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Fox News Silent on Bogus Hunter Biden Witness It Hyped Constantly
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Fox News Silent on Bogus Hunter Biden Witness It Hyped Constantly
When Russian businessman Alexander Smirnov landed at the Las Vegas airport on Valentine’s Day, the FBI was waiting for him.
Since 2010, he had worked with the agency as an informant, providing intel on what the Feds described as “various criminal investigations” — the most infamous of which was the special-counsel inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business dealings abroad.
Smirnov claimed to have explosive information revealing that Joe Biden had taken a cut of his son’s considerable payments as a consultant in exchange for influencing an investigation in Ukraine. But federal prosecutors say Smirnov strayed from the truth: On Thursday, they charged him with making false statements and obstructing the yearslong investigation of the president’s son.
Frequent viewers of right wing media are well acquainted with Smirnov.
Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity have said that his allegations are key to what they describe as the “Biden crime family” — the bogus narrative that Hunter Biden accepted millions of dollars in bribes from the energy company Burisma to give to his father in exchange for then-VP Biden making a Ukrainian investigation into Burisma go away.
According to the watchdog group Media Matters, Hannity alone featured 85 segments in 2023 on the allegations. (Republican politicians also trusted the source: Last July, Representative
James Comer and Senator Chuck Grassley released an FBI record detailing the unsubstantiated allegations, describing Smirnov as a “trusted FBI informant implicating then-Vice President Biden in a criminal bribery scheme.”)
Fox News viewers have heard plenty about the lesser charges Hunter Biden is facing, including possession of a firearm as a drug user and tax evasion.
But after prosecutors provided evidence that the corruption allegation was false, there was no mention of the story on Hannity on Thursday — or anywhere in Fox News’s prime-time programming, for that matter. (Chuck Grassley’s office has also stood by his public release of the unsubstantiated allegations.)
In the 37-page indictment, prosecutors state that Smirnov lied about his claims of Joe Biden’s criminal activity.
The indictment states that, in June 2020, Smirnov told his FBI handlers that he had two meetings in 2015 in which Burisma executives told him that they hired Hunter Biden as a consultant to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.” Smirnov claimed that Burisma paid Hunter Biden $10 million for his trouble.
But prosecutors state that Smirnov never provided any evidence for this explosive allegation.
A meeting Smirnov described taking place in 2015 in which he said he first heard about Biden-related corruption never occurred: Prosecutors found that Smirnov’s first meeting with Burisma happened in 2017, after Biden had left office.
“The Defendant’s story to the FBI was a fabrication,” the indictment states. “An amalgam of otherwise unremarkable business meetings and contacts that had actually occurred but at a later date than he claimed and for the purpose of pitching Burisma on [Smirnov’s] services and products, not for discussing bribes to [Joe Biden] when he was in office.”
“For months, we have warned that Republicans have built their conspiracies about Hunter and his family on lies told by people with political agendas, not facts,”
Hunter Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell said in a statement on Thursday. “We were right, and the air is out of their balloon.”
Addressing reporters on Friday, Joe Biden stated that the allegations have “been an outrageous effort from the beginning.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/fox-news-silent-on-bogus-hunter-biden-witness-it-hyped.html
nymag.com
Fox News Silent on Bogus Hunter Biden Witness It Hyped Constantly
Alexander Smirnov was a mainstay of coverage about the supposed “Biden Crime Family,” but his arrest for lying to Feds drew crickets.
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8 Replies
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Did you EXPECT them to cover it?
Just like I didn’t expect MSNBC and CNN to devote any air time to Biden’s lie that Prosecutor Hur asked him about his dead son. In case you hadn’t heard, Biden made the whole thing up.
President Joe Biden lashed out at Robert Hur last week over one particular line in the special counsel’s report on his handling of classified documents: that Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
“How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden told reporters in an impromptu White House press conference. “Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business.”
But Hur never asked that question, according to two people familiar with Hur’s five-hour interview with the president over two days last October. It was the president, not Hur or his team, who first introduced Beau Biden’s death, they said.
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Fox is NOT a ‘news’ organization. They are the propaganda network you use to wipe your ass and wrap fish guts in.
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Of Course anyone connected to the Florida Criminal Donald Trump has been told by the mob boss to suppress the truth.
Aleksandr Smirnov family invested 2 million into saving Trump’s Truth Social
in December 2021—when it was on the “brink of collapse” after its planned merger with DWAC got delayed—and another $8 million was paid two months later.
