FBI informant pleads guilty to lying about $10M Biden bribery payments to Joe, Hunter
A former FBI informant pleaded guilty on Thursday to lying about a $10 million bribe that a Ukrainian businessman paid to then-vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter to “protect” his firm from a looming corruption investigation.
Alexander Smirnov, 43, entered into a plea agreement with special counsel David Weiss and confessed to having created “a false and fictitious record” as part of a multi-year federal probe into the Bidens.
The falsehoods included the bribery allegation, which was memorialized in an FBI FD-1023 form in 2020 and released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) last year, and other aspects of Hunter Biden’s tenure on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
Smirnov faces up to six years in prison, one year of supervised release and must pay $675,502 in restitution, pursuant to the plea deal filed in US District Court for the Central District of California.
But prosecutors and the defense are expected to recommend at least two years in jail.
Under his agreement, he also pleaded guilty to charges of evading tax payments on $2.15 million in unreported income between 2020 and 2022, court filings indicated. Prosecutors had slapped the fresh tax evasion charges against Smirnov last month after being slapped with two felonies in February for his fabrications about the Biden-Burisma probe.
The dual US-Israeli citizen was detained by authorities that same month after having alleged that Joe and Hunter Biden received $5 million a pop from Burisma Holdings owner Mykola Zlochevsky in exchange for helping to oust former Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin sometime between 2015 or 2016.
More specifically, Smirnov suggested to the FBI that an executive claimed to have tapped Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” according to court documents.
In total, Hunter Biden and his business partner Devon Archer, who also served on Burisma’s board, were paid $6.4 million between March 2014 and April 2019 by?Zlochevsky’s firm, according to invoices and other documents found on his abandoned laptop.
The 54-year-old first son sat on the board of Burisma and earned a salary of up to $1 million per year — despite having no past experience in the energy industry and while his dad oversaw Ukraine as part of his vice presidential portfolio.
He had his $83,333 monthly payments cut in half just weeks after Joe Biden left the White House in January 2017.
During his first administration, now-President-elect Donald Trump was impeached over accusations that his team tried to pressure Ukraine for dirt on Hunter Biden in exchange for military aid. Ultimately, he was acquitted.
Underpinning that alleged gambit were concerns that President Biden, back when he was vice president, pressured the ouster of Shokin in late 2015 to quash a corruption investigaton into Burisma.
Biden, 82, has denied those accusations and underscored that other European leaders also wanted Shokin out of that role because, in their minds, he was not effectively pursuing corruption cases.
Prosecutors also alleged that Smirnov re-upped those now seemingly dubious accusations during an interview with the FBI in September 2023 during which he altered his narrative.
Smirnov “promoted a new false narrative after he said he met with Russian officials,” during that interview, prosecutors claimed.
They also previously claimed that the ex-confidential human source sent his handler “a series of messages expressing bias” against Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign.
Smirnov also allegedly spouted a provable false tale that the Premier Palace hotel in Kyiv had recordings of Hunter on the premises and uttering damaging statements about family corruption. Some have speculated that story derived from Russian intelligence.
It was easily shot down because Hunter “has never traveled to Ukraine,” according to prosecutors.
Congressional Democrats capitalized upon the indictment of Smirnov and used it as fodder against Republicans who were delving into his family’s business machinations as part of a House impeachment inquiry.
The FBI had trusted Smirnov as an informant for almost a decade, according to GOP lawmakers who pressed for the FBI FD-1023 form release.
GOP lawmakers, particularly on the House Oversight Committee, had battled the FBI for access to the FBI FD-1023 form, which are typically used to collect unverified but classified information from sources.
The Oversight panel had subpoenaed the FBI for access to that form and later threatened to push to hold the bureau’s director Christopher Wray in contempt. Eventually, Wray capitulated and allowed lawmakers to consult the document in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF).
But the ordeal had been a key flashpoint in the House GOP’s efforts to probe alleged overseas influence peddling by the Biden family, as they and their associates raked in millions of dollars during and after Joe Biden’s vice presidency.
