A six-year prison sentence was handed down on Wednesday to a former FBI informant who had concocted a false narrative about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter accepting bribes. This fabricated story had played a significant role in the Republicans’ impeachment efforts.
Alexander Smirnov, a defendant in the Los Angeles federal court, has recently admitted guilt to charges of tax evasion and lying to the FBI. Prosecutors claim that Smirnov engaged in a fraudulent bribery scheme with the intention of influencing the results of the 2020 presidential election.
According to his FBI handler, Smirnov, who holds dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship, made a false claim that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid then-Vice President Biden and his son $5 million each in 2015.
Smirnov made a bold claim in 2020, stating that he had expressed bias towards Joe Biden as a presidential candidate. However, prosecutors discovered that Smirnov’s interactions with Burisma were merely routine business dealings that began in 2017, after Biden’s tenure as vice president.
Smirnov’s false claim, which resurfaced years later during the House impeachment inquiry into President Biden, caused a significant uproar in Congress. President Biden, a Democrat, had defeated then-President Donald Trump, a Republican, in the 2020 election. The Biden administration dismissed the House impeachment effort as a mere “stunt.”
Republicans had been demanding the FBI to release the unredacted form that documented the unverified allegations before Smirnov’s arrest. However, they admitted that they were unable to verify the truthfulness of these allegations.
“In his acts of wrongdoing, he betrayed the United States, a nation that had bestowed upon him the utmost generosity, including granting him the highest form of recognition, citizenship,” stated the Justice Department special counsel David Weiss’ team in their court documents. “He disregarded the trust that the United States had placed in him as a law-abiding naturalized citizen, and more significantly, the trust that one of its leading law enforcement agencies had placed in him as a confidential human source, by attempting to meddle in a Presidential election.”
Smirnov will receive credit for the duration he has already spent in prison since his arrest in February of last year on charges of lying to the FBI. In November, prosecutors introduced additional tax charges, alleging that he had hidden millions of dollars of income earned between 2020 and 2022.
Smirnov’s lawyers requested a maximum of four years in prison, highlighting the valuable assistance he provided as an FBI informant for over ten years. They also emphasized his severe eye-related health problems and argued that an extended sentence would needlessly prolong his suffering.
Attorneys Richard Schonfeld and David Chesnoff expressed to the judge in court documents that Mr. Smirnov has learned a significant lesson and assures the Honorable Court that he will not find himself in violation of the law again.
Weiss prosecuted Smirnov, as well as bringing gun and tax charges against Hunter Biden. In December, Hunter Biden was due to be sentenced after being found guilty in the gun case and pleading guilty to tax charges. However, he was pardoned by his father, who expressed his belief that “raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”
In their efforts to secure a more lenient sentence, Smirnov’s legal team argued in court documents that both Hunter Biden and President-elect Trump have managed to avoid any significant consequences for their actions in separate federal cases.
Jack Smith, the special counsel, dropped the two federal cases against Trump. These cases alleged his involvement in a conspiracy to overturn his 2020 election defeat and his possession of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. The decision to abandon these cases came after Trump’s successful presidential victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in November.
Reference Article