A federal grand jury has indicted the confidential FBI source who accused President Joe Biden and son Hunter of taking $10 million in bribes from the head of a Ukrainian energy company that employed the younger Biden.
The bribes supposedly went to then-Vice President Biden in exchange for pushing Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating the company, Burisma Holdings.
The 37-page indictment says Alexander Smirnov lied about bribes of $5 million each for the Biden boys.
Contained in an FBI 1023 report, the bribery allegation is part of the GOP’s imprudent effort to impeach Biden for corrupt business dealings before he became president.
The Charges
The indictment says the handler warned Smirnov no less than 20 times to provide truthful information. Authorized to commit crimes for the investigation, the defendant was also warned that he could not “participate in an act that constitutes obstruction of justice (e.g., perjury, witness tampering, witness intimidation, entrapment, or fabrication, alteration, or destruction of evidence, unless such illegal activity has been authorized).”
The indictment alleges that Smirnov “provided false derogatory information” about the Bidens when he told his handler that the chieftain of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, paid them $10 million.
The lies came during a phone call with his handler on June 26, 2020, the indictment alleges. Smirnov told the handler about “two purported meetings and two purported phone calls with various Burisma executives” where the Bidens “were discussed.”
The indictment continues:
[Smirnov] claimed that Burisma executives at two meetings in 2015 and/or 2016, during the Obama-Biden Administration, told him that they were paying Businessperson 1 to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” and later that they had specifically paid $5 million each to [Joe Biden], when he was in office, and [Hunter Biden] so that “[Hunter Biden] will take care of all those issues through his dad,” referring to a criminal investigation being conducted by the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General into Burisma and to “deal with” the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General. In describing the phone calls, the Defendant claimed that Burisma Official 1 said he was “pushed to pay” [the Bidens], had text messages and recordings that show he was coerced to make such payments, and it would take investigators ten years to find the records of illicit payments.… The Defendant made these statements to the Handler in June 2020, when Public Official 1 was a candidate for President of the United States and the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties. Critically, the payments the Defendant described occurred, according to the Defendant, during the Obama-Biden Administration when [Joe Biden] was in a position to influence U.S. policy towards Ukraine, and prior to February 2016 when the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General was fired and, in any event, prior to the change in Administrations in January 2017.
The indictment alleges that Smirnov told myriad other lies that led to the two-count indictment of lying to a federal agent and the falsification of a federal record.
Smirnov could receive a 25-year prison sentence.
Biden-Burisma Influence Peddling Scheme
The timing of the indictment strangely coincides with the ongoing impeachment investigation of Joe Biden, which partly involves the Biden-Burisma influence-peddling scheme.
While Burisma was paying Hunter Biden a king’s ransom for doing nothing but providing access to his father, then-Vice President Biden ordered Ukraine to fire the prosecutor who was investigating the company. The prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was corrupt — so the allegation went.
In March 2016, Biden issued an ultimatum. Fire Shokin, or Ukraine won’t receive $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees. Biden bragged about the extortion scheme during an event sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.
“I said, ‘I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours.”
Continued Biden:
I looked at them and said, “I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.” Well, son of a b**ch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.
Given that the Obama State Department had given Ukraine and Shokin a clean bill of health with respect to so-called corruption in June and October 2015, the obvious question is why Biden insisted on sacking Shokin less than a year later.
Answer: The prosecutor wanted to question Hunter Biden.
No More Impeachment
That aside, the indictment of Smirnov, as The Hill observed, undermines a premise of the House GOP’s impeachment probe.
“GOP investigations have put the bribery allegations front and center of the impeachment push, and Republican leaders have pointed to the claims to convince colleagues to back the investigation,” the website reported:
“The impeachable offense is — I think, the key thing is in Burisma,” House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told reporters in December ahead of a House vote to authorize an impeachment inquiry.
And House Oversight and Accountability Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) last year called the tip “a very crucial piece of our investigation.”
Democrats are now delighting in the revelation — and what it means for the GOP inquiry.
Democrats want the inquiry stopped and an apology to Biden.
Then again, “the impeachment inquiry is not reliant on the FBI’s FD-1023,” Comer averred, The Hill reported. Rather, “it is based on a large record of evidence, including bank records and witness testimony, revealing that Joe Biden knew of and participated in his family’s business dealings.”
It is also based on the allegations that the Department of Justice, after Biden became president, obstructed an IRS probe of Hunter Biden.
