Tinker Taylor Furloughed Spy

Trump's DOJ let the Russian spy who lied about the Bidens out of prison and now no one knows where he is

Mar 08, 2026

Welcome to the weekend edition of The Experiment, your official hopepunk newsletter. If you’d like to support my work, become a paid subscriber or check out the options below. But even if you don’t, this bugga free. Thanks for reading!

OK, I’m gonna tell you a story that doesn’t sound true, that should not have happened, and that starts with a story that I immediately suspected not to be true, namely that executives from an Ukrainian energy company named Burisma paid Joe Biden and his son Hunter $5 million each in 2015.

The Biden-Ukraine balderdash arrived in the discourse in its final form — rank twaddle. Joe Biden has a lot of faults, and pride goeth before them all, but if greed is one of them, then Joe Biden has done a lousy job at lining his pockets. And then there was then-candidate Donald Trump, publicly daring Russia to dig into this and then, as president, got impeached for holding up aid to Ukraine in exchange for opposition research on Biden.

The story never proved out, of course, because this never happened, but Trump didn’t care. He has a tabloid’s sense of defaming others. Who cares if it’s true? It just needs to make a good headline in the New York Post so the numbskulls in the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability can blow it up for the cameras while LARPing ethics. They never impeached Biden because there was no there there. All they accomplished was to make the fact that Joe Biden never turned his back on his failson look corrupt. Honestly, some people make me wish there really was a Hell.

Hunter Biden's Laptop, Revealed by New York Post, Comes Back to Haunt Him - The New York Times — These f*cking guys…

So when it turned out in early 2024 that a US-Israeli citizen named Alexander Smirnov who had “extensive” Russian intelligence contacts had been feeding this disinformation to his FBI handler, the rank stupidity of it all made sense. Russian intelligence learned how to hijack the Republican Party in 2015—remember Jade Helm?—and has been leading the elephant party around by the nose like a zombie ant ever since, from the “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign” in 2016 to Trump firing FBI Director James Comey for investigating this in the first place. The very next day, Trump handed over classified intelligence to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, in the Oval Office like the ёбаная puppet Hillary said he was.

So yeah, the idea that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about the Bidens to the FBI through this Smirnov dude made more sense than the Bidens being some crime family. It was a perfect nesting doll of derp, a Potyemkin village of fools. The fact that the morons like Jim Jordan and James Comer bought the story and debased our country with years of public show trials probably made this a huge success in Moscow. Look how stupid we can make them act.

And of course there were money trails to Trump:

The intrigue here deepens in view of continued revelations about Smirnov’s dealings with Trump’s business empire. Trump’s own personal business associates paid Smirnov under unclear circumstances via a mysterious American firm in 2020—the same year he was providing false statements about the Bidens to the FBI. But Smirnov had other, unreported ties to Donald Trump and his businesses, via a convoluted group of linked companies, one of which came close to building a Trump-branded social media platform, like the firm that later became known as Truth Social, even though Smirnov reportedly had little direct involvement in the plan.

But by then 78 million Americans had voted to put the Russian intelligence asset back in the White House for Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo. Soon Trump was forfeiting the Cold War by repeating Vladimir Putin’s talking points on Ukraine and installing someone who has been described as “sympathetic … toward Russia” and “a favorite of Russia’s state media,” as the Director of National Intelligence. By then Smirnov had been sentenced to six years in prison for tax evasion and lying to the FBI. I figured I wouldn’t need to waste anymore time thinking about Alexander Smirnov.

Alexander Smirnov in a Los Angeles courtroom in 2024

Too often I act like I live in normal times. In normal times I should be able to assume that the President of the United States is not compromised by Russian intelligence and will act in what he—or, I don’t know, some day, maybe: she—perceives as the best interests of the country and not read talking points from the Kremlin. I am so mad at myself for acting like the situationship we’re in with the molting fascist is an aberration. The arc of the moral universe might bend towards justice, but since 2015 it’s been taking a crazy detour. You wouldn’t believe the traffic.

Of course I should have kept paying attention to Alexander Smirnov.

Some people were. The Trump administration, for one, was. In April, the Justice Department announced it was reviewing Smirnov’s sentence and asked a judge to let him out of prison on bail so he could see an eye doctor. (The New York Times reported that the order to help spring Smirnov came down from “senior Justice Department officials in Washington.”) To which a federal judge appointed by George W. Bush responded—and I’m not making this up—“Seriously?” U.S. District Judge Otis D. Wright II could not believe that federal prosecutors had taken the side of the Russian intelligence asset. “At this stage, the government is taking a look at this case anew? Am I reading that correctly?”

God bless Judge Wright, who noted that no one was questioning the evidence or offering new evidence. Also, he wrote that since federal prosecutors “present no new facts in their papers that would alter the court’s conclusion that Smirnov is a flight risk, let alone provide ‘clear and convincing evidence’ that he is not one,” Smirnov could sit his happy задница in the (admittedly low-security) pokey until February 2029 and think about what he’d done. And this is where the national news media who covered the Trump’s DOJ shenanigans figured they could tap out, too.

Alexander Smirnov, отвратительный придурок

See, the thing is Smirnov didn’t stay in prison. The Bureau of Prisons website says he’s at FCI Terminal Island in Long Beach, California, but he’s—I’m not sure how to put this exactly—not. Sometime in July he began a “furlough,” according to a prison official, who also “confirmed that Alexander Smirnov is affiliated with the facility, but is not currently housed there.”

This all came to light because someone wanted to sue Smirnov, which is how a process server discovered Smirnov was affiliated with but not housed by FCI Terminal Island. The process server, who still had a job to do, started bothering the sheriff’s office, which in October answered with a shrug emoji. Not only had Smirnov been furloughed, but no one knew where he was. Cool cool cool.

This all came to light because that process server told independent journalist Jacqueline Sweet, who got a “no comment” from the DOJ and no responses at all from the White House and the Central California U.S. Attorney’s office. And Sweet’s reporting was picked up by some publications—the New York Post, The New Republic—but the big dogs in the news have ignored the story about the missing Russian intelligence asset. They, like all of us, like Smirnov apparently, have just moved on.

It’s impossible to remain vigilant to everything happening. Apparently we started a war with another country in the Middle East that posed no threat to us? Apparently the DOJ found the missing FBI memos of interviews they did in 2019 with a woman who said Trump sexually assaulted her when she was a minor? Apparently we lost 92,000 jobs in February? Apparently the Trump administration can’t figure out how to refund $130 billion in tariffs the Supreme Court said were illegal, and meanwhile the price of gas went up 14% last week?

There’s so much going on, it’s easy to fall into the diversion fallacy that assumes anything is an attempt to divert attention from something else, as in, bombing Iran was a “wag the dog” diversion from the Epstein files. In my experience, politicians are always eager to take focus away from a damaging story, but to quote Huey Lewis, sometimes bad is bad. It’s not like they’re flooding the zone with good news.

Even with everything everywhere all at once, at some point, pretty please, could we deal with the fact that our President is a Russian stooge? If you don’t believe reports that he has had a Russian intelligence codename since the ‘80s, then could I interest you in a lengthy list of examples that show he has been acting like a Russian asset since then? We need to deal with the fact that the Republican Party and President Trump are being easily manipulated from Moscow, and we could start by finding Smirnov. Somebody should check the eye doctor.

Jason Stanford is a co-author of the NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Email him at jason31170@gmail.com.