratives like cocaine, and it makes it easier for Democrats to target and attack their political enemies as traitors. It veers back into the neo-McCarthyism that the Left had embraced since 2012 when Barack Obama mocked then-GOP nominee Mitt Romney for declaring that Russia is a geopolitical foe of the United States. There’s also another reason: Democrats don’t have much to run on in 2024. 

The Substack post added that Hillary Clinton’s people needed to neutralize the Clinton Cash book written by Peter Schweitzer, which dropped before the Uranium One deal was reported in The New York Times, where Clinton, then-secretary of state, signed off on an agreement that allowed a Russian company, Rosatom, to control one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Uranium One’s then-chairman had donated millions to the Clinton Foundation. The spooks were worried about Trump’s foreign policy, and all these roads intersected in the creation of this Russian collusion hoax. The post also highlights what these collusion delusion games signify for Democrats nowadays (via Public): 

While this information helps fill in some of the gaps that exist in terms of understanding how the Russia collusion conspiracy theory began, it does not explain why the media and Democratic politicians continue to push it. Part of the reason appears to be that, though the Russia conspiracy theory was debunked several years ago, many Democratic voters continue to believe it. As such, the conspiracy theory offers a readily available cognitive framework in which to put concerns around Trump and MAGA Republicans. 

The Russia conspiracy theory has the additional benefit of triggering the same “out-group” heuristic triggered by Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade of the 1950s. By casting Trump and MAGA Republicans as aligned with a hostile foreign power, it is easier to justify unethical and illegal behaviors to persecute them. We saw this previously when leaders of the Censorship Industrial Complex, such as Renée Diresta and Alex Stamos, first generated media hysteria over “foreign disinformation” before implying that “domestic disinformation” from MAGA voters was somehow connected to Russian disinformation attempts. McCarthyism is the process of re-framing domestic political opponents as foreign enemies. 

At the same time, it’s not clear that the Russia conspiracy theory still has the power it had from 2017 to 2020, which raises the question of why Democrats are still using it. The answer may be that the Democrats do not feel they have much else to run on in 2024. Trump is ahead in the polls, and Democrats’ fears that he and other Republicans will completely ban abortion appear to have subsided. Biden and the Democrats got almost everything they wanted on climate change. 

As such, the Russia conspiracy theory signifies the emptiness or nihilism of the Democratic party. It has achieved the agenda it set out to achieve on everything from health care to climate change to LGBT rights. It has now little left to advocate for beyond demonizing its political opponents as Putin’s puppets. 

They’ve got nothing left. Is that the main reason? Biden’s memory has degraded. Most Americans don’t view his agenda favorably, with nearly half saying they’re in worse financial shape than they were four years ago. Inflation remains high, and most think he’s too old, which dovetails into mental health issues. To make matters worse, Biden is facing a full-blown Muslim voter revolt in the Rust Belt. Young people, Blacks, Hispanics, and the rank-and-file of organized labor are running from this guy. In short, Biden took the Obama coalition and f**ked it. So, yeah, why not sell the Kremlin cocaine that makes liberals believe the Russian interference/disinformation tales? The media already tried to do that with the indictment of the FBI’s confidential informant, who alleged that Burisma bribed the Bidens, but that doesn’t negate the shady access-selling deals by the Biden family: 

To be sure, there is evidence that the Russian government spreads disinformation. For example, on Tuesday, Justice Department Special Counsel David Weiss alleged that an FBI informant named Alexander Smirnov lied when he claimed a Ukrainian natural gas company had given millions of dollars in bribes to the Biden family. Weiss wrote that Smirnov admitted Russian intelligence officials “were involved in passing” him the story. The revelation proves that there is no evidence of Biden family influence peddling and that the Russian government is actively interfering in the 2024 election, concluded some journalists. 

In truth, the allegations by Weiss about Smirnov prove no such thing. It is well established that President Biden’s son, Hunter, and brother, James, sold access. There are many emails and text messages, for example, showing the two men promising meetings and involvement from President Joe Biden in various business deals. And one of Hunter Biden’s business partners has testified that selling access to Joe Biden was at the center of various deals the men sought with investors around the world, from Ukraine to China. 

While the claim that the Russian government is actively interfering in the 2024 election should be understood as a conspiracy theory, we know that Russian interference in the 2016 election was too trivial to have any measurable impact.

