Hunter Biden’s Lawyers Says Bogus FBI Informant ‘Infected’ His Prosecution

Attorneys for the president’s son say an FBI informant’s lies have “infected” the case against their client.

Hunter Biden faces federal charges for having failed to pay his taxes on time and for illegally owning a gun when he was addicted to crack cocaine. A plea deal and diversion agreement collapsed last summer over a disagreement about Biden’s immunity from further charges.

In a court filing on Tuesday, Biden’s attorneys suggested prosecutors abandoned the plea deal because they believed they might be able to charge Biden with a more serious crime. The bribery allegation came from an FBI informant named Alexander Smirnov, whom the government has just accused of making the whole thing up.

“It now seems clear that the Smirnov allegations infected this case,” Biden’s legal team, led by Abbe Lowell, said in a court filing in Delaware, adding in a footnote that prosecutors had “taken Mr. Smirnov’s bait of grand, sensational charges.” The motion asked the court to make prosecutors hand over more evidence ahead of a trial.

Smirnov told his FBI handler in 2020 that the head of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, which employed Hunter Biden on its board, had paid both Joe and Hunter Biden $5 million in bribes. In June, Republicans obtained and released a raw FBI file describing the allegation, which became a major part of their impeachment inquiry against the president.

Last week, however, the government said they’d poked holes in Smirnov’s story and that he fabricated the allegation because he opposed Biden’s candidacy for president. The charges were filed by David Weiss, the same prosecutor overseeing the case against Biden. In the indictment against Smirnov, prosecutors said the FBI asked Weiss for help investigating