FEBRUARY 16, 2024 UPDATE: On Feb. 15 the New York Post reported the following: “Special counsel David Weiss on Thursday charged the FBI informant who alleged President Biden and first son Hunter Biden were involved in a $10 million bribery scheme with providing false information to the bureau. Alexander Smirnov, 43, was indicted by a California grand jury on two felony counts of making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record for statements he made to the FBI referenced in a June 2020 FD-1023 form that House Republicans have used as evidence in Joe Biden’s impeachment inquiry.”
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Doug P. at Twitchy pointed out that the Associated Press uncorked a headline about Sen. Charles Grassley's release of a document underlining that the Biden family accepted $10 million in bribes:
Grassley releases full FBI memo with unverified claims about Hunter Biden's work in Ukraine
"Hunter Biden's work" is awfully nebulous, and the "unverified" part is a scare word with the translation "AP has not attempted to verify this, so it's unverified." On Twitter, Mark Levin took exception to the headline:
AP proves, again, that it is a propaganda operation for the Democrat Party. Check out this title, which regurgitates what the White House lawyers are pushing, and has no relation to the facts. Instead, AP, like the rest of the corrupt Democrat Party media, is doing all it can…
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) July 21, 2023
AP reporter Lisa Mascaro began with the same "GOP Pounces" tone Levin slammed in her lede:
"Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley released an unclassified document Thursday that Republicans claim is significant in their investigation of Hunter Biden as they delve into the financial affairs of the president and his son, and revive previously debunked claims of wrongdoing."
She is borrowing "unverified" and "debunked" from the Democrats she quoted:
White House spokesman Ian Sams said Thursday, “It is remarkable that congressional Republicans, in their eagerness to go after President Biden regardless of the truth, continue to push claims that have been debunked for years."
...Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Oversight panel, said the document released by Republicans “records the unverified, secondhand, years-old allegations" that were already shown to be not true during the 2019 impeachment hearings.
Is Lisa Mascaro biased? Well, we previously noticed her article boosting Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, titled "Supreme Court nominee’s ‘empathy’ is flashpoint for Senate." Mascaro's lede then was "Empathy is not a quality many Republican senators want to see in the next Supreme Court justice." So she's a hack.
The New York Post explained the Grassley document from a confidential FBI informant:
Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of natural gas company Burisma Holdings, told the FBI informant in 2016 while meeting at a coffee shop in Vienna, Austria, that “it cost 5 [million] to pay one Biden, and 5 [million] to another Biden,” according to the redacted FD-1023 form.
“Zlochevsky made some comment that although Hunter Biden ‘was stupid, and his (Zlochevsky’s) dog was smarter,’ Zlochevsky needed to keep Hunter Biden (on Burisma’s board) ‘so everything will be okay,’” the June 2020 document says.
AP's motto is "Advancing the Power of Facts." That's laughable. These days they are trying to advance the power of spin.
