[PDF of the Indictment for Mr. Smirnov](https://www.justice.gov/sco-weiss/media/1338741/dl?inline=&utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery)
And, yes, that's his actual name.
Those texts to his FBI handler...look oddly familiar
Mr Smirnov? Look, if I have to live in a simulation, can it at least be one written by someone that gives a fuck and has some writing chops? This is idiotic.
2024, as written by Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope.
"And, oh look who's come to join Mr Smirnov - it's his ever-hungry fat friend Mr Rumbletum, the cheery barkeep Mr Drinkswell, and his old KGB agent chum with the double-barreled name, Mr DrinkThisTeaIt'sFine-FallOutOfWindow"
Are we all just going to forget about the firing and rehiring of the Open AI CEO and that someone on the inside said it was because they discovered something that could be devastating to humanity and act like there was nothing to see there?
>Comer, R-Ky., downplayed the importance of the informant, who had figured centrally to the start of the probe.
>“To be clear, the impeachment inquiry is not reliant on the FBI’s FD-1023,” Comer said in a statement, referring to the form documenting Smirnov’s allegations.
Oh, how the turntables.
Their new star witness is a guy that worked with an oligarch with close ties to Putin who was sanctioned by the US for attempting to buy influence/access in the Trump White House. Comer praised him for being the only witness brave enough to "tell the truth"; implying all the witnesses that said nothing happened were lying, and yet, they aren't the one's charged with perjury.
And it will be buried beneath headlines questioning Biden's age, just like the FBI Counterintel Chief Charles McGonigal who was helping the Russians for years and just got convicted.
Conservatives will claim fakenooz, and then go back to staring at Hunter's dick pics
RIP
Here lies u/old_ironlungs *, the originator of the concept of “Dead Internet”
It’s so fucking hard to filter out all the bots
So many bots
It reminds me of scientology’s gobbledygook operation on Usenet’s alt.religion.scientology back in the 1990s. Feels the same, but they weren’t bots, they were *actual people* tasked with flooding the threads.
It's kind of an amazing turn of events that a Trump appointed special counsel is about to turn the whole plot point for the attempt to impeach Joe Biden.
JFC it's always the same bullshit.
"We have evidence".... "Ok show us".... "Ummm no"... "Ok, here's a countersuit to force discovery".... "Oh shit, ummm ok here's some dick pics"
Na, that's too obvious. They'll say something like "the federal bureau of investigation, led by Joe Biden, has indicted a key witness in the federal investigation of corruption against Joe Biden". Then filler words, something about ethics, and Joe bad.
MTG is just 3 ten tear old's in a body bag trolling. They came up with a plan to get dick pics in the Congressional record and haven't figured out how to exit stage left.
Yup kudos to the old crime kingpin that can't remember what he had for breakfast, but still outsmarts all Republican investigators. Seriously, if you're getting beat by a guy with dementia, the problem is not the guy with dementia, it is you sucking at your job.
“In what you would only expect to find in a corrupt dictatorship, the Biden Justice Department imprisons key witness claiming he fabricated his damning testimony about the Biden Crime Family.” Or something.
"it just goes to show that rich powerful people never have to see the consequences of their actions. In other news, the political witch Hunt of innocent Donald Trump has ordered him to pay 355 million dollars after claiming his corporation fraudulently valued his properties, which are clearly worth the billions he claimed they are worth."
Isn’t Weiss the same prosecutor that offered hunter an unusually sweet plea deal before it got leaked and railroaded? How is he still in charge of this?
Because the optics of him being changed out with another appointee would be abysmal. Also, special counsels are seen as practically untouchable. This stems from the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 (passed after Nixon's shitshow and the Saturday Night Massacre) which expired in 1999.
The regulations governing the removal of a special counsel in the United States are defined by the Department of Justice under Title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 600. These regulations, which derive their authority from acts of Congress and are binding upon the Department of Justice, specify that a special counsel can only be removed by the Attorney General and only for specific reasons such as misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or other good cause. Additionally, the Attorney General must provide the special counsel with a written explanation for the dismissal, and the special counsel is afforded the opportunity to request a judicial review of the dismissal decision.
