An informant for the FBI has been charged with providing the bureau with false information about President Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s involvement with a Ukrainian energy company.
The Justice Department said Alexander Smirnov, 43, was arrested in Las Vegas, Nevada as he was returning from a trip overseas, according to NBC News. Smirnov was indicted on two counts of allegedly feeding false information as part of a 37-page indictment.
The indictment claims that Smirnov had been working as an informant for the FBI since 2010. According to NBC News, he “provided false derogatory information to the FBI” about both Joe and Hunter Biden after Joe Biden became president in 2020.
According to court records obtained by CNN, Smirnov reportedly told the FBI that he spoke with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma’s owner about its plans to buy a company in the U.S.
Prosecutors claimed that Smirnov falsely told the FBI that the company’s associate had paid the Bidens $5 million each in 2015 and 2016, according to The Associated Press. He also allegedly said that the company had hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”
“In truth and fact, the Defendant had contact with executives from Burisma in 2017, after the end of the Obama-Biden Administration and after the then Ukrainian Prosecutor General had been fired in February 2016, in other words, when [Joe Biden] had no ability to influence U.S. policy and when the Prosecutor General was no longer in office,” the indictment states, according to CNN.
“In short, the Defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against [Joe Biden], the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against [Joe Biden] and his candidacy,” according to CNN.
The charges against Smirnov were filed by the special counsel David Wiess with the Justice Department, according to the AP. Wiess has charged Hutner Biden in another case regarding tax and firearm violations.
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