Feb. 15 (UPI) — Special Advisor David Weiss On Thursday, an FBI informant was indicted on false statement and obstruction charges for allegedly lying about the president. Joe Biden and his son Hunter Bidenin the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.
White accused Alexander Smirnov, 43, is accused of making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious dossier regarding statements he made to the FBI after Biden became president in 2020.
Smirnov was arrested on Wednesday in Harry Reid Las Vegas International Airport after arriving in the United States from abroad, according to the Department of Justice.
He was scheduled to make his first appearance in federal court on Thursday. He faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison if convicted.
According to the indictment, Smirnov told an FBI agent in March 2017 that he had a phone call with the owner of Burisma and noted that Hunter Biden was a board member of Burisma at the time. Burisma.
Three years later, during Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, Smirnov would have invented two stories in which Burisma executives in 2015 and 2016 told him they hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his father, from all kinds of problems.”
He also claimed that the executives paid $5 million each to Hunter and Joe Biden while Joe Biden was vice president, so his son could “take care of all these issues through his father,” referring to the criminal investigations into Burisma carried out at the time by the then Ukrainian prosecutor. general.
Weiss, however, claimed that Smirnov only contacted Burisma executives in 2017, after Biden was no longer vice president and after Ukraine’s prosecutor general had already been fired.
“In other words, when (Joe Biden) no longer had the ability to influence American policy and when the Attorney General was no longer in office,” according to the indictment.
“The defendant turned his usual and unusual business contacts with Burma in 2017 and later into corruption allegations against (Joe Biden), the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for president, after expressing a bias against (Joe Biden) and his candidacy,” the indictment reads.
FBI agents interviewed Smirnov again in September 2023, during which he allegedly repeated previous false statements and changed his story to promote “a new false narrative after he said he met with Russian officials,” according to the report.
Smirnov’s indictment is a blow against congressional Republicans, who have long relied on his now-discredited testimony for their impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden.
When helaunched the impeachment investigation in September, then Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy said “a trusted FBI informant alleged a bribe to the Biden family.”
GOP leaders had fought with the FBI to obtain memos about what Smirnov told investigators and released the documents over the FBI’s objections.
The FBI is now using the same memos released by Republicans as part of its indictment against Smirnov.
