https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/12/17/david-weiss-rush-job-on-alexander-smirnovs-sentencing/
(Also see her many other posts on Smirnov at
https://www.emptywheel.net/tag/alexander-smirnov/)
As I noted in an update to this post, Alexander Smirnov, the FBI informant who attempted to frame Joe Biden with bribery in 2020 as part of Bill Barr’s side channel for dirt on Hunter Biden, has pled guilty.
In his plea deal, Smirnov admitted,
The events Defendant first reported to the Handler in June 2020 were fabrications. In truth and fact. Defendant had contact with executives from Burisma in 2017, after the end of the Obama-Biden Administration and after the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General had been fired in February 2016 — in other words, when Public Official 1 could not engage in any official act to influence U.S. policy and when the Prosecutor General was no longer in office. Defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against Public Official 1, the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his candidacy.
Yesterday, Judge Otis Wright accepted Smirnov’s plea.
I’ll have a more substantive post about how David Weiss, along with an absolutely supine media, appears to have buried the frame job to which he was a witness.
For now, I want to point to a notable feature of the plea: the timing of it. One of the terms of the deal was that Smirnov agree to be sentenced within 30 days of his plea colloquy, but not before January 8.
3. Defendant agrees to:
a. At the earliest opportunity requested by the SCO-W and provided by the Court, appear and plead guilty to:
i. Count Two of the indictment in United States v. Alexander Smirnov, 2:24-CR-00091-ODW, which charges defendant with causing the creation of a false and fictitious record in a federal investigation, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1519 (hereafter the “obstruction of justice indictment”).
ii. Counts One, Five and Eight, of the indictment in United States v Alexander Smirnov, 2:24-CR-00702-ODW, which charges the defendant with tax evasion for tax years 2020, 2021 and 2022, in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7201 (hereafter the “tax evasion indictment”).
b. Request that the Court sentence the defendant within 30 days of entry of the entry of his guilty pleas, but not sooner than January 8,2025
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