The Smirnov Maneuver

I was really confused reading the charges: he’s charged with lying about events that actually happened when he informed on the players as he was employed to do. Have I got that right? The events happened, he informed and the DoJ says he’s lying?

EODmom (View Comment):

I was really confused reading the charges: he’s charged with lying about events that actually happened when he informed on the players as he was employed to do. Have I got that right? The events happened, he informed and the DoJ says he’s lying?

He claimed to have firsthand knowledge and his chronology was off. If you or I claimed to be at the restaurant table where Joe Biden met with his son's clients, that would be perjury even though the event did happen as we claimed. But the media interpretation would be that this proves the event never happened.

Old Bathos (View Post):

the abuse of intelligence services by the Obama Administration, even to the extent of directing foreign allies to target Trump-related persons (this explains the origin of a “tip” from an Australian diplomat and the odd targeting of George Papadopoulos).

I guess you know this, but just for anyone who doesn't. When the Australian career diplomat Alexander Downer (and occasional Australian Secret Service asset) recorded his May 10, 2016 lunch with George Papadopoulos and asked questions about Hillary's e-mails was not the start of this operation. If I recall correctly -- ah, here's wikipedia to the rescue:

[In Rome] Mifsud claimed "substantial connections to Russian officials" and introduced Papadopoulos to a Russian woman that he falsely claimed was Putin's niece. At a meeting in April, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that he had learned that the Russian government had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton.

Papadopoulos also said the girl didn't speak any English and appeared to not know why she was sitting there with them.

And later in London, during lunch, Downer kept asking Papadopoulos about Hillary's e-mails, and Papadopoulos kept correcting him that Mifsud had offered "dirt" on Hillary, not the e-mails.

So all together, somebody, I forget who, contacted and paid Papadopoulos to fly from the US to London to give a speech on oil production. Once there, he was sent by (iirc) the US FBI liaison with the British government from London to Rome, where he was instructed to meet with Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud who taught at Link Campus University in Rome, (which Papadopoulos says was an FBI special training center, and in the process he met a former Italian Foreign Minister who ran the college -- don't remember his name). Anyway, Mifsud later mentioned having dirt on Hillary and introduced him to the Russian girl. And then back in London Papadopoulos was invited to lunch by Alexander Downer who grilled him over Hillary's e-mails and then reported back to the FBI in the US that Papadopoulos was meeting with Russians and trying to purchase Hillary's e-mails.

This was all part of the "surveillance", but more than just CIA surveillance, that Shellenberger, Taibbi and Gutentag wrote about recently.

Well, that's one way to deflect from, and attempt to bury, Bobulinski's testimony.

More details (from a non-CNN source) here:

Special Counsel Indictment Looks Just As Bad For David Weiss As The Charged FBI Informant

On Thursday, Special Counsel David Weiss unsealed an indictment charging a longtime confidential human source (CHS) with making false statements. But it wasn’t Christopher Steele, the CHS who threw the country into turmoil for four years by peddling the fraudulent Steele dossier. Former CHS Stefan Halper, who helped further the Russia-collusion hoax, also wasn’t the subject of the indictment. Nor was CHS Rodney Joffe, who sought to destroy the Trump presidency with the Alfa Bank hoax.

No, it was the CHS who, on June 26, 2020, told his handler that the owner of Burisma claimed he had paid Hunter and Joe Biden each $5 million in bribes in exchange for protection from being investigated by the Ukrainian prosecutor.

Thursday’s indictment revealed the name of that CHS for the first time — Alexander Smirnov — and alleged that Smirnov’s aforementioned statements, which were memorialized in an FD-1023 report, were false.

. . .

The harm here is not merely that investigators wasted time chasing apparently false leads, or that Hunter and Joe Biden suffered from Smirnov’s allegedly false accusations, but also that Smirnov’s lies may overshadow the other unrelated — and substantial — evidence implicating the Bidens in a pay-to-play scandal, rendering it more difficult to obtain justice.

As noted above, this will be used to cast aspersions on THIS.