Alexander Smirnov, a former FBI informant, had made claims about Joe Biden accepting bribes from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. This claim was seen as an important matter that needed to be investigated, so the Department of Justice decided to indict him.
On Thursday, Smirnov appeared in court in Las Vegas, accused of making a false statement and record. In response to this development, Joe Biden and Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin called for an end to the impeachment inquiry.
Fox News reports:
President Biden called for House Republicans to drop their impeachment inquiry against him, saying on Friday that it has been “an outrageous effort from the beginning.”
The president’s comments came after the indictment of FBI informant who alleged that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden had been paid millions of dollars in exchange for their help firing the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma Holdings.
“He is lying, and it should be dropped,” Biden said after a reporter asked about the indicted FBI informant.
House Republicans told Fox News Digital that their impeachment inquiry has much more evidence that does not rely on the indicted FBI source.
Special Counsel David Weiss charged Alexander Smirnov, 43, with making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record during FBI interviews.
According to the indictment, Smirnov gave “false derogatory information” to the FBI despite “repeated admonishments that he must provide truthful information and that he must not fabricate evidence.”
The indictment says that Smirnov had told an FBI agent in March 2017 that he had had a phone call with Burisma’s owner concerning the firm potentially acquiring a U.S. company and making an initial public offering (IPO) on a U.S.-based stock exchange.
In reporting this conversation to the FBI agent, Smirnov said that Hunter Biden was a board member of Burisma, though that was publicly known.
In June 2020, Smirnov is accused of having told the FBI, for the first time, about two meetings he had had four to five years earlier, in which executives associated with Burisma had supposedly admitted that they had hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”
During this meeting, the indictment alleges that Smirnov said the executives had paid $5 million to each of the Bidens while Joe Biden was still in office. The indictment alleges that Smirnov falsely claimed that the Bidens had been paid so that Hunter Biden, with his dad’s help, could take care of a criminal investigation being conducted by the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General, Viktor Shokin, into Burisma.
The allegations were recorded on an FBI FD-1023 form, which is used by FBI agents to record unverified reporting from confidential human sources. The form is used to document information as told to an FBI agent, but recording that information does not validate or weigh it against other information known by the FBI.
The FD-1023 form containing the allegations last year became a key document in the House investigation into the Biden family’s business dealings.
