WASHINGTON – Prosecutors will ask a judge Wednesday for six years in prison for a former FBI informant whose false story about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter taking bribes became central to The Republican impeachment effort.
Alexander Smirnov will be sentenced in federal court in Los Angeles later He pleaded guilty last month to tax evasion and lying to the FBI. about the bogus bribery scheme in what prosecutors say was an effort to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
Smirnov, who has dual US-Israeli citizenship, falsely claimed to his FBI handler that executives at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid then-Vice President Biden and his son $5 million each around 2015.
Smirnov’s explosive claim in 2020 came after he expressed “biases” about Joe Biden as a presidential candidate, according to prosecutors. In reality, investigators found that Smirnov only had routine business dealings with Burisma starting in 2017, after Biden’s tenure as vice president.
Prosecutors noted that Smirnov’s false claim “triggered a firestorm in Congress” when it resurfaced years later as part of the House impeachment inquiry into President Biden, a Democrat who defeated then-Republican President Donald Trump in 2020. The Biden administration dismissed the House impeachment effort as a “stunt.”
Before Smirnov’s arrest, Republicans had demanded that the FBI release the unredacted form documenting the unverified allegations, although they acknowledged they could not confirm whether they were true.
“In committing his crimes, he betrayed the United States, a country that showed him nothing but generosity, including granting him the highest honor it can bestow: citizenship,” Justice Department special counsel David Weiss’ team wrote in documents. judicial. “He repaid the trust that the United States placed in him as a law-abiding naturalized citizen and, more specifically, that which one of its primary law enforcement agencies placed in him to tell the truth as a confidential human source, while attempting to interfere in a presidential election. ”
Smirnov was arrested last February in the case that accused him of lying to the FBI, and to prosecutors in November. brought new tax charges alleging that he hid millions of dollars of income he earned between 2020 and 2022.
Smirnov’s lawyers are asking for no more than four years behind bars, noting the “substantial assistance” he provided to the U.S. government as an FBI informant for more than a decade. Smirnov’s lawyers noted in court documents that he suffers from serious health problems related to his eyes and argues that a long sentence would “unnecessarily prolong his suffering.”
“Mr. Smirnov has learned a very serious lesson and offers to this Honorable Court that he will not find himself on this side of the law again,” attorneys Richard Schonfeld and David Chesnoff told the judge in court documents.
Smirnov was prosecuted by Weiss, who also filed gun and tax charges against Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden was supposed to be sentenced in December after being convicted in trial in weapons case and plead guilty to tax charges. But he was forgiven by his father, who said he believed “crude politics has infected this process and led to a miscarriage of justice.”
Seeking a lighter sentence, Smirnov’s lawyers wrote in court papers that both Hunter Biden and President-elect Trump, who was charged in two federal cases by a different special prosecutor – “I have emerged free and clear of any significant punishment.”
Special prosecutor Jack Smith dropped both federal cases against Trump, accusing him of plotting to reverse his 2020 election defeat and hoard classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, after Trump’s presidential victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in November.
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