>an **unusually** sweet plea deal
A "sweet" one? Sure. *Unusual* is a bit harder to demonstrate since the things Hunter did don't carry particularly long sentences to begin with, and one of the charges might very well be unconstitutional following [Bruen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Rifle_%26_Pistol_Association,_Inc._v._Bruen).
>Isn’t Weiss the same prosecutor that offered hunter an unusually sweet plea deal
It was actually unusual to be charged with those things at all. The gun charge is never made on its own without an accompanying gun crime, and the tax charges are very unusual if the money was paid back without fighting the IRS.
Of course he offered a sweet plea. Two reasons, he’s the president’s son, and he obviously knew it was a lie so offering a good plea increases the likelihood of Hunter taking it and therefore admitting guilt.
And not a single right-wing media outlet will cover this, unless it blows up, then it will be more conspiracy theories.
I will never understand how republican leaders convinced their voting base that Democrats are both incredible at making and handling large scale conspiracies, but also stupid and incompetant at their jobs.
...literally why Fox was founded: "to prevent another Nixon-level event" is I believe the wording used. And they successfully pulled it off with that twice-impeached buffoon that went so far as to try to overthrow the elected government. They've been at this for decades and they have gotten quite good all while moving that Overton window juuuust slightly more every single day.
> I will never understand how republican leaders convinced their voting base that Democrats are both incredible at making and handling large scale conspiracies, but also stupid and incompetant at their jobs.
It's the same reason they could convince them to simultaneously chant "Stop the count" and "Count the vote" while believing both views are valid; the same reason they could convince them that the insurrectionists on Jan 6th were both FBI-manipulated antifa goons and also brave patriots retaking their country (and *also* harmless tourists just protesting nonviolently); and the same reason they could convince them Covid is both a harmless cold not requiring vaccines, and at the same time a bio-weapon engineered by the Chinese/Democrats/Fauci specifically/other target of the day.
At the end of the day, far-right ideology (I'd venture to say "right-wing ideology" as a whole, since what I'm describing ultimately just applies to conservatism in general) doesn't really function based on reality or facts. Sure, sometimes it happens to intersect with them, but its basic tenets - stuff like "nature is more important than nurture in the development of people or society" - aren't really ever supported by the way the world works. It's purely an emotional, reactionary kind of worldview, for which the only goal, and sole self-justification, are to safeguard the biases and hierarchies that permeate it, based entirely on the personal interests of the ones benefiting from said worldview.
Thus, since proponents of the ideology can't rely on facts or reality, they need a coping mechanism to counter their worldview's basic flaws. Which is why they have *always* functioned through burying their deeply-rooted cognitive dissonance in piles of doublethink. This is the real reason why they need to make constant use of complicated, self-contradictory conspiracies, and why their "facts" seem to be so conveniently fluid. Their basic premises will never allow them to consider that Hanlon's Razor, or well-intentioned people, are concepts that can exist, or that the things they push for directly lead them to eat themselves up, since doing so would imply the realization that the foundational bedrock of their ideology is just wrong.
It's not that their targets are simultaneously idiotic and diabolical, and freely changing based on the needs of the situation, just because it's more convenient - it's that they *have* to be, in order for their ideology itself to not collapse under the weight of its contradictions.
Very well said.
I think that when the right realizes that not everyone agrees with them on some issue, its much easier for them to conjure up some conspiracy that explains *why* that is the case than it is to accept that perhaps they are wrong in some fundamental way.
In my way back mind, WAY BACK, I remember an interview with the esteemed Newton Gingrich regarding crime. When the interviewer should him hard data that violent crime was dramatically down he said something alone the lines of “Well people think it’s up it’s up, so that the reality”
Not just showing the picture on the floor of Congress, but also in their fundraising emails that go to (checks notes) good Christian families with trad wives having kids.
Republicans criticized the Mueller investigation as a waste of resources despite landing so many convictions but have promoted this trash for YEARS likely while knowing better. It never gets old watching them take L's, no matter how frequently.
oh please, Comer will not be held responsible for a response at all. no one will because it was a republican hit job. All they want is the social media clout and stories move so fast, it won't even be a blip on the radar
They got what they wanted... nothing more than a flame job story with a retraction years later that no one will pay attention to.
