WASHINGTON (AP) — Prosecutors will ask a judge Wednesday to impose six years in prison for a former FBI informant whose false story about accepting bribes from President Joe Biden and his son Hunter was at the center of Republicans’ impeachment efforts.
Alexander Smirnov will be sentenced in federal court in Los Angeles after pleading guilty last month to tax evasion and lying to the FBI about the imitation bribery scheme that prosecutors say was an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
Smirnov, a dual U.S. and Israeli citizen, falsely claimed to his FBI handler that executives at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid then-Vice President Biden and his son $5 million each around 2015.
Smirnov’s explosive claim in 2020 came after he expressed “bias” against Joe Biden as a presidential candidate, according to prosecutors. In reality, investigators found that starting in 2017 — after Biden’s term as vice president — Smirnov only had routine business dealings with Burisma.
Prosecutors noted that Smirnov’s false claim “set off a congressional firestorm” when it resurfaced years later as part of the House’s impeachment inquiry into President Biden, a Democrat who defeated then-Republican 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 unconfirmed allegations, but acknowledged that they could not confirm whether they were true.
“In committing his crimes, he betrayed the United States, a country that has shown him nothing but generosity, including bestowing on him the greatest honor it can bestow on him, citizenship,” Justice Department special counsel David’s team wrote Weiss, in court documents. “He repaid the trust that the United States placed in him to be a law-abiding naturalized citizen, and especially the trust that one of its top law enforcement agencies placed in him to speak the truth as a confidential human source, by tried to interfere in a presidential election.”
Smirnov was arrested last February in the case accusing him of lying to the FBI, and in November prosecutors filed fresh tax charges alleging he concealed millions of dollars in income between 2020 and 2022.
Smirnov’s lawyers are asking for a maximum of four years behind bars, pointing to the “significant assistance” he provided to the U.S. government as an FBI informant for more than a decade, and arguing that a long prison sentence would “unnecessarily prolong his suffering.” .
“Mr. Smirnow has learned a very serious lesson and offers this honorable court that he will never find himself on this side of the law again,” attorneys Richard Schonfeld and David Chesnoff told the judge in court papers.
Smirnow was sued by Weiss, who also filed gun and tax charges against Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced in December after being convicted in a gun case trial and pleading guilty to tax charges. However, he was pardoned by his father, who said he believed “crude politics has infected this trial and led to a miscarriage of justice.”
In an effort to seek a lighter sentence, Smirnow’s lawyers wrote in court filings that both Hunter Biden and President-elect Trump — who was indicted in two federal cases by another special counsel — “have been spared any meaningful punishment.”
Special Counsel Jack Smith abandoned the two federal cases against Trump, accusing him of conspiring to overturn his 2020 election defeat and of hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida – following Trump’s presidential victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in November.
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Follow AP’s coverage of Hunter Biden at https://apnews.com/hub/hunter-biden.