Smirnov was a trusted source for years, and the FBI fought like the Japanese on Okinawa to prevent congressional Republicans from seeing his FD-1023 report. Only with threats of contempt lobbed at FBI Director Chris Wray last year did the Hoover boys relent, but now they’re throwing him under the bus when they knew he was passing Russian disinformation. It comes right as the Hunter Biden plea deal blows up, along with looming trial dates for the president’s son over tax evasion and gun charges. The same FBI that illegally spied on Trump campaign officials. The same agency that set up fake kidnapping plots of Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan.  

Sorry, but I’m more worried about Langley and the Hoover folks messing with our rights and elections than the Russians. 

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/02/23/nihilism-and-mccarthyism-journalist-highlights-whats-fueling-the-trump-russia-narratives-n2635625?utm_source=thdailyvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&recip=28668535

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Why the Democrats and Media Continue to Ignore Tony Bobulinski and His Evidence Against the Bidens

Why the Democrats and Media Continue to Ignore Tony Bobulinski and His Evidence Against the Bidens

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Last summer, we wrote about an explosive allegation by a trusted FBI confidential informant who claimed Burisma executives had paid a $10 million bribe to Joe and Hunter Biden. The accusation, we noted, was relayed by a man the Bureau had paid and relied upon for years.  At the time, my response entailed "highlight[ing] the serious nature of the informant's allegations, while also remaining healthily skeptical and asking more questions.  One central question was whether any of the CHS' statements in the document were ever corroborated.  If not, was that because they weren't investigated, or because they were probed and found to be unreliable?"  Days ago, the informant in question was arrested and charged with lying about this matter:

 An FBI informant has been charged with fabricating a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden, his son Hunter and a Ukrainian energy company, a claim that is central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress. Alexander Smirnov falsely reported to the FBI in June 2020 that executives associated with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden $5 million each in 2015 or 2016, prosecutors said in an indictment. Smirnov told his handler that an executive claimed to have hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” according to court documents. Prosecutors say Smirnov in fact had only routine business dealings with the company in 2017 and made the bribery allegations after he “expressed bias” against Joe Biden while he was a presidential candidate..Smirnov, 43, appeared in court in Las Vegas briefly Thursday after being charged with making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record

If this man invented the whole thing, he deserves his punishment -- though that will be awkward for the FBI, given their reliance upon him as a trusted and compensated source for years.  And while his specific bribery allegation was definitely a bombshell at the time (largely ignored by many of the media sources now rushing to report about the demise of a story they'd refused to cover), I don't agree that it's a lynchpin of the Biden family enrichment scandal being investigated by House Republicans.  More on that in a moment.  If the evidence leads where the government says it will, I'll happily concede that Smirnov's story is totally fabricated and the bribery tale is off the table.  For now, however, some people remain skeptical.  Miranda Devine, who was well ahead of the curve on the Biden family scandal, and Hunter Biden's laptop in particular, discussed these developments on my radio show this week:

Here's part of her latest New York Post column:

[Biden] has lied point-blank when confronted, claiming to have no knowledge of Hunter and Jim’s business dealings, despite dozens of proven instances when he met Hunter’s foreign business partners, and spoke to them at least two dozen times on speakerphone. But now, like a drowning man, the president suddenly has seized on the Smirnov indictment as vindication, making a rare live statement at the White House on Friday to assert that the impeachment inquiry against him is destroyed, and demanding that House Republicans drop their investigation, saying it was “an outrageous effort from the beginning.” [Democrats] have created a straw man out of Smirnov, pretending he was the “lead informant” of the impeachment inquiry. But he was no such thing. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) could do nothing with Smirnov’s allegation, other than publicize it, because the FBI kept the informant secret, as well as the existence or otherwise of any “investigation.” The Smirnov indictment doesn’t mean Joe and Hunter are in the clear. Far from it. The evidence against them is overwhelming...

....[Comer] had gathered evidence through bank records of millions of dollars from China, Russia, Ukraine, Romania and Kazakhstan being laundered through multiple shell companies for the Biden family, and jaw-dropping testimony from Hunter’s former business partners of Joe’s meetings with Hunter’s foreign benefactors right before big payments dropped. The modus operandi of Biden corruption was well established. And that was even before the IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler testified to Congress about the corrupt interference by the DOJ on the Hunter Biden investigation that dragged on for five years in Delaware before US Attorney David Weiss authorized a sweetheart plea deal in which Hunter would cop to no felony and get blanket immunity against future prosecutions.  Shapley and Ziegler showed that Weiss could have charged Hunter on the felony tax and gun charges in 2019.  Instead, Weiss tried to let Hunter off scot-free and allowed the statute of limitations to run out on the most serious charges — having to do with Ukraine and Burisma — that would have led investigators to Joe Biden’s door. 

