Open Threads

Don’t think most people get the magnitude of the Hunter Biden/Smirnov revelations. One big ongoing Russian operation from 2015 until today. Basically confirms what was always obvious, “Hunter Biden laptop” was part of the same operation. https://t.co/m1fuUs0vR3 via @TPM

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 21, 2024

Josh Marshall, at TPM, on “A Bigger Story Than You Can Possibly Imagine”:

… Let’s review recent events. First came the news that prosecutors in special counsel David Weiss’s office had decided that the confidential FBI informant who had been one of Biden’s top accusers had been lying and that they were charging him for lying to the FBI. That next step is critical. Informants lie to prosecutors all the time. They seldom get charged. It’s one standard to decide your informant isn’t telling the truth and/or won’t hold up at trial. It’s an entirely different one to think that you can prove they knowingly lied beyond a reasonable doubt. Clearly investigators felt they had caught Alexander Smirnov dead to rights. Yesterday came news that Smirnov has admitted that he got his false stories from Russian intelligence officers. Smirnov isn’t just at the center of the DOJ investigation, he’s at the center of what we have to generously call James Comer’s House inquiry, the premise for Joe Biden’s increasingly wobbly impeachment.

And on top of that, Hunter Biden’s lawyers are now claiming, as part of their effort to force new disclosures by Weiss’s office, that it was new or newly specific accusations from Smirnov which scuttled the plea deal which blew up as it was being agreed to in a federal court room. That point about the plea deal remains an accusation and obviously an interested one from Biden’s attorneys. But given what we’ve learned over the last week from the prosecution side — the folks who were repeatedly duped and took actions on the basis of disinformation directly from Russian intelligence — it seems to me highly likely that it’s true…

For years I’ve continued saying, against what seems like the unified thinking of every reporter, editorialist and credentialed smart person, that the fabled “Hunter Biden Laptop” was obviously the product of a Russian influence operation. The story was absurd on its face. Somehow Hunter Biden decided in a drugged-up fugue that he needed to take his laptop to a computer repair shop. He then forgot about it. The legally blind owner of the repair shop decided to crack it open and look at the files (as one does, of course) and then somehow managed to get the contents to Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon.

Sounds totally legit, as they say!…

Are we really supposed to believe that these Russian operations, which kicked off in 2015 and continued into 2017, were going full force through 2018 and 2019 with Rudy Giuliani and continue right up until today somehow played no role in the unbelievable story of Hunter Biden’s laptop? Of course they did.

In talking with David Kurtz before I started writing this David noted that we can’t really say Republicans and MAGA Republicans were duped. And that’s 100% right. The evolution of U.S. politics, egged along, skid-greased by helpful Russians, created a context in U.S. politics where these folks didn’t really have to be duped. The Russians under Putin are the good guys. If they’re making sure we have the most current information where’s the harm in that?

The real issue, as I note above, is the reporters, editorialists and commentators, who vouched for and credited this whole edifice of lies and bullshit. Yes, they guffawed when James Comer came forward yet again with more revelations that never quite panned out. But they didn’t give up hope. They were always waiting for the next revelation. Comer and his Republican colleagues hadn’t provided “hard evidence” yet but there sure was a lot of smoke.

This entire thing has been based on Russian plants and intelligence operations from the start. Every bit of it. It’s been obvious. And yet, well … they’re all dupes. Somehow almost a decade after this whole thing started we’re shocked to see, wow, Weiss’s office was being led around by another cat’s paw of the Russian intelligence services. We’re shocked. But why are we shocked? Every last person among the serious people of the nation’s capital and the sprawling thing called elite received opinion has egg on their face. And it’s not even clear they fully realize it yet.

it is honestly really hilarious how almost all of the most lurid resistlib talking points end up being true https://t.co/xOWgOplcdM

— Reconstructionist (@un_a_valeable) February 21, 2024

A note on the roots of the GOP addiction, from Mr. Charles P. Pierce’s weekly subscriber post:

When the news came down this week that Alexander Smirnov, whose charges against Hunter Biden and Hunter Biden’s father formed the basis of the snipe hunt that is the House “impeachment inquiry,” had been busted by the FBI because he allegedly made his whole tale up, probably with the help of the Russian intelligence apparatus, it was a no good, very bad day for Republican politicians, and for many members of our elite political media. Some of them gobbled up the bogus information that Smirnov laundered through the likes of Rep. James Comer because they believed it. More of them gobbled it up because scandals, even fake ones, are fun to cover. Another faction gobbled it up because they feel some vestigial moral obligation to lend credibility to both sides on everything. These are the most dangerous ones.

But all of them shared one fatal intellectual flaw — they declined for whatever reason not to entertain the notion that human laundromats like Comer, and House Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan, either didn’t know what they were talking about, or didn’t care to know what they were talking about. (The third alternative, that they knew they were passing along was disinformation, and that they did so anyway, is the most sinister.) There was an almost criminal lack of professionalism in so much of the coverage and now it has come a’cropper in the most embarrassing public way possible.

So far, the congressional suckers in this farce are sticking to their story. They don’t have a lot of choice in the matter. They’ve ridden the train too far to get off now. They can wait and see if the little momentum they have peters out on its own. They can hope that Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice slow-plays the prosecution of Mr. Smirnov until everybody forgets this week’s news. They can hope that the former president* becomes president*-elect and scrambles the country’s politics forever. But they can’t come off the hunt without angering their party’s irrational base while looking ridiculous to the rest of us and, possibly, putting themselves in legal jeopardy.

What is most interesting is how closely they followed the directions into what James Carville once called “the puke funnel” during the Republican pursuit of President Bill Clinton which, like the pursuit of the current president, began even before his hand had come off the Bible. Things were so much simpler, then. The ratfcking was all primarily domestic. Instead of Russian spooks, there was an incredible passel of poolroom liars from Arkansas doing business with conservative lawyers and activists in Washington. (Several of whom are d/b/a Never Trumpers of the Bulwark variety.) Instead of Comer and Jordan, we paid the salaries of Kenneth Starr and his bed-sniffing yahoos. But the game plan was the same — raise enough smoke in the far hinterlands to get the attention of the elite political press, find enough low-rent crooks who will say anything you want them to say, find some willing congresscritters to carry the ball forward in Washington, and watch the red lights ignite on a million cameras.

It was supposed to work this time, too…

GOP now openly admitting that they blew $41M — in their own salaries alone — pursuing a no-evidence of impeachment, all for naught. https://t.co/hFfd28a5fK

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) February 23, 2024