Ex-FBI informant appears in federal court in Las Vegas
Alexander Smirnov, 43, the former FBI informant accused of spreading lies about President Biden and his son Hunter, will appear in federal court Friday afternoon after being rearrested for the second time in a week.
Mr. Smirnov was sitting in his law office in Las Vegas on Thursday morning when US Marshals rushed in to take him into custody.
The hearing will determine whether prosecutors had the right to re-arrest him two days after a magistrate released him — a highly unusual and aggressive move that the government said was necessary to ensure national security and prevent him from going abroad to flee.
The bizarre episode is the latest development in a case that has sparked public interest and confusion in equal measure, focusing on an enigmatic fixer whose allegations formed the fractured foundation of a Republican effort to unseat Mr. Biden to make.
The hearing, before Judge Daniel Albregts in Nevada, is expected to be highly contentious, but is unlikely to change the trajectory of the case. Prosecutors charged Mr. Smirnov last week in California, where special counsel David C. Weiss filed tax charges against Hunter Biden. The judge in that jurisdiction authorized Mr. Smirnov’s rearrest on Thursday.
Mr. Weiss’s actions pitted him not only against the defense team, but also against the magistrate who released Mr. Smirnov on his own initiative, without cash bail, after requiring him to surrender his passports and wear an electronic monitoring device.
When Leo Wise, who represented the special counsel at the first detention hearing on Tuesday, suggested that Mr. Smirnov could flee the country and seek refuge in Russia, the judge sided with the defense and dismissed that argument lightly.
“My guess is that at this stage he probably thinks this is not the most attractive place to go when in fact he is inclined to hide somewhere,” the judge said, according to the court transcript.
In a filing on Thursday, Mr. Smirnov’s lawyer, David Z. Chesnoff, accused Mr. Weiss of blinding his client with “an arrest warrant for Mr. Smirnov based on the same allegations.”
Mr. Smirnov was arrested on February 15 as he stepped off an international flight in Las Vegas, where he has lived with his longtime girlfriend in a $980,000 apartment for the past two years.
In 2020, Mr. Smirnov told his FBI handler what prosecutors said was a blatant lie: that the oligarch owner of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had agreed to pay $5 million in bribes to both the president and Hunter Biden. The explosive claim was leaked to Republicans, who apparently made it public without verifying it.
At the time of his arrest, Mr. Smirnov was planning to leave for what prosecutors called “a months-long foreign trip through multiple countries,” claiming plans to meet with contacts from multiple foreign intelligence services.
For more than a decade, Mr. Smirnov, who speaks English and Russian, gave the FBI insight into the shadowy world of oligarchs and government officials while offering himself up as a consultant to some of the same people he surveilled.
In the court filings, the special counsel described Mr. Smirnov as a serial liar who could not even be trusted with an honest description of his profession or an accounting of his finances.
Mr. Chesnoff challenged those characterizations in court this week and suggested he would try to introduce as evidence that Mr. Smirnov was a truthful and patriotic source of important intelligence for the FBI.
“There will be a fierce defense against the argument that he was in fact not honest,” Mr. Chesnoff said.