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Vladimir Putin hardly needs to interfere in American democracy

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President Vladimir Putin of Russia must get a kick out of spreading disinformation to Americans for its own sake. Otherwise it is hard to see why he would bother. As has episodically been the case for eight years, Washington is abuzz over allegations of Russian manipulation. The special counsel investigating President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, has charged an FBI informant with telling lies about the president that have been central to Republican efforts to impeach him; the indictment links the informant to Russian intelligence.

You might expect such a dramatic development to derail the impeachment. That would betray a touching faith that the truth mattered in the first place. Republicans who once trumpeted the informant’s claims are shrugging them away and insisting that impeachment will move ahead based on other suspicions and suppositions, though the Republicans’ two-seat majority in the House of Representatives is all but certain to doom any vote, given the misgivings of some members.

This is not to minimise Russian efforts to undermine democracy. Robert Mueller, the special counsel who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election, found it “sweeping and systematic”. But politicians of both parties have shown that when it comes to spinning conspiracies and spreading dysfunction they can manage on their own. Republican members of the House are the best at this. The most shocking facts are not emerging from the shadows thanks to congressional investigations but are being paraded in the open thanks to congressional inanity, from the refusal of House Republicans even to vote on the Senate’s bipartisan agreement to tighten border security and help Ukraine and Israel, to their inability to agree among themselves on budget priorities with a government shutdown looming, tiresomely, yet again.

The story of the informant, or misinformant, has the familiar, miasmic qualities of other scandals in the Trump era. No one is said to have peed on anyone, but the tale does involve vivid characters, duplicitous dealings in European capitals, affectionate texts with FBI agents, investigations of investigations, ties to Ukraine and, in the end, benefits to Russia.

Before he was arrested in mid-February Alexander Smirnov, a dual citizen of America and Israel, had been slipping the FBI information for 13 years. The agency trusted him enough to authorise him to commit crimes as part of investigations, though it warned him not to lie, at least not to the FBI, according to the indictment. Mr Smirnov, now 43, was in contact with his handler almost daily; he called the agent “bro”.

In 2013 Mr Smirnov was struggling with credit-card debt of $125,000, according to the Los Angeles Times, but prosecutors say he now has access to $6m, though he does not own a house or have a job, at least in America. He does have nine guns at home, prosecutors say. He has pleaded not guilty.

Here comes the complicated bit. You recall Burisma, the Ukrainian gas firm of which Mr Biden’s son, Hunter, became a member of the board while his father was vice-president? In 2017 Mr Smirnov mentioned to his handler that Hunter Biden was on the board, as was known. Then, in 2020, as Mr Biden was running against Donald Trump for president, Mr Smirnov sent his handler texts “expressing bias” against Mr Biden, according to the indictment. When he promised information incriminating the Bidens, the handler replied, “that would be a game changer.”

Meanwhile, in early 2020, the attorney-general under Mr Trump had directed Scott Brady, a US attorney, to investigate the suspicions of Biden family corruption about which Mr Trump had previously demanded that Ukraine launch an investigation, triggering Mr Trump’s first impeachment. After Mr Brady tasked the FBI with searching its files for “Burisma”, the mention from 2017 popped up, and the handler contacted Mr Smirnov. This time Mr Smirnov said Burisma’s chief executive told him as far back as 2015 that the company paid bribes of $5m apiece to the Biden men. The FBI recorded the new accusations on a “Form 1023”.

In 2023 Republican congressmen got wind of the form and demanded it, extracting it and publicising it after threatening the FBI director with contempt. Although the information was uncorroborated, Nancy Mace, a South Carolina congresswoman, declared at the first impeachment hearing in September that “we already know the president took bribes from Burisma.” Jim Jordan of Ohio called the FBI document “the most corroborating evidence we have”, while Elise Stefanik of New York saw “the biggest political corruption scandal” of “the past 100 years”.

An imperfect spy

Mr Smirnov’s claims did not withstand the slightest scrutiny, according to the indictment. He did not meet any Burisma executives before 2017, and meetings and calls that he described never took place, the indictment says. When agents met with him in September, according to the indictment, Mr Smirnov changed his story and told new lies. He said that when Hunter Biden stayed in Kyiv’s Premier Palace hotel his calls may have been recorded by Russian intelligence. Yet Mr Biden has never even been to Ukraine. Mr Smirnov, prosecutors warned, “is actively peddling new lies that could impact US elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November”. They have successfully argued that he is a flight risk who should be detained pending trial.

