Ex-FBI informant accused of lying about Bidens agrees to plead guilty

A former FBI informant accused of lying about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden’s alleged business dealings with a Ukrainian energy company has agreed to plead guilty to federal charges, according to a court filing on Thursday.

Alexander Smirnov reached the agreement with U.S. Department of Justice Special Counsel David Weiss, who led a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, according to the court filing. Hunter Biden, who was convicted of federal gun felonies and tax charges, was pardoned by the president earlier this month.

Smirnov, a longtime informant for the FBI, was arrested in February after a federal grand jury in the Central District of California returned the indictment. He was accused of falsely claiming to the FBI in 2020 that Ukrainian energy firm Burisma paid millions in bribes to Joe Biden during his vice presidency and Hunter Biden, who was on the company's board.

The plea agreement comes weeks after Smirnov was indicted in a separate case involving federal tax charges, including concealing more than two million dollars in income he received from multiple sources between 2020 and 2022, court documents revealed.

According to the terms of the plea agreement, Smirnov will plead guilty to one count of causing the creation of a false record in a federal investigation and three counts of tax evasion for 2020, 2021 and 2022.

Under the plea agreement, Smirnov could face four to six years in prison, followed by one year of supervised release and more than $675,000 in restitution.

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Who is Alexander Smirnov?

Prosecutors said Smirnov was a confidential human source with the FBI and was assigned to a handling agent who was a special agent on an FBI squad that investigated violations of federal criminal law.

As an informant, Smirnov provided information to the handling agent that was used in various criminal investigations between 2010 and 2020, according to court documents. Prosecutors said Smirnov had been admonished by the handling agent when he first became an informant in 2010 and on multiple occasions years after.

"Despite repeated admonishments that he must provide truthful information to the FBI and that he must not fabricate evidence, Smirnov provided false derogatory information to the FBI" about Joe and Hunter Biden in 2020, according to court documents.

Smirnov's claims were documented by the FBI in a form, known as an FD-1023, that investigators use to record information from confidential sources. USA TODAY previously reported that Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, obtained the document and shared it with House Republicans last year.

Smirnov had initially been seen as a credible source by Republicans who criticized the president and his son's role at Burisma.

Allegations against Joe and Hunter Biden

According to court documents, Smirnov claimed that during two meetings in 2015 and/or 2016, Ukrainian executives of Burisma told him they hired Hunter Biden to "protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems."

Smirnov also claimed that the Ukrainian executives later paid $5 million each to Joe and Hunter Biden to "take care of all those issues through his dad," which referred to a criminal investigation into Burisma conducted by then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

But prosecutors said Smirnov had only been in contact with Burisma executives at the end of the Obama administration in 2017 and after Shokin was fired in 2016.

"In other words," court documents state, Smirnov's involvement with Burisma came when Joe Biden "had no ability to influence U.S. policy and when the Prosecutor General was no longer in office."

"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," the court documents added.

Smirnov's allegations were at the center of the House Republicans impeachment inquiry against the president.

Contributing: Bart Jansen, Joey Garrison, and Ken Tran, USA TODAY; Reuters

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Former FBI informant accused of lying about Bidens to plead guilty