The payments came from Paxum Bank, which is registered in Dominica, and ES Family Trust, and the Guardian reports Paxum Bank is partly owned by Anton Postolnikov, a relation of Aleksandr Smirnov, an ally of Vladimir Putin who worked for Putin’s government until 2017 and now runs the Russian-controlled maritime company Rosmorport
forbes.com
Trump’s Media Company Reportedly Under Federal Investigation For Money Laundering Linked To Russia
Trump Media had already come under federal scrutiny over its planned merger with the Digital World SPAC.
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Muscle4Muscle2009
Member
February 18, 2024 at 2:01 am
Fox is NOT a ‘news’ organization. They are the propaganda network you use to wipe your ass and wrap fish guts in.
Are you able to get MSNBC up where you live in Canada? I’m wondering if you will connote “legitimate news organization” status to them.
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This is deja vu all over again. Isn’t there another so called witness who’s on the run after his lies were exposed? Dumber and dumber.
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Member February 19, 2024 at 5:13 pm
This is deja vu all over again. Isn’t there another so called witness who’s on the run after his lies were exposed? Dumber and dumber.
You mean Biden, who claimed he was asked by the prosecutor if he remembered the year his son died, expressed outrage at the question and let the world know it was “none of his damn business?” Except that the prosecutor never asked him that question. It was another Biden lie.
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So what. When did your aunt die, your dog, your car, your brain…………..
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Now the Democrats should bring an investigation into the GOP Bogus case and prove the link to the Florida Criminal Donald Trump…. we all know he was behind this Biden smear.
Indictment of FBI Informant Undermines Centerpiece of GOP’s Impeachment Case
In directing the House to open a formal impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy cited, among other things, an unverified report from a “trusted FBI informant” who alleged that a Ukrainian company gave “a bribe to the Biden family.”
But that informant has now been indicted for lying to the FBI about the bribe.
Alexander Smirnov, who was arrested Feb. 14 at the Las Vegas airport, was indicted for providing “false derogatory information to the FBI” about Biden and his son Hunter in 2020 after Biden became a presidential candidate, according to a Department of Justice press release.
His bribery story unraveled after the FBI last year interviewed Smirnov and reviewed his travel records, messages and emails, which “were in direct conflict with what he reported [to the FBI] in 2020,” the indictment said.
On Fox News, Larry Kudlow, a former Trump aide, interviewed Sen. Ted Cruz about the release of the FBI report. “Every day, the evidence keeps mounting and the evidence that is coming in is number one, of a widespread bribery scheme of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and the entire Biden family, to extract bribes from foreign nationals,” Cruz said.
Later in July, after Hunter Biden’s business partner, Devon Archer, testified before the House oversight committee, Comer told Fox News: “Every day, this bribery scandal becomes more credible.”
Contrary to the claims of Comer and other Republicans, the FBI now has evidence that Smirnov’s tale about the bribes was fabricated.
In the indictment, the FBI said that Smirnov first mentioned Burisma in an FD-1023 form in 2017. At that time, Smirnov recounted a March 2017 phone call with Zlochevsky “concerning Burisma’s interest in acquiring a U.S. company.” At the time, Joe Biden was no longer in office.
Smirnov mentioned that Hunter Biden was on the Burisma board, but there was no mention of bribes. The FBI report at the time described the mention of Hunter Biden as a “brief, non-relevant discussion.”
“Notably, the Defendant did not report in 2017 that in the preceding two years, Burisma Official 1 [Zlochevsky] admitted to the Defendant that he had paid Public Official 1 [Joe Biden] $5 million when Public Official 1 was still in office, as the Defendant later claimed,” the indictment said.
The indictment called these meetings and phone calls “fabrications.” In fact, the indictment said, Smirnov did not meet or talk with any Burisma officialsprior to 2017, contrary to what he told FBI agents in 2020, and he did not travel to Vienna in December 2015, when he supposedly met Zlochevzky.
“In short,” the indictment said, Smirnov “transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against … the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his candidacy.”
The indictment included screen grabs of messages between Smirnov and his FBI handler that indicate Smirnov’s alleged bias against Biden.
factcheck.org
Indictment of FBI Informant Undermines Centerpiece of GOP's Impeachment Case - FactCheck.org
Republicans have cited an unverified report by an FBI informant to allege that Joe Biden took a bribe from a Ukrainian company. But that informant has now been indicted for lying to the FBI about the bribe.
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