MADRID 9 Ene. (EUROPA PRESS) –
A former FBI informant who admitted to falsely accusing US President Joe Biden and his son Hunter of accepting a bribe of ten million dollars (around €9.7 million) from Ukrainian authorities has been sentenced to six years in prison.
The man, identified as Alexander Smirnov, a dual Israeli-American citizen who has been in prison since his arrest in February 2023, pleaded guilty last month to promoting the creation of a false FBI record and three counts of tax evasion.
The ruling of a Los Angeles court derives from an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office that also involves the payment of 675,000 dollars (about 656,000 euros) to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), as reported by the television network American CNN, which cites court documents.
Smirnov’s lawyers – born in the then Soviet Union, although he moved to Israel with his family as a child and later to the United States – had demanded a four-year prison sentence, arguing that he had no criminal record, that he suffers glaucoma in both eyes and that “his remorse is sincere.”
According to the aforementioned network, the man became a naturalized citizen and an important informant for the FBI, although the Prosecutor’s Office maintained during the trial that he later showed a bias against Biden and invented the story of bribes to damage his campaign in 2020. against the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, who was seeking re-election.
Smirnov’s allegations were secretly investigated in 2020 by the Department of Justice, which found no evidence. However, in 2023 several Republican congressmen once again cited these statements by the former informant, which went viral and led to a new interview with him by special prosecutor David Weiss that led to his indictment after his words were considered to be false.
Weiss himself charged Hunter Biden in September 2023 with three felonies related to the acquisition of a firearm. In addition, Biden’s son later pleaded guilty to tax crimes, although the president of the United States granted a pardon to his son in December 2024 before he was sentenced in either of these two cases.