Everyone is talking about Smirnov when we should be talking about Weiss. [View all]

[druidity33]

There are other threads that go further back into this mess, but here is something to chew on courtesy of Dr. Wheeler (re: the indictment):

It describes that after Pittsburgh closed their assessment (something Bill Barr has public disputed), the FBI interviewed Smirnov again, and he lied again.

It doesn’t describe that after Smirnov changed his story, and days after (in October 2020) Donald Trump yelled at Bill Barr about Hunter Biden, Richard Donoghue ordered David Weiss to accept a briefing on the FD-1023.

And the timing of the claimed investigation stinks.

It claims that some time in July 2023, the FBI asked David Weiss to help investigate the source that Weiss had been ordered to integrate into his investigation years before.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/02/15/the-gaps-in-leo-wises-belated-indictment-of-alexander-smirnov/

But Wait! There's more!

Now, perhaps it’s a good thing that David Weiss didn’t know he was (at least per Ziegler, who — bizarrely — has more credibility than the people who have a stack of warrants and lots more metadata) falsely claiming that this picture depicted cocaine. Perhaps that means he didn’t breach Hunter’s privileged communications with Ablow and read what the then still-licensed psychiatrist had to say to his client.

But he has just made the competence of his team’s forensic analysis an issue, and done so in a filing in which Derek Hines appears to be claiming they don’t need any expert forensic reports.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/02/14/export-reports-when-david-weiss-claimed-keith-ablows-sawdust-was-hunter-bidens-cocaine/

Weiss was trying to be a Comey! By outing this spy he's actually saving his own skin! (see first link)

If you don't know Emptywheel... it's all in the weeds legal commentary and analysis. Thorough as fuck. I never comment because it's all mostly over my head. But a great reference point if there's a big legal case in the news... as there often is these days.

On edit, here's Josh Marshall at TPM picking up the ball:

The interplay between Special Counsel David Weiss’ prosecutions of Hunter Biden and Alexander Smirnov is going to take a lot of unpacking. Biden’s attorneys began to do some of that in filings yesterday, claiming that it had been Smirnov’s bogus allegations that undid the plea deal Biden had agreed to last summer.

The suggestion from the Biden camp is that Weiss seized on Smirnov’s claims well after the fact and hoped to use them to prosecute Biden, which is why prosecutors suddenly could no longer promise that the plea deal would extinguish all of Biden’s outstanding criminal liabilities.

Eventually Smirnov’s claims proved false, but Biden is still facing criminal charges on both coasts that would have been resolved but for Weiss being initially duped by Smirnov. At least that’s the argument.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/russias-staggering-success-in-duping-willing-republicans-and-right-wing-media