Former FBI informant will be sentenced for bogus bribery claim about President Biden and son Hunter
WASHINGTON — Prosecutors will ask a judge Wednesday for a six-year prison sentence for a former FBI informant whose bogus story about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter accepting bribes was at the heart of the case. Republican Impeachment Efforts.
Alexander Smirnov will then be sentenced in Los Angeles federal court pleaded guilty last month to tax evasion and lying to the FBI over the bogus bribery scheme, which prosecutors say was an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
Smirnov, a dual American and Israeli citizen, falsely claimed to his FBI handler that executives from 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 “bias” 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 term as vice president.
Prosecutors noted that Smirnov’s false claim “set off a firestorm in Congress” when it resurfaced years later as part of the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry into President Biden, a Democrat who defeated Republican then-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.
“By committing his crimes, he betrayed the United States, a country that has shown him nothing but generosity, including bestowing the greatest honor it can bestow: citizenship,” the Justice Department Special Counsel team wrote, David Weiss, in lawsuits. “He repaid the trust that the United States placed in him as a law-abiding naturalized citizen and, more specifically, that one of the nation’s top law enforcement agencies placed in him to tell the truth as a confidential human source, by attempting to interfere a presidential election.”
Smirnov was arrested last February in the case in which he was accused of lying to the FBI, and to prosecutors in November brought new tax levies he claimed he hid millions of dollars in income he earned between 2020 and 2022.
Smirnov’s lawyers are calling for no more than four years behind bars, given the “substantial assistance” he provided to the US government as an FBI informant for more than a decade. Smirnov’s lawyers noted in court papers that he suffers from serious health problems related to his life. eyes and argue 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 no longer be on this side of the law,” attorneys Richard Schonfeld and David Chesnoff told the judge in court filings.
Smirnov was prosecuted by Weiss, who also filed gun and tax charges against Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced in December after being convicted convicted during a trial in the weapons case And pleads guilty to tax charges. But he was pardoned by his father, who said he believed “raw politics has infected this process and led to a miscarriage of justice.”
In seeking a lighter sentence, Smirnov’s lawyers wrote in court papers that both Hunter Biden and newly elected President Trump – who charged in two federal cases by another special counsel – “to have walked free and free from any meaningful punishment.”
Special Counsel Jack Smith has abandoned the two federal cases against Trump that he accused him of conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss And hoarding secret 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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