Key informant who lied in Biden impeachment pleads guilty: court records

Alexander Smirnov has been given a plea deal after he spent years lying about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, which resulted in a years-long investigation by Republicans in Congress, flagged national security expert Marcy Wheeler.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and former Attorney General Bill Barr all bought into the false claims, resulting in years of investigations that probed the bank accounts of the president, his brother, and his son.

The court filing posted on Thursday said: "The events Defendant first reported to the Handler in June 2020 were fabrications. In truth and fact, Defendant had contact with executives from Burisma in 2017, after the end of the Obama-Biden Administration and after the then Ukrainian Prosecutor General had been fired in Feb. 2016 — in other words, when Public Official 1 could not engage in any official act to influence U.S. policy and when the Prosecutor General was no longer in office. Defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against Public Official 1, the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for president, after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his candidacy."

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Public Official 1 can reasonably be assumed to be President Biden.

The defendant then repeated the false claims to FBI agents in Sept. 2023, where he also changed his story and had new false stories about Public Official 1.

The court filing also revealed that Smirnov was given "more than $2 million in income from multiple sources in 2020, 2021 and 2022. He then used the money to prop up his and his girlfriend's lifestyle in Las Vegas. Expenditures included a $1.4 million condo, a Bentley, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of clothes, jewelry, and accessories for himself and Domestic Partner purchased at high-end retailers in Los Angeles and Las Vegas."

Incoming president Donald Trump has not indicated whether or not he intends to pardon Alexander Smirnov, only that he will pardon Jan. 6 defendants.