Again, we will return to the serious and substantiated accusations against the Bidens shortly, but recall that the Weiss investigation reportedly refused to even look into the Smirnov allegations, some details of which were said to have been confirmed -- not debunked -- by FBI agents in the Pittsburgh office, who'd initially assessed them.  Attorneys for the highly credible career IRS whistleblowers are calling into question Special Counsel Weiss' objectivity and motives in this episode:

But even if you'd like fully discard all of Smirnov's claims, the whistleblowers' evidence remains.  So do the bank records showing huge payments flowing into multiple Biden family members' accounts from overseas sources, via numerous shell corporations.  And so does the consistent and unchanged testimony of various Biden business associates -- including Devon Archer, and especially Tony Bobulinski.  The latter affirmed his firsthand knowledge of the Bidens' scheme under oath in Congressional testimony.  He also noted that after bringing his allegations and evidence to federal investigators, he was never contacted again:

How is this possible?  It's possible if the Biden DOJ was determined to not really investigate any of this.  The Wall Street Journal editorial board makes several crucial points on all of this:

Remember Tony Bobulinski? He’s the former Hunter Biden business partner who exposed details about the Biden family business in 2020 but was ignored by the press. Last week he testified before the House Oversight and Judiciary committees, and he confirmed how the Bidens sold political influence and the family “brand.”...He has provided dozens of emails, text messages and business and financial documents to back up his testimony...He says Joe Biden was also central to the [China/CEFC] deal. Mr. Bobulinski says he met the then former Vice President in early May 2017 in Los Angeles in the context of the CEFC deal. Hunter arranged a meeting with his father, though Mr. Bobulinski says he was “coached” by his partners that “this is going to be a high-level meeting. We’re not going to go into a lot of detail” about CEFC. This was prelude to an email chain in mid-May that discussed shares in the new business venture, including “10 held by H for the big guy.” Mr. Bobulinski says “the big guy—100 percent—is Joe Biden.” He told the committees that “not once did anybody else that was on that email chain” question this phrase because everyone knew “who they were talking about.”

Mr. Bobulinksi provided the committee with texts and emails in which Hunter and Mr. Gilliar refer to Joe’s involvement in the deal. Mr. Gilliar warned Mr. Bobulinski in late May in a text: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u are face to face, I know u know that but they are paranoid.”... He points to “stacks of evidence that Joe Biden showed up at meetings, shook hands, participated in phone calls,” including claims he was on at least 20 Hunter business calls. Joe Biden “was calling to demonstrate the Biden brand to whoever was in that meeting, whether it was the Ukrainians, the Romanians, the Russians, Colombians, Chinese, whoever it was. That’s all he had to do.” Mr. Bobulinski says. “Just him being on the phone is evidence of involvement and enabling the transaction.” Mr. Bobulinski first tried to tell his story in the days before the 2020 election, but the press closed ranks around the Bidens. He told the House last week that he gave a voluntary interview to the FBI in October 2020, but the FBI never followed up. He was also never contacted by U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who is investigating Hunter. He says he was warned by Mr. Walker in October 2020 to stop talking because his claims were “going to bury us.”

The editorial concludes, "voters can decide if this matters to their choice for President, but it is a long way from Joe Biden’s 2020 claims that he had nothing to do with Hunter’s business. As Mr. Bobulinski put it to the committee: 'The only reason any of these international business transactions took place, with tens of millions of dollars flowing directly to the Biden family, was because Joe Biden was in high office. The Biden family business was Joe Biden, period.'”  I asked Devine whether a single piece of Bobulinski's account, repeated on national television and several times under oath, has ever been refuted.  She responded that none of it has.  If not for rank political bias, how could that important reality be ignored by people rushing to assert that the apparent implosion of the Smirnov claims (which, again, they studiously avoided altogether until he was arrested for lying) somehow destroys the basis of the impeachment inquiry probe?  The question answers itself.  I'll leave you with this:

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2024/02/23/bobulinski-n2635593?utm_source=thdailyvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&recip=28668535