Revealed: Trump allies' ties to indicted Biden impeachment witness

An American company that paid an indicted FBI informant who testified in the Joe Biden impeachment inquiry has ties to a British company owned by associates of Donald Trump in Dubai, according to a new report.

The Guardian reported that business filings and court documents show Smirnov, who has been accused of lying to investigators about the president and his son Hunter Biden, was paid $600,000 in 2020 by a company called Economic Transformation Technologies (ETT), and the indictment shows that same year he started lying to the FBI about the Bidens.

ETT's chief executive is Christopher Condon, an American who is also one of three shareholders in ETT Investment Holding Limited in London.

The other two shareholders are Pakistani American investor Shahal Khan and Farooq Arjomand, a former chairman and current board member of Damac Properties in Dubai.

Arjomand and Khan have ties to Trump through some of his associates and Damac, a Middle Eastern developer who has partnered with the former president for a decade, and Trump describes Damac's former chairman Hussain Sajwani as a "friend” and a “great man," and their families have attended weddings, Mar-a-Lago parties and ribbon-cutting ceremonies together.

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Sajwani attended the former president's 2016 inauguration, and Trump reported making up to $5 million in 2017 from a Damac licensing deal for the Trump International golf club in Dubai, and multiple reports show he and Sajwani continued discussing business into his presidency.

Khan is CEO of the "blank check company" BurTech Acquisition Group, while Patrick Orlando, a special adviser and shareholder for that public shell company, served as chief executive of another blank-check company, Digital World, when it began the process of merging with Trump Media & Technology Group – which could yield $4 billion in shares for Trump once it's finalized.

A former business associate told the Wall Street Journal last month that the $600,000 payment from ETT to Smirnov was for a stake in an Israel-based crypto trading platform, Bitoftrade, that Smirnov was involved in launching.

The Guardian reported that calls and emails to Condon, Arjomand, Sajwani, Smirnov’s lawyer and Trump's team were not returned, which Khan said he was "on the board for a very short period" but had no connection to the payment.

Smirnov is currently being held without bond after prosecutors argued that his contacts with officials associated with Russian intelligence and easy access to money made him a flight risk.