FBI informant who planted misinformation about Joe and Hunter Biden gets 6 years prison

LOS ANGELES (CN) — A former FBI informant was sentenced to six years in federal prison on Wednesday for lying to his handler in 2020 about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden receiving $5 million in bribes each from a Ukrainian energy company.

Alexander Smirnov, 44, also received a 72-month sentence for a separate conviction for tax fraud, which he’ll serve concurrently with his sentence for causing the creation of a false and fictitious record in a federal investigation. He pleaded guilty in both cases.

U.S. District Judge Otis Wright II in Los Angeles hit the Ukrainian-born defendant with the highest possible sentence under his plea deal with the prosecutors and special counsel David Weiss, who was appointed last year to lead the Justice Department’s investigation of Hunter Biden.

In pleading for a prison term of no more than four years, David Chesnoff, one of Smirnov’s attorneys, pointed out that the president’s son was pardoned by his father following his convictions for lying about his drug use when he bought a gun in 2018 and for cheating on his taxes for four years.

“The president’s son got away with it,” Chesnoff told the judge. “It doesn’t seem fair to the public at large that one guy gets away and the other guy is left holding the bag.”

Smirnov didn’t address the court in person after the judge declined to seal the courtroom so that the defendant could explain how his work for the FBI as a confidential human source, for about 12 years, was motivated by patriotism and civic duty.

“That’s a hard sell,” Wright said, noting that Smirnov’s attorneys had done an excellent job representing their client’s position.

Leo Wise, a prosecutor with the special counsel’s office, rebuked Smirnov’s contention that lying about the Bidens was just a solitary blemish on his otherwise spotless record as an FBI informant.

“This wasn’t a single transgression,” Wise told the judge. “He lied and cheated on his taxes for years.”

Smirnov, the prosecutor argued, claimed tax credits on his returns that were intended only for people while he was living in luxury and driving a Bentley. In addition, Wise noted, Smirnov was paid $300,000 for his work as an informant, and the FBI was concerned about his own criminal activity while he was helping them investigate criminal organizations.

Smirnov, who was born in the Ukraine and grew up in Israel before becoming a U.S. citizen 10 years ago, was also order to pay $675,000 in restitution for his tax fraud conviction.

In a bid to influence the outcome of the presidential election in 2020, Smirnov told his FBI handler that Burisma, the Ukrainian energy conglomerate, paid both Joe and Hunter Biden a $5 million bribe when Joe Biden was vice president under President Barack Obama in exchange for their help resolving a domestic investigation of the company. That turned out to be a completely made-up story.

Moreover, in 2023 Smirnov again tried to get the FBI to look into purported visits by Hunter Biden to a Kyiv hotel that was spying hub for Russian intelligence. This too was a lie; Hunter Biden has never visited Kyiv, even though he served on the board of directors of Burisma.

Smirnov was charged in a separate tax evasion indictment. He admitted that he provided filed false income tax forms to hide millions in income.

According to his plea agreement, he received more than $2 million from multiple unidentified sources in 2020, 2021 and 2022, to pay personal expenses for himself and his domestic partner, a woman that he has referred to as his girlfriend and at other times his wife, although they are not married.

“These expenditures included a $1.4 million Las Vegas condominium, a Bentley, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of clothes, Jewelry and accessories for himself and domestic partner purchased at high-end retailers in Los Angeles and Las Vegas,” prosecutors wrote in the plea deal.

Smirnov told his professional tax return preparer that he would not disclose how he earned any income and that the tax preparer shouldn’t inquire about how he earned his income. He also instructed the tax preparer to delete any emails ormessages they exchanged.

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