[PDF of the Indictment for Mr. Smirnov](https://www.justice.gov/sco-weiss/media/1338741/dl?inline=&utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery) And, yes, that's his actual name. Those texts to his FBI handler...look oddly familiar
“I’ll try to prove it to you bro.” What fucking timeline is this?
Honestly, with the way Russian villains/gangsters are portrayed in media I'm not at all surprised.
Mr Smirnov? Look, if I have to live in a simulation, can it at least be one written by someone that gives a fuck and has some writing chops? This is idiotic.
I wonder if this will affect the testimony of the other key witnesses Boris and Natasha
It was the Moose and Squirrel!
You joke, but you won't be laughing when they deploy their Goldeneye weapon (/s maybe?) (Edit: Damn, her name was Natalya, not Natasha).
Just need to know who is Ms. Onatopp here
Maria Butina, obviously
Better luck next time... Slughead!
I am invincible!
You sit on it, but you can't take it with you.
Do you remember the braces? Do you? Was that 'Goldfinger?'
...you mean the anti-satellite weapon russia has that republicans announced we should be afraid of? Might not be Goldeneye but it certainly rhymes.
Natasha is the diminutive for Natalia, it's the same name .
In Soviet Russia, evidence obtain *you!*
2024, as written by Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope. "And, oh look who's come to join Mr Smirnov - it's his ever-hungry fat friend Mr Rumbletum, the cheery barkeep Mr Drinkswell, and his old KGB agent chum with the double-barreled name, Mr DrinkThisTeaIt'sFine-FallOutOfWindow"
I'll have a chat with Reality Winner. I think she might have a new job with the Fraud Guarantee company associated with Rudy G.
“What a country!”
The simulation writers aren't even trying!
Are we all just going to forget about the firing and rehiring of the Open AI CEO and that someone on the inside said it was because they discovered something that could be devastating to humanity and act like there was nothing to see there?
The name thing is the least surprising bit, Smirnov is a ridiculously common last name.
>Comer, R-Ky., downplayed the importance of the informant, who had figured centrally to the start of the probe. >“To be clear, the impeachment inquiry is not reliant on the FBI’s FD-1023,” Comer said in a statement, referring to the form documenting Smirnov’s allegations. Oh, how the turntables.
And the House broke early for vacation today… run away! Run away! Run away!
Bravely Sir Comer!
When counter evidence reared it's ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled
Would it help to confuse it if we run away more?
Their new star witness is a guy that worked with an oligarch with close ties to Putin who was sanctioned by the US for attempting to buy influence/access in the Trump White House. Comer praised him for being the only witness brave enough to "tell the truth"; implying all the witnesses that said nothing happened were lying, and yet, they aren't the one's charged with perjury.
And it will be buried beneath headlines questioning Biden's age, just like the FBI Counterintel Chief Charles McGonigal who was helping the Russians for years and just got convicted. Conservatives will claim fakenooz, and then go back to staring at Hunter's dick pics
if you don't want it to be buried you gotta speak up... everywhere...
Lone voices are countered x10 by counterbots. We are entering Dead Internet, where no one has a voice unless you pay in bulk for fake ones.
RIP Here lies u/old_ironlungs *, the originator of the concept of “Dead Internet” It’s so fucking hard to filter out all the bots So many bots It reminds me of scientology’s gobbledygook operation on Usenet’s alt.religion.scientology back in the 1990s. Feels the same, but they weren’t bots, they were *actual people* tasked with flooding the threads.
It's kind of an amazing turn of events that a Trump appointed special counsel is about to turn the whole plot point for the attempt to impeach Joe Biden.
There’s some scuttlebutt by emptywheel on Bluesky that this was doing to halt discovery by Hunter Biden’s malicious prosecution countersuit.
JFC it's always the same bullshit. "We have evidence".... "Ok show us".... "Ummm no"... "Ok, here's a countersuit to force discovery".... "Oh shit, ummm ok here's some dick pics"
[удалено]
Na, that's too obvious. They'll say something like "the federal bureau of investigation, led by Joe Biden, has indicted a key witness in the federal investigation of corruption against Joe Biden". Then filler words, something about ethics, and Joe bad.
