A former FBI informant is set to plead guilty Monday to lying about a bogus bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter that has become the focus of a Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress.
Alexander Smirnov is expected to plead to felony charges in Los Angeles in connection with the fake story, a tax evasion charge stemming from a separate indictment accusing him of hiding millions of dollars in income, according to court documents.
Smirnov has been in jail since his February arrest that he told his FBI handlers that executives of the Ukrainian energy company Burysma paid President Biden and Hunter Biden $5 million in 2015.
The prosecution and defense have agreed to recommend a prison sentence of four to six years, according to the plea agreement.
Smirnov had been a whistleblower for more than a decade when he made the explosive allegations about Biden in June 2020, after “expressing bias” against Biden as a presidential candidate, prosecutors said.
But Smirnov only had regular business dealings with Burisma that began in 2017, according to court documents. An FBI field office investigated the allegations and recommended the case be closed in August 2020, according to charging documents.
No evidence has emerged that Joe Biden was corrupt or bribed in his current role or previous office as vice president.
His identity was not publicly known before the indictment, Smirnov’s claims played a key role in Republican efforts in Congress to investigate the president and his family, and helped lead to the House impeachment inquiry into Biden.
Before Smirnov’s arrest, Republicans demanded that the FBI release undocumented forms of unsubstantiated allegations, though they admitted they could not confirm whether they were true.
During a conversation with investigators in September 2023, Smirnov also claimed the Russians had recordings of Hunter Biden because a hotel he was staying at in the Ukrainian capital was “wired” and under their control — information he said he had been sent by four high-level Bidens. level Russian officials.
But Hunter Biden never visited Ukraine, according to Smirnov’s indictment.
Smirnov claimed to have had contact with Russian intelligence-affiliated officials and told authorities after his arrest earlier this year that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in sending the 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. Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced this month after pleading guilty at trial in a gun case and pleading guilty to federal charges in a tax case. But he was pardoned earlier this month by his father, who said he believed “crude politics had infected the process and caused a miscarriage of justice”.
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