HOAXFormer FBI Informant Pleads Guilty to Fabricating Biden Bribery Story

Alexander Smirnov, a former FBI informant, pleaded guilty Monday in Los Angeles federal court to faking the story about a phony bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Smirnov’s fabricated story became central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress, and was the main element of a sprawling, and ultimately futile, GOP-led congressional investigation which found nothing to support the alleged bribery plot.

Smirnov entered his plea to a felony charge in connection with the bogus story, and also to a tax evasion charge accusing him of concealing millions of dollars of income.

The prosecutors and David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, the defense attorneys, have agreed to recommend to the judge a sentence of between four and six years in prison.

Smirnov, 44, who will be sentenced next month, will get credit for time served.

When he was arrested in February, deputies to Special Counsel David Weiss, in a memo arguing for Smirnov’s indefinite detention, described him as a hall-of-mirrors fabulist. He not only fed the FBI bogus information about the Bidens and misled prosecutors about his wealth, estimated at $6 million, but he also told officials there that he worked in the security business, even though the government could find no proof that was true.

He was arrested after telling his FBI handler that senior executives of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid President Joe Biden and Hunter Biden $5 million each around 2015. Smirnov told his handler that a Burisma executive claimed to have hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” according to court documents.

Smirnov told the story to the FBI in June 2020. At the time he had already been an informant for more than a decade.

Court documents show that, starting in 2017, Smirnov had marginal business dealings with Burisma. An FBI field office immediately investigated the allegations he had made in June 2020, but, in August 2020, concluded that Smirnov’s allegations were baseless and recommended the case be closed, according to charging documents.

No evidence has ever emerged that Joe Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes as president or in his previous role as vice president.

The FBI found Smirnov’s allegations against the Bidens to be baseless, but Republicans in Congress still made these allegations the center of their effort in Congress to investigate Biden and his family. Smirnov’s false allegations were also used to justify a House impeachment inquiry into Biden.

As the House investigation of the Bidens stalled, and before Smirnov’s arrest, Republicans in the House had demanded that the FBI release the unredacted form documenting the unverified allegations Smirnov made against the Bidens, even though they admitted they could not confirm whether or not if the allegations were true.

In September 2023, talking with House investigators, Smirnov also lied about what he claimed were Russians recordings of Hunter Biden. Smirnov claimed that these recordings were made when Hunter had supposedly stayed in a hotel in Ukraine’s capital, a hotel which was “wired” and under the control of Russin intelligence.

Smirnov told House investigators that the information was given to him by four high-level Russian officials.

Also in September 2023, Smirnov repeated some of the false claims when he was interviewed by FBI agents, and changed his story about others and “promoted a new false narrative after he said he met with Russian officials,” prosecutors said.

After admitting his stories about the Bidens were false, Smirnov told FBI interrogators that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden.

The case against Smirnov was brought by special counsel David Weiss, who also prosecuted Hunter Biden on gun and tax charges.

Glenn Thrush offers a pithy summary in the New York Times of the Smirnov affair:

For more than a decade, Mr. Smirnov played a double game, giving the F.B.I. tantalizing and, at times, valuable intelligence about a rogues’ gallery of oligarchs and public officials while offering himself as a consultant, with a fuzzy skill set, to some of the same people he was keeping tabs on.

But his charm, confidence and daring finally caught up with him in 2020 when he told his F.B.I. handler what prosecutors say was a brazen lie — that the oligarch owner of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had arranged to pay $5 million bribes to both President Biden and his son.

The explosive claim was leaked to Republicans, who made Mr. Smirnov’s allegations a centerpiece of their now-stalled effort to impeach President Biden, apparently without verifying the allegation. Many of the politicians who highlighted his fake allegations have remained silent about his indictment.