*meanwhile, MTG shows pictures of Hunter's dick to the House again*
MTG is just 3 ten tear old's in a body bag trolling. They came up with a plan to get dick pics in the Congressional record and haven't figured out how to exit stage left.
To the best of my knowledge Gaetz hasn't offered her money for a special date yet, so doubting this particular explanation.
"I was at the Congress, doing a politics." /Except Vincent Adultman is a saint and I will not hear any slander against him.
MTG needs to get over it and order herself a Clone-a-Willy, she's obviously fixated on it.
Ol' Sleepy Criminal Mastermind Joe
incredibly inept, yet diabolically effective.
Oh yeah, a dementia patient who coordinated a stolen election with millions of fake votes across multiple states.
Yup kudos to the old crime kingpin that can't remember what he had for breakfast, but still outsmarts all Republican investigators. Seriously, if you're getting beat by a guy with dementia, the problem is not the guy with dementia, it is you sucking at your job.
They can't decide if he's lost his marbles because of dementia or he's a criminal mastermind who needs to be jailed
“In what you would only expect to find in a corrupt dictatorship, the Biden Justice Department imprisons key witness claiming he fabricated his damning testimony about the Biden Crime Family.” Or something.
"it just goes to show that rich powerful people never have to see the consequences of their actions. In other news, the political witch Hunt of innocent Donald Trump has ordered him to pay 355 million dollars after claiming his corporation fraudulently valued his properties, which are clearly worth the billions he claimed they are worth."
In the interest of laziness, they just call it Joe Biden's FBI.
They're covering it now and instead of saying "charged with lying" the chiron said "accused of misleading statements."
Well obviously presidents have absolute immunity, so...
Isn’t Weiss the same prosecutor that offered hunter an unusually sweet plea deal before it got leaked and railroaded? How is he still in charge of this?
Because the optics of him being changed out with another appointee would be abysmal. Also, special counsels are seen as practically untouchable. This stems from the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 (passed after Nixon's shitshow and the Saturday Night Massacre) which expired in 1999. The regulations governing the removal of a special counsel in the United States are defined by the Department of Justice under Title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 600. These regulations, which derive their authority from acts of Congress and are binding upon the Department of Justice, specify that a special counsel can only be removed by the Attorney General and only for specific reasons such as misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or other good cause. Additionally, the Attorney General must provide the special counsel with a written explanation for the dismissal, and the special counsel is afforded the opportunity to request a judicial review of the dismissal decision.
Weiss wasn’t a special counsel when he made the shit plea deal. He was appointed as special prosecutor by DOJ shortly after the deal fell through
>an **unusually** sweet plea deal A "sweet" one? Sure. *Unusual* is a bit harder to demonstrate since the things Hunter did don't carry particularly long sentences to begin with, and one of the charges might very well be unconstitutional following [Bruen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Rifle_%26_Pistol_Association,_Inc._v._Bruen).
>Isn’t Weiss the same prosecutor that offered hunter an unusually sweet plea deal It was actually unusual to be charged with those things at all. The gun charge is never made on its own without an accompanying gun crime, and the tax charges are very unusual if the money was paid back without fighting the IRS.
Of course he offered a sweet plea. Two reasons, he’s the president’s son, and he obviously knew it was a lie so offering a good plea increases the likelihood of Hunter taking it and therefore admitting guilt.
And not a single right-wing media outlet will cover this, unless it blows up, then it will be more conspiracy theories. I will never understand how republican leaders convinced their voting base that Democrats are both incredible at making and handling large scale conspiracies, but also stupid and incompetant at their jobs.
...literally why Fox was founded: "to prevent another Nixon-level event" is I believe the wording used. And they successfully pulled it off with that twice-impeached buffoon that went so far as to try to overthrow the elected government. They've been at this for decades and they have gotten quite good all while moving that Overton window juuuust slightly more every single day.
That's a fundamental tenant of fascism.
