“A former FBI informant charged with fabricating corruption allegations about President Joe Biden and his son has agreed to plead guilty to four felony charges to resolve two pending federal criminal cases against him, according to a court filing.
Alexander Smirnov, 44, admitted to lying when he told the FBI that he took part in meetings with executives from Ukrainian energy company Burisma in 2015 or 2016 about a scheme to pay $10 million to Joe and Hunter Biden. Joe Biden was the vice president at the time of the fabricated meetings, and Smirnov claimed the purported payments were bribes to “protect us … from all kinds of problems,” according to a plea agreement filed Thursday in federal court in Los Angeles.”
“as a historical matter, the critics are dead wrong when they insist that the Hunter Biden pardon is a unique and uniquely polarizing use of the pardon power. Presidents since George Washington have wielded that power, often in extraordinarily controversial ways.
The question isn’t whether Biden’s action was somehow singular in its offensiveness — history shows us that it is not. It’s whether the pardon power, a constitutional holdover from the divine rights of kings, is a power worth removing altogether from the Constitution.
Here are four earlier examples of controversial uses of the pardon power, from Washington to Bill Clinton. Together, they make Biden’s pardon look almost quaint.”
“rather than merely pardoning his son for the gun crimes for which he was convicted and the tax crimes for which he pleaded guilty, the president’s pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024. That language mirrors the language in Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which did not merely cover the Watergate scandal but extended to “all offenses against the United States” that Nixon “has committed or may have committed” between Jan. 20, 1969, and Aug. 9, 1974 — the exact span of Nixon’s presidency.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)”
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“its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.”
“As a matter of statutory law, the case against Biden is straightforward. He has publicly admitted that he was regularly smoking crack cocaine around the time he bought the gun, and prosecutors say investigators found cocaine residue on the leather pouch in which he had kept it. As a matter of constitutional law, the viability of the case is less clear”
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“Judging from survey data on drug use and gun ownership, something like 20 million Americans are committing that felony right now. The Justice Department prosecutes only a minuscule percentage of those potential defendants. That is partly because such cases are not a high priority, which tells you something about the logic of treating this offense as a felony that is currently punishable by up to 15 years in prison (thanks to legislation that Biden’s father signed in 2022). But the main reason that gun-owning drug users are rarely prosecuted is that the government generally does not know who they are.
The Biden exception to that rule is the result of two factors. If he had not publicly disclosed his drug use or if Hallie Biden had not publicly revealed his gun possession, there would have been no basis to charge him. But even at that point, federal prosecutors did not have to pursue the case, let alone treat a single gun purchase as three felonies. Here is where Weiss’ eagerness to show that Biden would not get a pass simply because he is the president’s son may have played a role.”
“contrary to the impression left by movies and TV shows, criminal cases almost never go to trial. In the United States, nearly 98 percent of criminal convictions result from guilty pleas”
“The indictment is brief because the underlying situation is quite simple. When Hunter bought the gun, he filled out a form saying he was not a drug user, when in fact he had a serious addiction at that time. Prosecutors assert that this violated three different laws — two false statements laws, and one law banning firearm possession by a drug user.
But the legal and political saga surrounding the indictment is much more complicated. Initially, prosecutors weren’t going to charge Hunter in the gun case at all. They did so only after the lead prosecutor, David Weiss, shifted to a more aggressive posture after a plea deal he’d struck with Hunter’s team fell apart. The question is why, exactly, that plea deal fell apart.
The Hunter Biden investigation has had about as messy a year as could be imagined. In May, two IRS officials involved in the probe went to Congress as whistleblowers to argue that Weiss’s team wasn’t being aggressive enough. In July, Weiss’s team presented their plea deal with Hunter before a judge — who refused to accept it, telling both sides to clarify some of its provisions after a dramatic public hearing.
Then, in August, talks between Weiss’s team and Hunter’s attorneys to finalize that deal collapsed. Hunter’s team has claimed that Weiss tried to belatedly change the deal’s terms on them — offering Hunter much more limited immunity from prosecution — after criticism from Republicans that he wasn’t being tough enough on the president’s son.
Whatever the reason for Weiss’s shift, there’s likely more to come from him. Last month, Weiss, who is the US Attorney for Delaware, requested that Attorney General Merrick Garland grant him special counsel status as well, and Garland agreed. Weiss has suggested in court filings that he intends to charge Hunter with tax crimes as well.”
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“The decision to charge here is not because this gun incident suddenly became more serious. It’s because prosecutors have now decided to go after Hunter more aggressively, after the political pressure and the plea deal’s collapse.
