Posted on 11/28/2024 3:41:03 PM PST by Libloather
One of the most disturbing scandals of the Hunter Biden saga is the imprisonment without trial of former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov.
The Ukrainian-born Israeli-American, who once told his FBI handler about Ukrainian claims of a $10 million bribe to the Bidens, has been languishing in a Los Angeles prison for nine months on charges that he lied to the FBI.
Last week, federal prosecutors slapped new tax-evasion charges on Smirnov, 43, which suggests they know their original indictment is too weak for a jury to convict him when he faces trial beginning Jan. 8.
Smirnov was one of the FBI’s most trusted confidential human sources, paid more than $100,000 during what his lawyers call “undivided, years-long loyalty to the United States” before he was thrown to the wolves in the middle of the Biden impeachment inquiry.
Busted in February
He was arrested in February on charges that he “provided false derogatory information to the FBI in 2020 about Joseph Biden, who at the time was a candidate for president and had previously been the vice president.
“The alleged false information concerned Joseph Biden’s and his son Hunter Biden’s involvement with Burisma Holdings Ltd., a Ukrainian energy business.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Appoint Alexander Smirnov as FIB Director.
Not surprising. These people need to ALL BE FIRED AND THE ENTIRE AGENCY DISSOLVED. THEN THE ARRESTS AND PROSECUTIONS
Top Hunter Biden Prosecutor David Weiss, FBI ‘Constricted’ Internal Communications, Testimony Shows
Daily Caller ^ | October 26, 2023 8:00 PM ET | JAMES LYNCH - INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER
The FBI can’t be trusted for background checks. Before any background checks, the investigators need to the closely vetted for bias and corruption.
Time to take this power away from FBI.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits the U.S. government to engage in mass, warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international communications, including phone calls, texts, emails, social media messages, and web browsing. The government claims to be pursuing vaguely defined foreign intelligence “targets,” but its targets need not be spies, terrorists, or criminals. They can be virtually any foreigner abroad: journalists, academic researchers, scientists, or businesspeople. And in the course of this surveillance, the government casts a wide net that ensnares the communications of ordinary Americans on a massive scale — in violation of our constitutional rights.
PRISM: The NSA obtains communications — such as international messages, emails, and internet calls — directly from U.S. tech and social media companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. The government identifies non-U.S. person accounts it wishes to monitor, and then orders the company to disclose all communications and data to and from those accounts, including communications with U.S. persons.
Upstream: Working with companies like AT&T and Verizon, the NSA intercepts and copies Americans’ international internet communications in bulk as they flow into and out of the United States. The NSA then searches for key terms, such as email addresses or phone numbers, that are associated with its hundreds of thousands of foreign targets. Communications determined to be to and from those targets — as well as those that happen to be bundled with them in transit — are retained in NSA databases for further use and analysis.
Critically, while Section 702 does not allow the NSA to target Americans at the outset, vast quantities of our communications are still searched and amassed in government databases simply because we are in touch with people abroad. And this is the bait-and-switch: Although the law allows surveillance of foreigners abroad for “foreign intelligence” purposes, the FBI routinely exploit this rich source of our information by searching those databases to find and examine the communications of individual Americans for use in domestic investigations.
Although Congress intended Section 702 to be used for counterterrorism purposes, it’s frequently used today to pursue domestic investigations of all kinds. Both the FBI and CIA have access to some of the raw data produced by this surveillance, and they increasingly use that access to examine the private communications of Americans they are investigating — all without a warrant.
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Bttt!
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