Last week, the conspiracy that Joe Biden was accepting bribes from Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine collapsed when the key witness — an ex-FBI informant named Alexander Smirnov — was charged by federal prosecutors for making it all up and lying to federal agents. A week later, the conspiracy is completely in shambles, and Smirnov is under arrest for the second time in two days.
On Thursday afternoon, Smirnov, who had been granted bail by a federal judge after his initial arrest on Tuesday, was detained once again, reportedly while at his lawyers’ office.
It is unclear who ordered Smirnov’s second arrest, which was on the same charges as the first; his lawyers are arguing for his release.
On Tuesday, federal prosecutors filed a detention memo in court arguing that Smirnov, who provided intelligence on Russia to the U.S., was also being played by the Kremlin. Smirnov “admitted that officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story about” Hunter Biden, prosecutors said. They also claimed that Smirnov has boasted of “extensive and extremely recent” contact with Russian intelligence and that he had longstanding connections to Russian officials, including one who was allegedly responsible for coordinating “assassination efforts” abroad. Prosecutors cited these connections as one of the main reasons they believed Smirnov was a flight risk: The Russians could spirit Smirnov overseas if he were released on bail. Nevertheless, he was granted bail on the condition that he wear a GPS monitor and surrender his two passports.
Smirnov was charged with lying to the FBI when he told them in 2020 that the Bidens accepted bribes. (The story went that the Ukrainian energy firm that Hunter advised years ago paid him and his father, who was then the vice-president, to pressure Kyiv into dropping an investigation into the company.) In 2023, according to prosecutors, Smirnov offered up a new story about Hunter — this time furnished by people associated with Russian intelligence. He relayed to the FBI that Moscow’s spy services had acquired kompromat on Hunter by recording cell-phone conversations he once had while inside a Ukrainian club. (This is false, prosecutors said, because Hunter has never been in Ukraine.) Furthermore, prosecutors said Smirnov admitted to meeting with Russian intelligence as recently as December, when they supposedly kept feeding him dirt on the president’s son. “What this shows is that the misinformation he is spreading is not confined to 2020,” they wrote.
In the filing, prosecutors also claimed that “Smirnov had the intention of meeting with one of these officials on his upcoming planned overseas travel” and that there was “a serious risk he will flee.”
Smirnov is being prosecuted by the office of special counsel David Weiss, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to dig into alleged crimes by the president’s son. (Hunter Biden has since been charged with crimes related to tax evasion and gun possession.) On Tuesday, Hunter’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, filed a memo in response to the explosive claims. Lowell argued that “the Smirnov allegations infected” Weiss’s case against Biden and accused the special counsel’s investigation into the president’s son of following Smirnov “down his rabbit hole of lies.”
