On Lies And Damned Lies

And keeping hope in truth alive

It was always clear that Robert Hunter Biden had compromised his personal integrity somehow in the pursuit of fortune, compromising the family business. Sketchy as his Burisma board seat became while his father was vice president, however, the exact factual details of the power grift have taken time to emerge. Turns out the correct answer was the US ambassador to Italy rather than the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office. Hunter “wrote a letter to the ambassador in 2016 seeking assistance for Burisma, which had been working on a geothermal project in Italy” but was “having trouble getting regulatory approval.”

This is not quite the same story that Alexander Smirnov peddled to the FBI, producing four years of hysterical stories and overwrought congressional hearings before he was arrested in February. Smirnov, who simply lied about the timing of his own business contacts with Burisma to fabricate his story of a $10 million bribery scheme, awaits trial for lying to the feds. Republicans put the false and fictitous record produced by Smirnov’s FBI contact, a so-called Form 1023, at the center of their investigations into the Bidens during 2023. That falsehood was not the same story as this one, but it is similar enough to the real story of Hunter’s shady business that an average news consumer could mistake it for the real thing.

Republicans will have fresh ammunition to go after the Bidens now, though the change at the top of the Democratic ticket may render the effort moot. Hunter may get sentenced to prison time, but he will probably only pay stiff fines and walk away. Americans will not be surprised if that happens because that sort of thing happens all the time, in America.

Hunter faces tax evasion charges related to his actual income from Burisma as well as other businesses overseas. Prosecutors in the case have informed the court that they intend to bring up Hunter’s ties to Gabriel Popoviciu, a Romanian businessman who was allegedly trying to “influence U.S. government policy” during the Biden vice presidency. Convicted of real estate fraud in 2017, Popoviciu “wanted U.S. government agencies to probe the Romanian bribery investigation he was facing in the hopes that would end his legal trouble.”

Hunter allegedly took a cut of $3 million that Popoviciu paid his partnership for these shady services. While the payments were booked as “management services to real estate prosperities in Romania,” prosecutors say that Hunter knew the scheme was shady, and therefore his tax evasion is deliberate. They charge him with an “attempt to influence US government agencies” but do not charge him with violating FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

As real as these charges are — Hunter being innocent until proven guilty, etc — they are not as big or scandalous as the story Smirnov made up. A good fake scandal has size and salaciousness. It sounds true because it is like the truth. It has “truthiness,” to borrow a term from the Stephen Colbert who was funny instead of this one, which is clearly a pod person. See what I mean?

The reader will likely recall the infamous Pee Tape, an outsized absurdity that multiple sources in Russia had “confirmed” for Christopher Steele, likely at the behest of the FSB, deranging the broader discussion of Trump’s policies. Such episodes are why “human intelligence” (HUMINT) must be treated with skepticism. Nothing contained in a dossier of raw HUMINT should be accepted as true without strongly corroborating evidence, especially when the sources live in an authoritarian surveillance state. No corroborating evidence for a Pee Tape ever emerged. Buzzfeed Inc. is currently trading at $2.38 a share as I write this. These two data points are connected.

Igor Danchenko, the Russian-born businessman who conducted research for Steele during his travels in Russia and supplied 80 percent of the material in the dossier by his own estimation, was accused of fabricating his sources at trial. A jury found him not guilty of lying to the FBI in 2022. Danchenko disagreed with the way Steele had presented the information, maintaining that he had never considered the rumors he reported to be high-quality information. Rolling Stone recently reported that Danchenko has written a tell-all book and begun speaking out. I would like to read his book.

In March, a British judge threw out Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Orbis Intelligence, Christopher Steele’s private firm, and ordered him to pay their legal fees. Trump believes, and wants Americans to believe, that the Democratic Party conspired to make up a fake news Pee Tape story from the beginning. Danchenko seems to suggest instead that Steele ‘sexed up’ the significance and reliability of the rumors that he had relayed from Russia. Trump’s story sounds true to Trump supporters, but Danchenko’s story sounds true of Steele, who charged top dollar of a prestige client, namely the Democratic Party. Only Danchenko can explain who his sources were and the contexts of his conversations. What matters, in the end, is that he had those conversations inside Russia.

Russia is a land of lies. Russians lie so much that they need two different words for lying, one meaning ‘untruth’ (lozh ложь) and the other meaning ‘ridiculous untruth’ (vranyo враньё), or if you prefer, ‘lies’ and ‘damned lies.’ Danchenko reported damned lies to Steele, who presented them as mere lies to the Democratic Party. BuzzFeed was not briefed on the quality of the sources and had no way of assessing the truth about the contents of the dossier, so when they published it under the imprimatur of Professional Journalism, damned lies had been transmuted into maybe truths?

Hunter Biden left his laptop with a stranger and forgot about it. The laptop itself was real enough. Rudy Giuliani knew about the laptop, which means that the Kremlin knew about the laptop, which is how the United States Intelligence Community™ also “knew” that Hunter’s laptop was Kremlin “disinformation.” Lies and damned lies surround the legendary laptop. Ultimately, the contents of the hard drive have not borne out as a ‘smoking gun.’ For example, the “cocaine photo” turns out to be a visual joke made with lines of sawdust, because Hunter has a sense of humor. He is human, including his very real flaws. No corroborating evidence of conspiracy to sell US policy from within the Obama administration, via the office of the vice presidency by way of the son, has ever emerged, though the Biden family business is genuinely shady.

Let us suppose that 85 percent of the fact claims in the so-called Steele Dossier were true, as Rachel Maddow tediously asserts to this day, because the very same ratio of truth exists in the Victor Shokin story. He was a real Ukrainian prosecutor, though he somehow never prosecuted anyone. Shokin was in trouble with Ukrainian anti-corruption watchdogs and under suspicion from the EU, not just the US State Department. His firing had no connection to Burisma-Biden influence money. Then-vice president Joe Biden’s visit to Kyiv took place months before the Ukrainian Rada voted no confidence in Shokin — and he merely transmitted the administration’s policy.

Of course, Joe Biden had to brag about his supposed role in Shokin’s removal — not because he was part of a conspiracy, but because there is not much else for a vice president to actually do, in the American constitutional system. He told a damned lie to inflate himself, so his enemies accepted the lie as a convenient truth. They do the same thing. We have no idea how many times Putin has lied about himself, for example. He has supposedly been dying of cancer, suffering from Parkinson’s, and lying on death’s door since 2022. Which rumors about him came from his own lips, emanating then from greater Russia, the land of lies? Which ones were little lies that other people told about his health for the sake of convenience?

Sources matter. The sources who talk to those sources matter. No strongly-personal rumor should ever be believed, let alone reported, without strong corroboration. We are surrounded by uncorroborated lies that people tell about each other and themselves, now. Deepfakes and fake news seem ubiquitous, election season shenanigans more intense than ever, professional journalism less able or willing to discern lies from truth than ever before. To survive this environment with our brains intact, we must learn to suspend belief without losing our expectation that the facts will eventually emerge, or at least enough of the facts to make up our minds with confidence. Play the long game with truth, and the lies will sort out. The liars want you to give up on truth, so maintain hope for it. Don’t give them what they want.