The informant turned defendant and targeted the Bidens

Alexander Smirnov was in many ways the archetype of an informant who operated in the shadowlands of the former Soviet Union – a profiteer, fixer and gossip who promoted his ability to understand a confusing landscape to American law enforcement agencies.

For more than a decade, he played a double game, giving the FBI tantalizing visibility among a cast of oligarchs and government officials while offering himself as a consultant, with a difficult-to-define skill set, to some of the same people he did. keep an eye on.

Then he crossed the line.

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 President Biden and his son Hunter. The explosive claim was leaked to Republicans, who made Mr. Smirnov's allegations the centerpiece of their now-stalled effort to impeach President Biden, apparently without verifying the accusation.

Last week, Mr. Smirnov, 43, was indicted on charges that he lied to investigators about the Bidens. He was arrested as he prepared to leave for what prosecutors called “a months-long foreign trip through multiple countries,” during which he claimed he had plans to meet with contacts from multiple foreign intelligence services.

In court filings, prosecutors for David C. Weiss, the special counsel investigating Hunter Biden, described Mr. Smirnov as a serial liar who could not even be trusted to honestly describe his own profession or account for his finances.

Democrats in Congress predicted that the indictment would undermine the impeachment proceedings. Lawyers for Hunter Biden have used it in an attempt to undermine the tax and gun cases brought against him by Mr. Weiss. In a court file, they claimed that Mr. Smirnov's false claims “tainted” the cases, and suggested, without providing evidence, that prosecutors rejected a plea deal last summer because they had “Mr. Smirnov down his rabbit hole of lies.”

How Mr. Smirnov managed to convince business associates, law enforcement agencies and politicians that he had something valuable to offer remains as much of a mystery as the man now at the center of the saga.

Little is known about Mr. Smirnov, aside from a few public documents and snippets of biography in papers filed in federal court in Las Vegas, where he lives and was taken into custody on Thursday. He appears to have no social media presence and covered his face as he left prison on Tuesday, wearing a leather jacket and orange shoes.

(He was released Tuesday by a federal judge after posting a personal recognizance bond and surrendering his U.S. and Israeli passports. Prosecutors appealed that decision Wednesday, citing the risk he posed to national security.)

Mr. Smirnov, a dual citizen of Israel and the United States, moved into a three-bedroom, three-bathroom apartment on the Las Vegas Strip that his longtime girlfriend bought two years ago for $980,000. There are no public records of previous criminal charges against him in the United States.

Before that, he lived in California for at least sixteen years, most recently in the affluent coastal community of Laguna Beach.

It is not clear, either in court cases or in public records, where Mr. Smirnov was born. He is fluent in Russian, speaks English with a heavy accent and may have roots in Ukraine, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.

In court filings this week, his attorneys portrayed him as a law-abiding Nevada resident with a valid driver's license and a “stable residential history.” He suffers from a serious, unspecified problem with his eyes that requires regular treatment.

“Mr. Smirnov has undergone seven surgeries in the past year, is required to take prescription medications daily and requires ongoing care,” wrote David Z. Chesnoff, his attorney.

His lawyers cited his close personal ties to three people — his longtime girlfriend, Diana Lavrenyuk, her adult son in the District of Columbia, and a Miami cousin, Linor Shefer — to refute prosecutors' claims that he would flee the country if he was released. .

Ms. Shefer – who was crowned “Miss Jewish Star” in Moscow in 2014 in a pageant chaired by Israel's ambassador to Russia, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — declined to comment when reached on her cell phone early Thursday.

The special counsel's office did little to fill in these biographical gaps, in part because prosecutors seemed unsure whether everything he told them was true.

In a memo advocating for his indefinite detention, deputies for Mr. Weiss described him as a perennial fabulist. He not only provided false information to the FBI about the Bidens and misled prosecutors about his wealth, estimated at $6 million, but also told officials there that he worked in the security sector, even though the government could find no evidence that this was true .

Mr. Chesnoff said in a brief interview that his client had misunderstood the government's questions about his finances and reported only his modest personal wealth without including more substantial assets in business accounts.

Even as they shared some of the surprising information he passed on to his handlers — including the claim that he received unspecified information about Hunter Biden from Russian intelligence services — prosecutors cast doubt on everything he told the FBI.

“The misinformation he spreads is not limited” to his false claims about the Bidens, prosecutors wrote.

“He is actively spreading new lies that could impact the US elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November,” she added.

Nevertheless, some degree of mendacity is expected among informants working in a part of the world where disinformation is rife, forcing law enforcement officials to search for seeds of useful information.

A federal prosecutor involved in screening claims about Mr. Biden's foreign work testified last year that Mr. Smirnov was a “key confidential human source” who had “been used in other investigations.”

But court documents show that law enforcement officials have long harbored doubts about the veracity of Mr. Smirnov's reports and claims he made about his relationships that appeared designed to exaggerate his importance.

And many of his most provocative claims, outlined in Justice Department documents, have not yet been publicly verified.

For example, he appears to have told the FBI that a business associate who introduced him to Burisma executives had ties to Russian organized crime, according to notes from that conversation, which do not indicate whether there is evidence to support the claim.

It's the kind of raw information that law enforcement agencies routinely collect and examine behind closed doors before deciding whether to act on it, and the investigation into Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings attracted so much of it that the Justice Department created a special intake process has been created.

But Mr. Smirnov's allegations made their way to Republicans in Congress, who forced the disclosure of raw FBI notes detailing the bribery claims and gave them a prominent place in the impeachment proceedings.

But while Mr. Smirnov's indictment provided a rare PR boost to Hunter Biden — who will appear before a House committee next week — Mr. Smirnov's claims are not mentioned in the charges against Mr. Biden.

And there is no evidence that they were central to Mr. Weiss's investigation into Mr. Biden's foreign business dealings and finances, which relied on financial records and grand jury interviews with a number of associates.

Pashtana Usufzy contributed reporting from Las Vegas.