WASHINGTON (AP) — A former FBI informant who is charged with fabricating a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden's family has been indicted in a new case on federal tax charges.
The tax indictment against Alexander Smirnov was unsealed this week in California federal court, months after his arrest on charges that he fabricated a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme involving Joe Biden, his son Hunter and a Ukrainian energy company.
The indictment brought by Justice Department special counsel David Weiss charges Smirnov with tax evasion and filing false tax returns, accusing him of concealing millions of dollars of income he earned between 2020 and 2022.
Smirnov's attorneys, David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, said in an email Tuesday that their client "intends to vigorously fight these allegations with the same intensity as he has fought the original indictment."
Smirnov's trial was recently pushed to Jan. 8 in the case charging him with lying about the Biden family. Smirnov has denied the allegations in that case.
Prosecutors have alleged that he falsely reported to the FBI in June 2020 that executives associated with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Hunter Biden and Joe Biden $5 million each in 2015 or 2016. Smirnov told his handler that an executive claimed to have hired Hunter Biden to "protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems," according to court documents.
Prosecutors say Smirnov in fact had only routine business dealings with the company in 2017 and made the bribery allegations after he "expressed bias" against Joe Biden while he was a presidential candidate.
Hunter Biden is scheduled to be sentenced next month in two separate criminal cases accusing him of a scheme to avoid at least $1.4 million in taxes and lying on a federal form when he bought a gun in 2018.