WASHINGTON — A former FBI informant accused of fabricating one multi-million dollar bribery scheme involve President Joe Biden’s family has been sued for federal tax charges in a new case.
The tax charges against Alexander Smirnov were unsealed this week, months later, in California federal court his arrest on charges that he concocted a multi-million dollar bribery scheme involving Joe Biden, his son Hunter and a Ukrainian energy company.
The indictment filed by Justice Department Special Prosecutor David Weiss accuses Smirnov of tax evasion and filing false tax returns, accusing him of hiding millions of dollars in income he earned between 2020 and 2022.
Smirnov’s attorneys, David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, said in an email Tuesday that their client “intends to vigorously fight these allegations with the same intensity as he fought the original charges.”
Smirnov’s trial was recently postponed until January 8 in the case in which he was accused of lying about the Biden family. Smirnov has denied the allegations in that case.
Prosecutors have alleged that he falsely reported to the FBI in June 2020 that executives linked to Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Hunter Biden and Joe Biden $5 million each in 2015 or 2016. Smirnov told his handler that an executive claimed to have hired Hunter Biden to “Protect us, through his father, from all kinds of trouble,” according to court documents.
Prosecutors say Smirnov in fact only had routine business dealings with the company in 2017 and made the bribery allegations after “expressing bias” against Joe Biden while he was a presidential candidate.
Hunter biden will be sentenced next month in two separate criminal cases in which he is accused of a plan to avoid at least $1.4 million in taxes And lying on a federal form when he bought a gun in 2018.