Ex-FBI informant will be held in custody indefinitely, judge says

Alexander Smirnov, the former FBI informant accused of falsely claiming that President Biden and his son Hunter took bribes, will be held in custody indefinitely because he poses a significant flight risk, a California judge ruled Monday.

After a 45-minute hearing, a bespectacled Mr. Smirnov — stocky, bearded with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and dressed in brown and orange prison garb — pleaded not guilty in heavily accented English, turning for a moment to reminisce about his old days. to wave. girlfriend sitting on the gallery.

Federal District Court Judge Otis D. Wright II found criticism of a decision by a federal magistrate in Las Vegas who last week released Mr. Smirnov, 43, a confidential informant since 2010, and rejected prosecutors’ argument that he would try to escape to Russia.

Prosecutors for David C. Weiss, the special counsel investigating Hunter Biden, provided new details last week in his lawyer’s office about the circumstances of Mr. Smirnov’s rearrest. They became alarmed after a search of the $980,000 apartment owned by Mr. Smirnov’s girlfriend and where he has lived for the past two years revealed nine handguns, they said.

A prosecutor for Mr. Weiss, Leo Wise, explained that the sheer number of weapons prompted Justice Department officials to make an arrest at the law firm, rather than at Mr. Smirnov’s home, which they believed was not appropriate. would be safe. An ankle monitor allowed them to track his movements.

Mr. Smirnov’s lawyer, David Chesnoff, explained that Mr. Smirnov was in his office at the time of his rearrest because he was eager to begin preparing his defense. He said he planned to appeal the decision.

When asked outside the courthouse whether his team had actually tried to help his client flee the country, as prosecutors have suggested, Mr. Chesnoff appeared to sidestep the question.

“I think this is a dead end case,” he said, adding, “I don’t think there is any controversy.”

Judge Wright also raised concerns about Mr Smirnov’s finances. Prosecutors had accused Mr. Smirnov, who has dual American and Israeli citizenship, of deliberately underestimating his personal wealth of $6 million and found a recent flood of outflows from his accounts, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, suspicious.

“There is nothing garden variety about this case,” Judge Wright said.

Mr. Chesnoff argued that his client was a loyal American who would not flee the country. He complained that Mr. Smirnov was treated more harshly than disgraced financier Bernie Madoff, who was allowed to go free pending trial after agreeing to wear an ankle monitor.

Mr. Madoff “defrauded all of America and half of Europe,” he said.

Mr. Smirnov was escorted from the courtroom and taken into protective custody, apart from the general population of the federal lockup in Los Angeles.

On Friday, Mr. Smirnov was transported to California by U.S. marshals, in part because the case had been taken to state federal court.

Mr. Smirnov was arrested on February 15 as he stepped off an international flight in Las Vegas, where he has lived with his girlfriend 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 Hunter Biden and his father. 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 was surveilling.

In the court filings, the special counsel described Mr. Smirnov as a serial liar who could not even be trusted to honestly describe his profession or account for his finances.