A federal grand jury indicted an FBI informant Wednesday for allegedly providing "false derogatory information" about President Joe Biden and first son Hunter Biden and their ties to Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holding.
Special counsel David Weiss announced the two-count indictment against Alexander Smirnov handed down by a grand jury in the Central District of California. He's charged with making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record, both felonies.
The charges against Smirnov would appear to be a blow to House Republicans’ impeachment effort against President Biden. It was Smirnov who alleged that the Bidens were paid $5 million each in exchange for helping remove a Ukrainian prosecutor, a statement he made to the FBI that has been classified as “a fabrication.”
"The indictment alleges that the [Smirnov] transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against [President Biden] after expressing bias against [Biden] and his presidential candidacy," Weiss' office said in a statement announcing the charges.
However, House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said Congress' investigation is not anchored in Smirnov’s claims to the FBI.
“It is based on a large record of evidence, including bank records and witness testimony, revealing that Joe Biden knew of and participated in his family’s business dealings,” Comer said in a statement to CNN.
Smirnov was arrested Wednesday at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas. Smirnov appeared in a Las Vegas court on Thursday afternoon where he did not enter a plea, the Associated Press reported. He faces a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison.
According to the allegations: "Despite repeated admonishments that he must provide truthful information to the FBI and that he must not fabricate evidence, the Defendant provided false derogatory information to the FBI about Public Official 1, an elected official in the Obama-Biden Administration who left office in January 2017, and Businessperson 1, the son of Public Official 1, in 2020, after Public Official 1 became a candidate for President of the United States of America," it read in part.
Public official 1 is Joe Biden; Businessperson 1 is Hunter Biden. The crux of the case appears to be what Smirnov told his FBI handler in June 2020.
"He claimed executives associated with Burisma, including Burisma Official 1, admitted to him that they hired Businessperson 1 to 'protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,' and later that they had specifically paid $5 million each to Public Official 1 and Businessperson 1, when Public Official 1 was still in office, so that '[Businessperson 1] will take care of all those issues through his dad,' referring to a criminal investigation being conducted by the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General into Burisma and to 'deal with [the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General]," the charging document read.
House impeachment investigators have asserted, based on Smirnov’s allegations, that Joe Biden, through Hunter Biden, put pressure on Ukraine to fire then prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma.
“This indictment isn’t enough,” a spokesperson for Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a statement Thursday. “The public has a right to see all the underlying evidence supporting the Biden Justice Department’s case. The Biden administration must show its work.”
This story has been updated