Yesterday’s news was mostly focused on the Fani Willis hearings, which are still going on today. The crew at MSNBC last night was trying to be positive about Willis’s testimony, although some commentary today says the case is now in trouble.

However, while it’s arguable (maybe) that Willis’s conduct might justify some scrutiny by some Georgia state ethics review board, it seems it doesn’t rise to the level of her being diqaualified from the case under Georgia law. According to this article, under Georgia law Willis could only be disqualified if she has a conflict of interest with the case. For example, if she had a prior relationship with a defendant, or with a victim, or has some financial interest in how the case is decided, that would be disqualifying. But I don’t see how anything she’s being accused of is connected to the case itself, or would make any difference to its outcome.

Maybe there’s something I’m missing, as I’m not following the testimony all that much. And I do feel bad for her for having her personal life paraded in public as it is.

In other news, today Rep. James Comer must be hving a sad. His chief and possibly only “credible” source for his Burisma bribery allegations against President Biden turns out to have, um, made it all up. The source was an FBI informant, and Comer and others have been talking about this guy’s testimony and even leaking parts of it for months. That the testimony hasn’t been released is a “cover up,” they said.  So then this happened:

As it turns out, the Justice Department was working on the verifiability of the allegation. On Thursday, it unsealed an indictment: The informant who alleged that he’d been told about the bribe had allegedly made the whole thing up.

At the outset, the indictment summarizes the actions of the FBI informant, a man named Alexander Smirnov. Smirnov, it alleges, “transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against [Joe Biden], the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against [Biden] and his candidacy.” …

… The indictment walks through Smirnov’s communications with his FBI handler. In May 2020, Smirnov suggested to his handler that Biden would be “going to jail” over the leak of phone calls between Biden and former Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko — a leak that originated with a Ukrainian lawmaker who had provided information to Giuliani and was later sanctioned by the Trump administration as a Russian agent. Smirnov then said that the information about a bribe to Biden would “soon be in the news” and that he would try to prove it.

Giuliani’s slapdash efforts to dig up dirt on Biden in Ukraine had led then-Attorney General William P. Barr to set up a process for assessing such allegations based out of the FBI field office in Pittsburgh. In June 2020, that office contacted Smirnov about a reference he’d made in 2017 to Hunter Biden.

It was at this point, the indictment alleges, that Smirnov described conversations with Burisma executives during the Obama administration. During a 2016 meeting in Austria, Smirnov claimed, he’d been told by Zlochevsky about the alleged bribe.

But the indictment shows evidence that Smirnov couldn’t have had that conversation with Zlochevsky then. In fact, it alleges, Smirnov “met with officials from Burisma for the first time in 2017, after [Biden] left office in January 2017.” It documents how Smirnov informed his FBI handler about his initial contacts with the company’s executives after that point.

“The Defendant’s story to the FBI was a fabrication,” it alleges, “an amalgam of otherwise unremarkable business meetings and contacts that had actually occurred but at a later date than he claimed and for the purpose of pitching Burisma on the Defendant’s services and products, not for discussing bribes to Public Official 1 when he was in office.”

So with that “evidence” gone up in smoke, as I understand it, Comer’s got nothin’. I assume they will say that the FBI’s version of events is the cover up.

The best part, though, is that now there are calls to investigate Comer.

Also from yesterday, the last shred of “evidence” claimed for the “stolen” 2020 election presented in Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules has gone up in smoke as well. The main claim of the film was based on data from the right-wing activist group True the Vote that claimed claimed thousands of people collect and submitted fraudulent ballots in swing states. However,

Georgia officials, who had been under relentless attack in the wake of the 2020 election, demanded that True the Vote turn over whatever evidence or information about informants it had, eventually obtaining a court order for the group to do so. This week, the group’s attorneys responded: There was no such evidence to share.

Oops!

This is not the first time that True the Vote has been caught flat-footed. Officials in Arizona recommended that the group be investigated by the FBI and IRS (given its tax-exempt status) for failing to provide evidence it claimed to have about ballot-stuffing in that state. True the Vote itself promised for months that it would release its data publicly to validate the claims made in “2000 Mules.” It never did.

Again, this is not surprising. The film features True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht and investigator Gregg Phillips prominently and repeatedly, allowing them to allege that they had uncovered this network of ballot harvesters. But Phillips had already burned his credibility on vote-fraud allegations after the 2016 election, when he claimed to have found millions of illegal ballots. (Trump elevated this claim, too.) No such evidence was ever presented, obviously.

D’Souza’s argument depends entirely on True the Vote’s data, as he explained when we spoke in 2022. Much of it was immediately disproved, like the scene in the film where Phillips and Engelbrecht intimate that they had used cellphone location data to solve a murder that, it turns out, had already been solved. The movie relies heavily on video taped at ballot boxes, with Phillips and Engelbrecht providing voice-over commentary to suggest that something shady is going on. But at no point do they show a person at a ballot box matched to geolocation data, the purported evidence on which their allegations rest. In fact, only one map of an alleged ballot harvester’s path is shown in the film. In an email to The Washington Post, Phillips admitted that it was artificial.