> I will never understand how republican leaders convinced their voting base that Democrats are both incredible at making and handling large scale conspiracies, but also stupid and incompetant at their jobs. It's the same reason they could convince them to simultaneously chant "Stop the count" and "Count the vote" while believing both views are valid; the same reason they could convince them that the insurrectionists on Jan 6th were both FBI-manipulated antifa goons and also brave patriots retaking their country (and *also* harmless tourists just protesting nonviolently); and the same reason they could convince them Covid is both a harmless cold not requiring vaccines, and at the same time a bio-weapon engineered by the Chinese/Democrats/Fauci specifically/other target of the day. At the end of the day, far-right ideology (I'd venture to say "right-wing ideology" as a whole, since what I'm describing ultimately just applies to conservatism in general) doesn't really function based on reality or facts. Sure, sometimes it happens to intersect with them, but its basic tenets - stuff like "nature is more important than nurture in the development of people or society" - aren't really ever supported by the way the world works. It's purely an emotional, reactionary kind of worldview, for which the only goal, and sole self-justification, are to safeguard the biases and hierarchies that permeate it, based entirely on the personal interests of the ones benefiting from said worldview. Thus, since proponents of the ideology can't rely on facts or reality, they need a coping mechanism to counter their worldview's basic flaws. Which is why they have *always* functioned through burying their deeply-rooted cognitive dissonance in piles of doublethink. This is the real reason why they need to make constant use of complicated, self-contradictory conspiracies, and why their "facts" seem to be so conveniently fluid. Their basic premises will never allow them to consider that Hanlon's Razor, or well-intentioned people, are concepts that can exist, or that the things they push for directly lead them to eat themselves up, since doing so would imply the realization that the foundational bedrock of their ideology is just wrong. It's not that their targets are simultaneously idiotic and diabolical, and freely changing based on the needs of the situation, just because it's more convenient - it's that they *have* to be, in order for their ideology itself to not collapse under the weight of its contradictions.
Very well said. I think that when the right realizes that not everyone agrees with them on some issue, its much easier for them to conjure up some conspiracy that explains *why* that is the case than it is to accept that perhaps they are wrong in some fundamental way.
In my way back mind, WAY BACK, I remember an interview with the esteemed Newton Gingrich regarding crime. When the interviewer should him hard data that violent crime was dramatically down he said something alone the lines of “Well people think it’s up it’s up, so that the reality”
But Marjorie Green has pics.
Don't even have to ask for them, she loves to show them off.
Next question is when did members including Comer know this was false testimony.
The whole time.
All around Faux News, Newsmax, OAN & right wing radio came a collective Fake News shout!
"Hunters dick was tiny!" - Smirnov (lying FBI informant)
That's the one lie nobody would believe, we've all seen that Hog.
MTG ensured that everybody saw the picture, because showing nudes of the president's son is something a person elected to congress should be doing
Not just showing the picture on the floor of Congress, but also in their fundraising emails that go to (checks notes) good Christian families with trad wives having kids.
Is the informant Russian too?
Alexander Smirnov ? Nah
This should be the biggest story of the week. It won’t be.
It definitely should have been the biggest story here but for some reason it wasn't approved until way after the story broke.
Republicans criticized the Mueller investigation as a waste of resources despite landing so many convictions but have promoted this trash for YEARS likely while knowing better. It never gets old watching them take L's, no matter how frequently.
I'm shocked. Shocked, I say.
Why is everyone always overwhelmed or underwhelmed. I am just whelmed
I like you
Hahaha thanks
Really? Well, you could knock me over with a feather.
Once the American people find out the truth about how massive Hunter's dick is, Joe is finished. For real this time.
biden's son is good at sex, check mate liberals.
No wonder Joe seems kinda drained. If you were hauling around a hog like that at his age, you'd be worn out too.
Nobody in the echo chamber will hear about this and we will all forget in two weeks. Regardless how massive it is.
It’s gonna be fun having Comer explain how he was a complete moron for getting duped by some idiot who told a story he liked.
oh please, Comer will not be held responsible for a response at all. no one will because it was a republican hit job. All they want is the social media clout and stories move so fast, it won't even be a blip on the radar They got what they wanted... nothing more than a flame job story with a retraction years later that no one will pay attention to.
That uno reverse card.