President Joe Biden called on House Republicans to drop their impeachment inquiry into him on Friday after an informant who gave the FBI information about alleged corruption involving the Biden family was charged this week for lying to federal authorities.
Special Counsel David Weiss charged Alexander Smirnov with 18 U.S.C. § 1001: false statement, and 18 U.S.C. § 1519: creating a false and fictitious record, related to allegedly false information that he gave to his FBI handler about Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden’s alleged business dealings with Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma.
“An FBI informant at the center of the impeachment inquiry into you has been indicted for allegedly lying,” a reporter said to Biden. “Your reaction to that and should the inquiry be dropped?”
“He is lying and it should be dropped,” Biden responded. “And it’s just been an, it’s been an outrageous effort from the beginning. We did nothing. No, I’m serious.”
The indictment says that Smirnov was warned by his FBI handler nearly two dozen times over the course of a decade that the information that he was relaying to the Bureau must be truthful or else he would face criminal consequences.
He was arrested on Thursday at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas after arriving in the U.S. from overseas.
Smirnov provided information to the handler that he knew was being used in various criminal investigations conducted by the FBI. The indictment says that he was authorized by U.S. authorities to engage in certain criminal activity for the sake of assisting law enforcement in their investigations.
Smirnov “provided false derogatory information to the FBI” about Joe Biden after he became a candidate for president in 2020, the indictment says.
The indictment laid out the story that Smirnov told his handler:
Three years later, in June 2020, the Defendant reported, for the first time, two meetings in 2015 and/or 2016, during the Obama-Biden Administration, in which he claimed executives associated with Burisma, including Burisma Official 1, admitted to him that they hired [Hunter Biden] to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” and later that they had specifically paid $5 million each to [then-Vice President Joe Biden] and [Hunter Biden], when [Joe Biden] was still in office, so that “[Hunter Biden] 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].”
[Smirnov] also reported two purported phone calls between himself and Burisma Official 1 wherein Burisma Official 1 stated that he had been forced to pay [Joe Biden] and [Hunter Biden] and that it would take investigators 10 years to find records of illicit payments to [Joe Biden].
The indictment said that the allegations that Smirnov provided to his handler in June 2020 were “fabrications.”
“In truth and fact, [Smirnov] 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.
“In short, [Smirnov] 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.”
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