No Republican who hyped Mr Smirnov’s accusations has expressed regret, and the leader of the committee pursuing impeachment, James Comer, insists his inquiry, which has yet to produce evidence of a crime by the president, “is not reliant” on them. It would be reassuring to discover that, at bottom, Mr Putin is responsible for all this nonsense. What seems more probable is that he offered an assist to politicians already more than capable of wasting their chance to do some good while in office. 

Read more from Lexington, our columnist on American politics:
The flaws that China’s chief ideologue found in America (Feb 22nd)
Donald Trump’s tremendous love (Feb 16th)
This is not a story about Taylor Swift and the Super Bowl (Feb 8th)

Also: How the Lexington column got its name

Economics

Andrew Bailey on why UK-U.S. trade deal won’t end uncertainty

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Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey attends the central bank’s Monetary Policy Report press conference at the Bank of England, in the City of London, on May 8, 2025.

Carlos Jasso | Afp | Getty Images

Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey told CNBC on Thursday that the U.K. was heading for more economic uncertainty, despite the country being the first to strike a trade agreement with the U.S. under President Donald Trump’s controversial tariff regime.

“The tariff and trade situation has injected more uncertainty into the situation… There’s more uncertainty now than there was in the past,” Bailey told CNBC in an interview.

“A U.K.-U.S. trade agreement is very welcome in that sense, very welcome. But the U.K. is a very open economy,” he continued.

That means that the impact from tariffs on the U.K. economy comes not just from its own trade relationship with Washington, but also from those of the U.S. and the rest of the world, he said.

“I hope that what we’re seeing on the U.K.-U.S. trade side will be the first of many, and it will be repeated by a whole series of trade agreements, but we have to see that happen of course, and where it actually ends up.”

“Because, of course, we are looking at tariff levels that are probably higher than they were beforehand.”

Trump unveils United Kingdom trade deal, first since ‘reciprocal’ tariff pause

In Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Report released Thursday, the word “uncertainty” was used 41 times across its 97 pages, up from 36 times in February, according to a CNBC tally.

The U.K. central bank cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point on Thursday, taking its key rate to 4.25%. The decision was highly divided among the seven members of its Monetary Policy Committee, with five voting for the 25 basis point cut, two voting to hold rates and two voting to reduce by a larger 50 basis points.

Bailey said that while some analysts had perceived the rate decision as more hawkish than expected — in other words, leaning toward holding rates elevated than slashing them rapidly — he was not surprised by the close vote.

“What it reflects is that there are two sides, there are risks on both sides here,” he told CNBC.

“We could get a much more severe weakness of demand than we were expecting, that could then pass through to a weaker outlook for inflation than we were expecting.”

“There’s a risk on the other side that we could get some combination of more persistence in the inflation effects that are gradually working their way through the system,” such as in wages and energy, while “supply capacity in the economy is weaker,” he said.

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Economics

Trump knocks down a controversial pillar of civil-rights law

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IN THE DELUGE of 145 executive orders issued by President Donald Trump (on subjects as disparate as “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” and “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads”) it can be difficult to discern which are truly consequential. But one of them, signed on April 23rd under the bland headline “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy”, aims to remake civil-rights law. Those primed to distrust Mr Trump on such matters may be surprised to learn that the president’s target is not just important but also well-chosen.

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Economics

Harvard has more problems than Donald Trump

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A Programme at Harvard Divinity School aspired to “deZionize Jewish consciousness”. During “privilege trainings”, working-class Harvard students were instructed that, by being Jewish, they were oppressing wealthier, better prepared classmates. A course in Harvard’s graduate school of public health, “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health”, sought to “interrogate the relationships between settler colonialism, Zionism, antisemitism, and other forms of racism”: Will these findings by Harvard’s task-force on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, released on April 29th, shock anyone? Maybe not. Americans may be numb by now to bulletins about the excesses, not to say inanities, of some leftist academics.

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