A former FBI informant who fabricated statements to the bureau that in part spurred a GOP congressional investigation into the Biden family has been indicted on tax fraud charges.
Alexander Smirnov, as a confidential informant, had relayed to the FBI that the head of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma told him he had paid both President Biden and his son Hunter Biden $5 million.
The claims were false but nonetheless became central to a GOP probe of the Bidens and increased scrutiny of special counsel David Weiss, who later filed tax charges against Hunter Biden.
With the new indictment, Weiss has now brought tax charges against Smirnov, including two counts of tax evasion and eight counts relating to making false statements in a return.
He is accused of concealing millions in income earned between 2020 and 2022.
“Mr. Smirnov intends to vigorously fight these allegations with the same intensity as he has fought the original indictment,” Smirnov’s attorneys, David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, said in a statement.
Smirnov was first indicted in February, with the Department of Justice writing that he made up the allegations due to his opposition to President Biden’s candidacy.
“As alleged in the indictment, the events that Smirnov first reported to the FBI Agent in June 2020 were fabrications,” the Justice Department wrote in a press release announcing the grand jury indictment.
“The indictment alleges that the defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against Public Official 1 after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his presidential candidacy,” they added, referring to President Biden.
GOP investigators put the bribery allegations front and center of their impeachment push, with House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) at one point calling them “the key thing” in potentially seeking impeachment charges against Biden.
The GOP ultimately stopped short of seeking to impeach President Biden but nonetheless released a report ahead of the Democratic National Convention that accused him of impeachable conduct.
But for Hunter Biden, the GOP scrutiny brought more attention to his own legal troubles.
Weiss was elevated to the role of special counsel after two IRS whistleblowers alleged he was unable to bring more aggressive tax charges against the president’s son.
A judge would also later reject a plea deal Weiss had sought to arrange with Hunter Biden, and when that collapsed the judge instead brought multiple gun charges, which netted a conviction.
Weiss would also later bring multiple tax charges against Hunter Biden, with a jury moving to convict him on three felony tax and six misdemeanor tax offenses.
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