An informant who alleged that President Biden engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national during his vice presidency was arrested on charges of lying to the FBI. The case may undermine a push by House Republicans to impeach the president. The informant, Alexander Smirnov, a confidential FBI source since 2010, provided “false derogatory information” about Biden and his son, Hunter, authorities said Thursday, reports the Wall Street Journal. Smirnov’s allegations appeared in an official FBI record that House Republicans have touted in their investigation into the Biden family’s business dealings. An FBI official had cautioned that investigative reports only “include leads and suspicions, not conclusions of investigators based on fuller context.”
Rep. James Comer (R-KY), said the impeachment inquiry into Biden doesn’t rely on the FBI document and is based on “a large record of evidence,” including bank records and witness testimony. “We will continue to follow the facts to propose legislation to reform federal ethics laws and to determine whether articles of impeachment are warranted,” Comer said. Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, said, “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. We were right and the air is out of their balloon.” Smirnov had allegedly provided the FBI with tips related to Burisma, a Ukrainian gas producer that had Hunter Biden on its board starting in 2014, when Joe Biden was vice president. That relationship has been the subject of criminal and congressional investigations for years into Hunter Biden. Smirnov claimed that there had been two phone calls between himself and a Burisma official in which the official purportedly said that he had been forced to pay both Bidens and it would take investigators 10 years to find records of the payments to the president. Those allegations were fabrications, prosecutors said.
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