When Russian businessman Alexander Smirnov landed at the Las Vegas airport on Valentine’s Day, the FBI was waiting for him. Since 2010, he had worked with the agency as an informant, providing intel on what the Feds described as “various criminal investigations” — the most infamous of which was the special-counsel inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business dealings abroad. Smirnov claimed to have explosive information revealing that Joe Biden had taken a cut of his son’s considerable payments as a consultant in exchange for influencing an investigation in Ukraine. But federal prosecutors say Smirnov strayed from the truth: On Thursday, they charged him with making false statements and obstructing the yearslong investigation of the president’s son.
Frequent viewers of conservative media are well acquainted with Smirnov. Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity have said that his allegations are key to what they describe as the “Biden crime family” — the narrative that Hunter Biden accepted millions of dollars in bribes from the energy company Burisma to give to his father in exchange for then-VP Biden making a Ukrainian investigation into Burisma go away. According to the watchdog group Media Matters, Hannity alone featured 85 segments in 2023 on the allegations. (Republican politicians also trusted the source: Last July, Representative James Comer and Senator Chuck Grassley released an FBI record detailing the unsubstantiated allegations, describing Smirnov as a “trusted FBI informant implicating then-Vice President Biden in a criminal bribery scheme.”)
Fox News viewers have heard plenty about the lesser charges Hunter Biden is facing, including possession of a firearm as a drug user and tax evasion. But after prosecutors provided evidence that the corruption allegation was false, there was no mention of the story on Hannity on Thursday — or anywhere in Fox News’s prime-time programming, for that matter. (Chuck Grassley’s office has also stood by his public release of the unsubstantiated allegations.)
In the 37-page indictment, prosecutors state that Smirnov lied about his claims of Joe Biden’s criminal activity. The indictment states that, in June 2020, Smirnov told his FBI handlers that he had two meetings in 2015 in which Burisma executives told him that they hired Hunter Biden as a consultant to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.” Smirnov claimed that Burisma paid Hunter Biden $10 million for his trouble.
But prosecutors state that Smirnov never provided any evidence for this explosive allegation. A meeting Smirnov described taking place in 2015 in which he said he first heard about Biden-related corruption never occurred: Prosecutors found that Smirnov’s first meeting with Burisma happened in 2017, after Biden had left office. “The Defendant’s story to the FBI was a fabrication,” the indictment states. “An amalgam of otherwise unremarkable business meetings and contacts that had actually occurred but at a later date than he claimed and for the purpose of pitching Burisma on [Smirnov’s] services and products, not for discussing bribes to [Joe Biden] when he was in office.”
“For months, we have warned that Republicans have built their conspiracies about Hunter and his family on lies told by people with political agendas, not facts,” Hunter Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell said in a statement on Thursday. “We were right, and the air is out of their balloon.” Addressing reporters on Friday, Joe Biden stated that the allegations have “been an outrageous effort from the beginning.”
