A former FBI informant who claimed President Joe Biden received a $5 million bribe said that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved” in proliferating that claim, according to a Department of Justice filing on Tuesday.
Alexander Smirnov was arrested last week and charged with lying to the FBI. He claimed that Biden and his son Hunter Biden received $5 million each when the elder Biden was vice president. The ex-informant claimed the money was paid out by Ukrainian energy company Burisma, on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Smirnov said the money was payment for Biden getting Ukraine’s government to fire a prosecutor named Viktor Shokin, who, as the story goes, was investigating the company for corruption. However, as has been widely reported, Shokin was fired for not probing corruption and had no active investigation into Burisma at the time of his firing.
CNN covered the filing on Tuesday’s edition of The Situation Room.
Reporter Evan Perez said that after Smirnoff was arrested by the FBI, he “admitted that officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story about Hunter Biden.”
House Republicans are investigating the Bidens and have claimed that the president engaged in corruption as vice president. They have relied extensively on Smirnov’s claims to undergird their case.
Smirnov is being prosecuted by Special Counsel David Weiss, who is also prosecuting Hunter Biden on nine felony tax counts. The president’s son pleaded not
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