Special Counsel David Weiss charged Alexander Smirnov, a former FBI informant, for giving Congress “false information” relating to Joe and Hunter Biden’s dealing with the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.
Smirnov was arrested at the Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas.
“According to the indictment, Smirnov was a confidential human source (CHS) with the FBI,” a press release from the Department of Justice (DOJ) reads. “As alleged in the indictment, despite repeated admonishments that he must provide truthful information to the FBI and that he must not fabricate evidence, Smirnov provided false derogatory information to the FBI about Public Official 1, and Businessperson 1, the son of Public Official 1, in 2020, after Public Official 1 became a presidential candidate.”
Smirnov told the FBI in 2020 that Burisma executives hired Hunter Biden to “protect” the company, “through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”
Later, Burisma gave $5 million to Joe and Hunter Biden so that Hunter could “take care of all those issues through his dad,” referring to “a criminal investigation being conducted by the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General into Burisma.”
According to the indictment, these claims were “fabrications.”
“In truth and fact, the Defendant had contact with executives from Burisma in 2017, after the end of the Obama-Biden Administration and after the then Ukrainian Prosecutor General had been fired in February 2016, in other words, when Public Official 1 had no ability to influence U.S. policy and when the Prosecutor General was no longer in office,” the indictment claims. “In short, the Defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against Public Official 1, the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his candidacy.”
If convicted of making false claims, Smirnov faces a maximum of 25 years in prison.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) has used Smirnov’s statements as a key element in the committee’s investigation into the Bidens.
In September Comer wrote a letter to U.S. Department of State Secretary Antony Blinken seeking clarification on the abrupt foreign policy shifts concerning the dismissal of the Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin during the tenure of Joe Biden as Vice President.
Chairman Comer stated in his letter to Secretary Blinken, “The Committee on Oversight and Accountability seeks information from the U.S. Department of State to provide context for certain sudden foreign policy changes that occurred while Joe Biden was Vice President, particularly regarding Ukraine while then-Vice President Biden’s son served on the board of directors of a company being investigated for corruption.”
The Hill reported that Smirnov’s statements were recorded in an FD-1023 form, where he shared what he heard from Burisma official Mykola Zlochevsky.
Mykola Zlochevsky, the CEO of Burisma, allegedly stated that payments of $5 million each were made to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden in a scheme described as “poluchili, which translates from Russian crime slang to mean “forced or coerced to pay,” according to the released FD-1023 document.
“In the FBI’s record, the Burisma executive claims that he didn’t pay the ‘big guy’ directly but that he used several bank accounts to conceal the money. That sounds an awful lot like how the Bidens conduct business: using multiple bank accounts to hide the source and total amount of the money,” Comer said at the time the FD-1023 was released.
