Accused former FBI agent has access to $6 million and Israeli passport

The former FBI informant accused in the United States of lying to the agency about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s relationship with a Ukrainian energy company has admitted that Russian intelligence provided him with information.

The report of the special prosecutor in charge of the case, David Weiss, indicated  Tuesday that Alex Smirnov, as he himself emphasizes, has links to foreign intelligence services, including the Russian ones.

The informant told the authorities that he had had meetings with these contacts, among others, in November 2023, where a source provided him with information about Russian military operations in a third country, not detailed.

Russian agents
mirnov was arrested on February 14 in Nevada upon returning from an international flight. Two days later, he planned to embark on a trip of several months to different countries in which, according to his own description, he was going to meet with representatives of different intelligence agencies and governments.

In his interrogation, he confessed that agents associated with Russian intelligence contributed to the spread of the story about the Bidens.

Smirnov had told FBI agents that President Biden and his son Hunter received $5 million each from the company Burisma Holdings between 2015 and 2016, something that was not true, as detailed last week in the indictment filed in court. in California.

Hunter served on Burisma’s board of directors from 2014 to 2019.

The man falsely alleged to the FBI that Burisma employees told him they hired Hunter because he would “protect them, through his father, from all kinds of problems.”

Republicans claim, thanks to testimonies like Smirnov’s, that Biden’s family – especially Hunter – received more than $15 million from foreign companies and governments from Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Romania, and China between 2014 and 2019. His partners would have received another $9 million.

Smirnov, who worked as an FBI informant since 2010, faces two criminal charges, one for giving fraudulent testimony to a government agent and another for falsifying documents in a federal investigation.

One of the Russian contacts Smirnov spoke about was described by him as the son of a former high-ranking official in the Russian Executive, but also as someone who supposedly controls two groups of people in charge of plotting assassinations in a third country, such as a Russian representative in abroad and as someone with ties to Russian intelligence.

Prosecutor Weiss warned Tuesday that Smirnov has access to $6 million in funds that would allow him to live comfortably abroad for the rest of his life and that even if he surrendered his US and Israeli passport nothing would prevent him from obtaining a new Israeli passport and that his contacts in foreign intelligence agencies could also help him.