As the Justice Department fights to keep former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov behind bars, Republicans and Democrats are scrambling to fit Smirnov’s indictment into their partisan narratives about President Joe Biden’s impeachment inquiry.
David Weiss, the special counsel appointed to investigate Hunter Biden, charged Smirnov last week with making a false statement and creating a fake record — years after Smirnov told the FBI he had evidence that Hunter and Joe Biden received bribes from a Ukrainian energy company.
Smirnov’s identity had remained a secret since news of his bribery claim became public thanks to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who sought to have the FBI document, known as an FD-1023, containing Smirnov’s allegations made public, which Grassley did in July 2023. Until last week, Smirnov was known only as the confidential human source behind the FD-1023.
Here is how Republicans and Democrats have spun Smirnov’s indictment.
Republicans have lost their ‘star witness’
Several Democrats, including Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), have used Smirnov’s arrest to undermine the impeachment inquiry by claiming Republicans have lost their most important witness.
But Smirnov was not a key witness in the GOP impeachment inquiry. In fact, he was never scheduled to be a witness at all.
Republican lawmakers did not know the identity of the confidential human source behind the FD-1023 form, and a source familiar with the impeachment inquiry said they did not have plans to interview him.
While GOP lawmakers did ask the Justice Department what investigators had done to look into the bribery claim, accusing the DOJ of covering up the allegation with inaction, they did not ask to speak with Smirnov himself.
Instead, Republicans spent far more time hyping the testimony of other witnesses, including former Hunter Biden business partners Devon Archer and Tony Bobulinski, as they built their case against Joe Biden.
Indictment means Biden impeachment is ‘Russian disinformation’
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Wednesday that the charges against Smirnov revealed the entire impeachment inquiry to be the product of a Russian influence operation.
“It appears like the whole thing is not only, obviously, false and fraudulent, but a product of Russian disinformation and propaganda,” Raskin said of the impeachment effort.
Raskin’s claim appears to be based on details Weiss revealed this week in a court filing asking a judge not to release Smirnov while awaiting trial, a claim the judge denied.
The special counsel noted that Smirnov told investigators in September that he had spoken with Russian officials about the Biden family.
“When he was interviewed by FBI agents in September 2023, Smirnov repeated some of his false claims, changed his story as to other of his claims, and promoted a new false narrative after he said he met with Russian officials,” Weiss wrote in the filing.
Smirnov repeated his reference to the Russians immediately after his arrest, Weiss said.
“During his custodial interview on February 14, Smirnov admitted that officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story about” Hunter Biden, Weiss said.
But the impeachment inquiry was based on far more than the bribery claim Smirnov made in an FBI document that was, by the time the impeachment inquiry began, more than three years old.
Republicans in Congress began investigating Hunter Biden’s role with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, as far back as August 2019 — nearly a year before Smirnov even relayed his allegedly false bribery allegation to the FBI.
The events that created momentum for the start of the impeachment inquiry in September 2023 included the testimony of IRS whistleblowers who said the DOJ slow-walked a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden and shut down questions that may have implicated Joe Biden, the discovery of secret email aliases Joe Biden had used to communicate with Hunter Biden, and testimony from Archer about the then-vice president’s habit of talking to his son’s foreign business partners on speakerphone.
The IRS whistleblowers in particular changed the dynamics of congressional inquiries into Hunter Biden. A senior GOP aide told CBS News in August 2023 that their testimony was a “game changer” for the investigation at that time.
Republicans cited dozens of pieces of evidence for a hearing in September 2023 about the start of their impeachment inquiry, which began in earnest nearly three months before the House formalized it with a vote. One was the FD-1023, but many more stretched far beyond the single, unproven allegation made by Smirnov.
‘It was never fact-checked‘
That line in Politico’s morning newsletter on Wednesday echoed comments from Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), who said allegations of wrongdoing regarding the Biden family’s activity in Ukraine had long been “debunked.”
Neither is entirely true. The FD-1023 form did go through a layer of vetting within the DOJ before the 2020 election, and the GOP’s interest in what then-Vice President Joe Biden and his son did in Ukraine starting in 2014 spanned far beyond the bribery claim and included the firing, at Joe Biden’s behest, of a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into Burisma.
Former U.S. Attorney Scott Brady oversaw an effort in 2020 to vet information from a variety of sources related to the Biden family and Ukraine and to brief investigators conducting a criminal investigation of Hunter Biden on any Ukraine-related tips deemed credible. Brady told the House Judiciary Committee in October 2023 that his team in the Western District of Pennsylvania U.S. Attorney’s Office came across Smirnov’s original interview with the FBI in June 2020 as part of that effort.
Smirnov had given an interview to the FBI in March 2017, during which he told agents that he’d learned from a Burisma official that the Ukrainian energy company was looking to purchase a U.S. company to gain access to the American stock market.
After discovering that interview, Brady’s office then asked the FBI to contact Smirnov, whose identity was not known publicly at the time of Brady’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee, and interview him again to learn more details about what Smirnov had mentioned in passing about Burisma during his original March 2017 interview.
But the FBI, Brady said, was at first hesitant to do so.
“I think there was concern by the FBI about the sensitive nature of both the information and also the fact that this was an important confidential human source who had provided information to them in the past that had been used in other investigations,” Brady said in October. “So it was an important CHS to them.”
Brady testified that during an October 2020 briefing he gave to Weiss’s prosecutors in the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office, Brady’s team and FBI agents told Weiss that “we felt that the 1023 had indicia of credibility sufficient to merit further investigation.” The FBI interviewed Smirnov again in late June 2020 after Brady’s requests.
“We were able to corroborate certain information that was represented by the CHS and is memorialized in this 1023,” Brady said, according to the transcript of his interview that the Judiciary Committee released publicly last week after Smirnov’s arrest.
Brady did not have the resources or the mandate from the DOJ to reach out to Smirnov’s Ukrainian contacts and investigate the underlying claims from Smirnov.
But Brady did relay to Weiss that Smirnov, whose identity was not known at that point, had provided valuable information to the FBI in previous investigations and that a review of Smirnov’s “travel and meetings” from the time Smirnov claimed to have spoken with Ukrainian officials appeared to match up with what he said in the FD-1023.
Christopher Steele double standard
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) suggested Wednesday that the DOJ had created a double standard by not charging Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer behind the discredited dossier of Russia collusion allegations against former President Donald Trump, while charging Smirnov for a seemingly similar offense.
That is not a fully accurate comparison. Although Steele did not face charges for his claims, one of the main sources he relied upon for the material in the dossier did get indicted.
Former special counsel John Durham prosecuted Igor Danchenko, a Russian national, on four false statement charges related to what Danchenko told FBI agents about where he got the material for the Steele dossier.
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A Washington, D.C., jury acquitted Danchenko in 2022.
However, his prosecution shows that the Justice Department pursued similar charges prior to Smirnov’s indictment — albeit after Trump had left office and the indictment could have minimal impact on politics. Smirnov’s indictment, by contrast, affects an open political debate.
