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

Attorneys for the president’s son seized on allegations that a confidential FBI source invented bribery allegations against Hunter and Joe Biden.

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.