At a gala on May 11, 2019, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was handed a thumb drive from a "foreign national" with "dirt" on Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, according to a new report.
An exclusive report from Insider cited "two sources with direct knowledge of the incident, who explained that the thumb drive was given to Pompeo's aides by an FBI informant, and former KGB agent, with the code name "Rollie." Insider said it had decided not to print the informant's real name.
When asked about it, "Rollie" first denied the claim and, when shown photos of him with Pompeo, he wrote over WhatsApp, "You can publish. It's advertising for me. I'm not interested in the past."
He denied handing over the thumb drive.
On the drive was the same information he gave months earlier to Justice Department officials in Los Angeles, Insider reported.
The documents contain "poorly sourced allegations" from old news articles and links from Ukrainian and Russian websites saying Hunter Biden was laundering money. They frequently refer to President Joe Biden using his first name but misspelling it "Josef," Insider wrote.
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"They contain no evidence of criminal activity," the report said.
Rudy Giuliani is known to have given Pompeo a folder of documents containing unproven allegations he got while in Ukraine in March 2019. It's also when, as Insider characterized him, "right-wing investigative reporter John Solomon" also began writing about Burisma and the Bidens for The Hill.
The attack on Biden began shortly before he went to Ukraine in Dec. 2015 for a meeting in which Biden said a prosecutor had to be fired for corruption. "Biden was carrying out a policy developed at the State Department and coordinated with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund," the Washington Post explained in 2019.
Posting about it on social media, former Foreign Affairs Committee communications director Tim Mulvey explained that the allegations about Hunter Biden that first appeared online tracked back to a Russian website.
FBI whistleblower Johnathan Buma, Rollie's handler, disclosed that the information was taken seriously and passed to FBI agents in Delaware who were already investigating Hunter Biden.
Insider explained it was a "third channel" of disinformation that was making its way to the Trump administration in 2020: this informant, Giuliani and another FBI informant named Alexander Smirnov.
It was broadly reported last week that Smirnov is being prosecuted for lying to the FBI about the matter. He was arrested for the second time on Thursday.
"Prosecutors allege that Smirnov repeatedly lied to his FBI handler, whom he worked with for more than a decade, and should not be trusted," CNN reported. "He also has extensive contacts in Russia and elsewhere, prosecutors said, and lied to authorities about his 'access to over $6 million in liquid funds — more than enough money for him to live comfortably overseas for the rest of his life.'" For that reason, prosecutors are fighting to keep him in prison, alleging he's a flight risk.
Smirnov hasn't entered his plea for the case yet.
He alleges he got the information on the Bidens from Russian intelligence officials.
Republicans have seized on the information about the Bidens, claiming that it proves a bribery scheme. They started an impeachment inquiry on the matter. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) now accuses Republicans of promoting Russian propaganda to attack Biden.