In case anybody wonders why the FBI looked into a possible Trump-Russia connection...
(Yahoo)Democrats and other critics of the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden have called for the GOP to put an end to its efforts following the indictment of a key witness on charges of lying to the FBI. Alexander Smirnov had contact with a number of Russian officials and admitted Russian intelligence officials were involved in passing him a false story about the president’s son Hunter Biden, according to a court document.
Lev Parnas, a former associate of Rudy Giuliani, testified at Wednesday’s hearing that he “found precisely zero evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine” when he was tasked by Donald Trump and the former president’s former lawyer to try to dig up dirt on the Bidens. “The only information ever pushed on the Bidens in Ukraine has come from one source and one source only: Russia and Russian agents,” Parnas told the committee.
(Independent)Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-American businessman who served time in prison for violating federal campaign finance laws and fraud charges, told committee members that he’d been a “key participant” in a scheme to dig up dirt on Mr Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.
He said Mr Giuliani had “tasked” him with “finding dirt on the Bidens so that an array of networks could spread misinformation about them” so Mr Trump and his allies could “damage the Bidens’ reputations and secure the 2020 election for Trump”.
(The Hill)“Weren’t media groups skeptical of your claims?” Raskin asked [Parnas].
“Most media groups — I’d probably say all, except for Fox and a few other right-wing media groups — didn’t want to take any of the information, and that aggravated Rudy Giuliani and John Solomon and other players,” Parnas said. “And the main group that it was being pushed through was Fox — Sean Hannity and some other media personalities over there.”
“But then there was also other people that were doing the bidding for the Russians — people in Congress, like Sen. Ron Johnson, like Congressman Pete Sessions, who sits here right now,” Parnas said, gesturing toward the Texas congressman, who sits on the committee.