Ex-FBI informant agrees to plead guilty to lying about Bidens
A former FBI informant accused of fabricating a claim that President Joe Biden and his son Hunter were each paid a $5 million bribe by a Ukrainian oligarch has agreed to plead guilty to a range of federal charges, according to a court filing Thursday.
Alexander Smirnov, a profiteer, fixer and gossip based in Las Vegas, reached a deal with the special counsel overseeing the investigation into Hunter Biden, David C. Weiss, that could lead to 48 to 72 months in prison, according to the filing in federal court in California.
The deal comes weeks after Weiss charged Smirnov with tax evasion following his indictment in February on charges that he lied to investigators about the Bidens.
A federal judge could review the deal as soon as Monday.
At the time he was arrested, Smirnov, 43, was preparing to leave for what prosecutors called “a monthslong, multicountry foreign trip” during which he claimed to have plans to meet with contacts from multiple foreign intelligence agencies.
He was initially held in Las Vegas and later transferred to California, and was scheduled to face trial in January before the same judge who presided over Biden’s case.
The plea deal effectively ends the work of Weiss, whom Donald Trump appointed as a U.S. attorney in Delaware during his first term, then held over during the Biden administration to complete a yearslong investigation of the president’s troubled youngest son.
Joe Biden pardoned his son last month, before Hunter Biden’s sentencing on his conviction on gun charges in June and his guilty plea in the California tax case this fall.
Smirnov’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Smirnov promoted his ability to make sense of a confusing Eastern European landscape to U.S. law enforcement agencies and was accused of falsely telling the FBI that Hunter Biden, then a paid board member of the energy giant Burisma, demanded the money to protect the company from an investigation by the country’s prosecutor general at the time.
Smirnov’s motivation for lying, prosecutors wrote, appears to have been political. During the 2020 campaign, he sent his FBI handler “a series of messages expressing bias” against Joe Biden, including texts, replete with typos and misspellings, boasting that he had information that would put him in jail.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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