The Smirnov turnoff, Devine ed.

Miranda Devine addresses “The Smirnov turnoff” in today’s New York Post column “New election year means another Russiagate as Biden, Dems try to smear impeachment probe.” Devine is of course the invaluable historian of The Laptop From Hell and the Biden family business. Here is the opening of her column:

For the 2016 election, Democrats launched Russiagate 1.0: the Trump-Russia collusion hoax proven groundless by the Mueller investigation.

For the 2020 election, it was Russiagate 2.0. Biden campaign adviser Antony Blinken prompted former CIA Acting Director Mike Morell to concoct the “Dirty 51” letter falsely claiming that Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop was Russian disinformation.

That lie justified censorship of The Post’s accurate stories from the laptop of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s international influence peddling schemes.

Now that we’re heading into the 2024 election, we have Russiagate 3.0. Democrats pretend the impeachment inquiry has “utterly collapsed” because of the curious indictment last week of trusted FBI informant Alexander Smirnov on false statement charges after he allegedly told his FBI handler that Hunter and Joe each had received a $5 million bribe from the Ukrainians.

In a frantic effort to keep Smirnov in jail pre-trial, prosecutors for notorious Biden protector David Weiss, the Delaware US attorney, used language ripped straight out of the Russiagate textbook: “Smirnov’s efforts to spread misinformation about a candidate of one of the two major parties [Joe] continues.”

Now Smirnov is being used as make-believe vindication of the 51 former intelligence officials who signed the fake laptop letter to help Biden win the 2020 election.

Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA operations officer who claims to be a victim of the dubious “Havana syndrome,” pounced on the Smirnov story.

“It validates exactly what we were warning about,” he told NBC News. “The Russians were going to push this narrative of Hunter Biden and corruption, to hurt Joe Biden.”

No. Hunter’s “laptop from hell” was not Russian disinformation. It still isn’t. The FBI has had it in its possession since December 2019 and has authenticated it as real and valid for use in court.

The Dirty 51 are grasping at straws to try to justify their interference in the 2020 election. It wasn’t the Russians. It was Trump-deranged former CIA management who felt any means justified the ends if they could stop Trump winning a second term.

But now, as the laptop is augmented by whistleblower receipts and witness testimony, and as House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer unravels the complex web of corrupt foreign payments to the Biden family, the president’s praetorian guard is desperate. They are drowning in evidence of corruption while burbling, “There is no evidence!” Russia is all they have.

The joke is on Biden’s media handmaidens still pushing Joe Biden’s absurd lies.

No, the laptop is not a “Russian plant,” as he claimed. And, yes, Joe did talk to Hunter about his “overseas business dealings.”

Heck, he did a lot more than talk.

He made himself available for breakfasts, lunches, dinners, coffees, and pleasant chit chat on the speakerphone with Hunter’s foreign benefactors, all to oil the wheels of the family business — which was selling access to him, as he well knew.

“Look after my boy,” he told Kremlin-backed oligarch Elena Baturina and her husband, Yuri Luzhkov, the corrupt former mayor of Moscow, when Hunter activated the speakerphone at a Russian restaurant in Brooklyn called Romanoff on May 4, 2014.

They sure did. Just three months earlier, Baturina had wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, the firm cofounded by Hunter, his “best friend in business” Devon Archer, John Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz, and Jimmy Bulger, nephew of mobster “Whitey” Bulger.

Devine has much more here.