Alexander Smirnov, 43, is facing charges in connection with lying to the FBI and creating false records. He was arrested on Feb. 15 at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, after his arrival in the US from overseas, and will make his initial appearance in federal court the same afternoon.
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The charges undercut a key linchpin of the Republican impeachment case against the President.
The indictment alleges that Smirnov’s story to the FBI “was a fabrication, an amalgam of otherwise unremarkable business meetings and contacts that had actually occurred, but at a later date than he claimed, and for the purpose of pitching Burisma on the Defendant’s services and products, not for discussing bribes to [Joe Biden] when he was in office.”
Congressional Republicans have uncritically championed Smirnov’s now-discredited allegations for roughly a year and they fought with the FBI to obtain memos detailing what Smirnov told investigators. They later released the materials publicly, over the FBI’s objections.
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Republicans have repeatedly praised Smirnov as “credible” and put his uncorroborated claims front-and-center in their impeachment inquiry into the President.
While announcing the impeachment inquiry, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said “a trusted FBI informant has alleged a bribe to the Biden family.”
The collapse of Smirnov’s story is a major blow to Republican narratives about the Biden family.
“For months we have warned that Republicans have built their conspiracies about Hunter and his family on lies told by people with political agendas, not facts,” said Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, in a statement to CNN.
During Biden’s campaign for the Presidency, Smirnov allegedly submitted reports to the FBI about two meetings with Burisma executives from 2015 and 2016, during which the executives admitted that they hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”
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Smirnov also allegedly reported that executives paid $5 million each to Joe and Hunter Biden while Joe Biden was Vice President so that Hunter would “take care of all those issues through his dad,” referring to a criminal investigation being conducted by the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General into Burisma.
“In truth and fact, the 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 February 2016. In other words, when [Joe Biden] had no ability to influence U.S. policy and when the Prosecutor General was no longer in office,” the indictment states.
Burisma is a privately owned Ukrainian gas production group. It is the country's only vertically integrated holding company engaged in the exploration, production, service, and sale of hydrocarbons. Burisma Group is one of the three largest independent gas producers in Ukraine and is headquartered in Cyprus.
On June 12, 2020, Mykola Ilyashenko, the Kyiv Tax Service’s first deputy head, Andriy Kicha, Burisma's chief legal officer, and another trustee of former Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevskyi, Burisma's owner, were detained.
According to law enforcement, Zlochevskyi attempted to pay a bribe of $6 million to the then-head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO) Nazar Kholodnytskyi, and the-then head of National Anti-Corruption Agency of Ukraine (NABU) Artem Sytnyk. SAPO and NABU were pursuing a criminal case against Zlochevskyi at the time, involving embezzling funds from the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) stabilization loan program.
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Zlochevskyi was served with a notice of suspicion in July 2020 and arrested in absentia by the Supreme Anti-Corruption Court.
He left Ukraine in late 2014 when he received the status of a suspect in the case of illicit enrichment. In January 2015, the Prosecutor General's Office put him on the wanted list. In the fall of 2016, information about ex-minister was removed from the website of the Ukrainian Internal Affairs Ministry.
Republicans have accused the President and his family of illicit enrichment through political decisions that they allege Biden made during his Vice Presidency in 2009-2017, when he held the position under Barack Obama.
In addition, Republicans claim that the U.S. Department of Justice has interfered with the Hunter Biden investigation. However, they have yet to provide anything resembling convincing evidence linking Joe Biden's actions as Vice President to his son's business activities.
On Dec. 14, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to formally authorize impeachment proceedings against Joe Biden.
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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Section: Nation
Author: Альона Сонько