There’s nothing unusual about prosecutors charging more crimes after a plea deal falls apart. The mystery here remains why, exactly, the plea deal fell apart. If the main reason is simply that, due to political pressure from Republicans and embarrassment over the IRS officials’ claims, Weiss’s team got cold feet on a deal they’d agreed to — that wouldn’t make them look so great.
If the main reason is instead that, due to confusion or incompetence on his team, he belatedly concluded the initial deal with Hunter had been far too generous — well, that wouldn’t make him look so great either.”
“Whatever you may think about the impeachments of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, they were at least impeached for things they verifiably did.
But Joe Biden may become the first president to be impeached entirely because of an unproven theory.
Republicans, and allies of Donald Trump in particular, have spent five years searching for the proof that will vindicate their long-held assertion that Joe Biden was corruptly in cahoots with his son, Hunter — being paid off by foreign interests and skewing US policy to support them.
Yet while much has emerged about Hunter’s sordid personal life and dubiously ethical behavior, Republicans have been unable to hang anything significant on his father.
Don’t take it from me. Take it from Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), who wrote this month: “What’s missing, despite years of investigation, is the smoking gun that connects Joe Biden to his ne’er-do-well son’s corruption.”
Of course, the GOP’s impeachment effort isn’t really about what the evidence shows — it’s political. What’s really behind this is that the hard right has been demanding aggressive action against Biden, Trump wants payback for his own two impeachments, and Speaker Kevin McCarthy is struggling to hold off threats to his speakership. The evidence is largely beside the point.”
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“As far as Joe’s relationship with Hunter’s business partners, the investigation has revealed the following: the vice president occasionally spoke to some of Hunter’s business associates at golf outings and dinner events. Sometimes he called Hunter to say hello during Hunter’s business meetings, and Hunter put him on speakerphone, but Joe wouldn’t talk business. Officials in Biden’s office forwarded information about White House events to Hunter. Joe once wrote a college letter of recommendation for the son of a Chinese executive in business with Hunter.”
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“did Joe actually make Hunter give him half his salary?
In the laptop material, there are many resentful tirades from Hunter about how much he does for his family and how unappreciated he is, often laden with exaggerations and persecution fantasies (usually coming when family members were trying to get him off drugs).
There is evidence of some intermingling of Joe’s finances with Hunter’s. Eric Schwerin, who Hunter had hired to help with his finances in the mid-2000s, also assisted Joe Biden with managing his finances when he was vice president. Hunter covered some expenses for Joe, like home repairs and cell phone bills.
And Hunter claimed in another text that his dad had long used one of his accounts. “My dad has been using most lines on this account which I’ve though the gracious offerings of Eric [Schwerin] have paid for past 11 years,” he texted in 2018.
But there’s no documentation of anything remotely near half Hunter’s (sizable) income, or any sort of set percentage, going to Joe. The covering of expenses that’s been documented seems to have been more informal — Hunter, the highest-earning Biden, picking up the tab for his dad, or setting some bills on autopay.”
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“there’s no evidence that the US policy of pushing for Shokin’s ouster was meant to protect Burisma. As many US officials testified back during the Trump impeachment inquiry, the US government had concluded Shokin was corrupt for other well-documented reasons, and wanted him gone.”
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“if Zlochevsky had secretly agreed to pay Joe Biden $5 million while he was vice president, that would be a huge scandal. But did it actually happen?
Currently, there’s not a shred of evidence that it did happen. Of course, Zlochevsky did say it was done so amazingly secretly that it will be impossible to find, which is… convenient.
Here’s another problem. The FBI document states that the informant had already briefed the Bureau on one of these talks with Zlochevsky several years ago. Back then, though, the informant didn’t mention any salacious bribe claims. Only years later, well after Trump had publicly been trying to make Biden and Burisma a huge scandal, and that the Justice Department was investigating it, did the informant “recollect” these juicy Zlochevsky claims.
Another issue is that the informant says he barely knew Zlochevsky, so this level of purported candor may seem odd. “CHS explained it is very common for business men in post-Soviet countries to brag or show-off,” the document reads.
In any case, all we have here is a claim. No evidence has emerged to prove that claim true.”
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“Hunter messaged back, “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.” He continued in a threatening vein: “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.”
It reads like a shakedown, and indeed, the Chinese company would send over $5 million a few days later. Was Hunter actually speaking on behalf of his father, as he appeared to imply, or again simply throwing his name around without his knowledge? When these messages emerged, an attorney for Hunter said that “any verifiable words or actions of my client, in the midst of a horrible addiction, are solely his own and have no connection to anyone in his family.””
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“All of this is extremely messy and shady on Hunter’s part. It’s clear Hunter Biden wanted people to think his father was deeply involved in his dealings.
But again, evidence of Joe Biden’s actual involvement is absent.”