Perhaps unsurprisingly, though WorldNetDaily joined other right-wing media in peddling stories about Hunter Biden’s alleged crimes, it didn’t have much to say when a key informant supporting many of the key claims, Alexander Smirnov, was arrested and found to have lied to investigators about Hunter. WND simply reprinted a Daily Caller article for its main report on Smirnov’s arrest. It wasn’t until about a week later that WND offered something resembling its own content on Smirnov, in the form of a Feb. 21 article by Bob Unruh that lazily rewrote a right-wing Federalist article attacking the prosecutor in the case:
The special counsel, a former U.S. attorney, who is handling the prosecution of Hunter Biden on gun charges, and possibly more to be filed, is being accused of endangering national security through his incompetence.
The claim comes from a commentary in The Federalist, and concerns that FBI document in which a “trusted” source claimed Ukrainian officials had paid $5 million bribes to Hunter and Joe Biden to be protected during an investigation by a corruption prosecutor there.
Now that source has been accused by Special Counsel David Weiss of lying to his FBI handler regarding those claims.
But, the column pointed out, those bribery claims are years old, and Weiss knew about them, but never bothered to investigate until now.
The source was identified as Alexander Smirnov.
Just this week, Weiss claimed, “Smirnov’s contacts with Russian officials who are affiliated with Russian intelligence services are not benign.”
Smirnov wasn’t mentioned in an original WND article again until a Feb. 27 piece by freelancer Elizabeth Stauffer, who offered a revisionist interpretation of events from the previous two presidential elections:
Desperate to derail former President Donald Trump’s candidacy back in 2016, Democrats used a bogus dossier created by a former British spy to convince voters Trump was “colluding with the Russians” to win the election.
Although Trump ultimately won, the investigation triggered by the allegations made in the now-debunked dossier exerted a hugely negative impact on the first three years of his presidency.
Then, when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story just a few weeks before the November 2020 presidential election, raising concerns that then-candidate Joe Biden had been involved in his son’s foreign influence-peddling business, Democrats teamed up with Big Tech and the media to suppress the story. This was followed up by a letter signed by 51 former intelligence community leaders who claimed the laptop story had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign. But as is now known, that utterly false letter had secretly been instigated by then-Biden campaign adviser and current Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The letter proved key to Biden’s victory. Just days after it was published, Biden used it to effectively shut down Trump when he raised the topic in their final presidential debate.
In fact, other things including information about Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos promoted the Trump investigation. And the New York Post failed to offer independent verification of the laptop data it released, meaning that it did, in fact, look a lot like a Russian disinformation operation, given that it came from shady sources and released by a right-wing pro-Trump rag. Stauffer should be mad at the Post for not immediately offering verification.
Stauffer went on to complain that non-right-wingers are pointing to Smirnov’s arrest as a reason to doubt the Republican-driven impeachment inquiry and war on Hunter:
Very few people actually know whether Smirnov lied to the FBI. But thanks to two brave IRS whistleblowers who worked on Hunter Biden’s case, now in its fifth year, as well as the presiding judge’s refusal to rubber stamp his sweetheart deal and diversion agreement, it is now known that Weiss and his Department of Justice colleagues have been far more interested in protecting the Bidens than in pursuing actual justice. Indeed, after having been lied to – twice – about claims of “Russian disinformation” from high-ranking intelligence community officials and Democratic politicians, many find it difficult to trust anything coming from them.
Meanwhile, Democrats are using Smirnov’s arrest to debunk the entire impeachment inquiry. And their cheerleaders in the legacy media have gotten the memo. In an op-ed published by CNN last week, former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut claimed that Smirnov is the Republicans’ “key witness” and that his allegations constitute the “heart” of their investigation. Aftergut concluded that Smirnov’s indictment “pushes [the] GOP impeachment probe of Biden off the edge.”
Stauffer then helped Republicans play cleanup:
But House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., told CNN, “To be clear, the impeachment inquiry is not reliant on the FBI’s FD-1023. It is based on a large record of evidence, including bank records and witness testimony, revealing that Joe Biden knew of and participated in his family’s business dealings.”
Comer also noted that the committee had asked the FBI about its level of confidence in the CHS at the time, and were told he was “credible and trusted, had worked with the FBI for over a decade, and had been paid six figures.”
The Democrats’ strategy here is clear: They are assuring voters that the entire premise of the Biden impeachment inquiry is based on Russian disinformation.
Never mind that Joe Biden was referred to as “the big guy” slated to receive 10% of the profits from a joint venture between members of his family and Chinese energy giant CEFC in an email found on his son’s laptop. Or that one of his son’s former business partners, Tony Bobulinski, has gone on the record to authoritatively confirm that Joe Biden is indeed “the big guy.” Never mind that Comer has pieced together the money trails from Chinese and Romanian nationals to nine members of the Biden family, including a grandchild, and that the funds were transferred via a network of up to 20 shell corporations set up by Hunter Biden and his associates.
To a large segment of the American voting population, Democrats don’t even try to win elections based on the issues anymore. Instead, they are widely seen as sowing disinformation and propaganda to mislead the public, as exemplified in the current campaign to resurrect Russiagate for yet another election cycle.
Stauffer is clearly not going to discuss how Republicans are sowing disinformation and propaganda to mislead the public in the form of a dubious impeachment investigation that is falling apart — or why the partisan investigation is a legitimate issue that should the basis of an election campaign. She is also showing no interest whatsoever in fact-checking anything Comer or other Republican politicians have to say about the investigation.