Ex-FBI informant agrees to plead guilty to lying about Bidens’ Ukraine ties

A former FBI informant accused of falsely claiming that Joe Biden and the president’s son Hunter accepted bribes has agreed to plead guilty to federal charges, according to court papers.

As part of the plea deal with the justice department special counsel, David Weiss, Alexander Smirnov will admit he fabricated the story that became central to a Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress.

The plea agreement comes just weeks after prosecutors filed new tax evasion charges against Smirnov. The two sides will recommend a sentence of at least two years behind bars and no more than six years, according to the agreement.

David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, attorneys for Smirnov, said they will make their case for a fair sentence in court and declined to comment further.

Smirnov was arrested in February on allegations that he falsely reported to the FBI in June 2020 that executives associated with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Hunter Biden and Joe Biden $5m each in 2015 or 2016. Smirnov told his handler that an executive claimed to have hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems”, according to court documents.

Prosecutors said Smirnov had contact with Burisma executives, but it was routine and actually took place in 2017, after Barack Obama’s presidency and Biden, his vice-president, had left office – when Biden would have had no ability to influence US policy. Prosecutors said he made the bribery allegations after he “expressed bias” against Biden while he was a presidential candidate in 2020.

He repeated some of the false claims when he was interviewed by FBI agents in September 2023 and changed his story about others and “promoted a new false narrative after he said he met with Russian officials”, prosecutors said.

Smirnov has agreed to plead guilty to charges of tax evasion and causing a false FBI record, according to court papers.

Smirnov is being prosecuted by the same special counsel who brought federal gun and tax charges against Hunter Biden. Hunter was supposed to be sentenced this month on his convictions in those cases until he was pardoned by his father.