Alexander Smirnov, 43, a former FBI informant accused of spreading falsehoods about President Biden and his son Hunter, has been arrested for the second time in a week and is scheduled to appear in federal court on Monday. It is.
Mr. Smirnov was sitting in his lawyer's office in Las Vegas on Thursday morning when federal marshals burst in to take him into custody.
The hearing will decide whether prosecutors had the right to re-arrest him two days after a magistrate released him, a highly unusual and aggressive move that would have compromised the country's security. The government maintains that the move was necessary to protect Mr.
The bizarre episode is the latest development in a case that has sparked national interest and confusion in equal measure, centering on a mysterious fixer who shaped the charges that shattered the foundations of the Republican push to impeach Biden.
The hearing, before a federal judge in California, is expected to be highly contentious but is unlikely to change the trajectory of the case. Prosecutors indicted Mr. Smirnov last week in California, where special counsel David C. Weiss filed tax charges against Hunter Biden. A judge in the same jurisdiction granted Smirnov's re-arrest on Thursday.
Mr. Weiss' actions not only put him at odds with his defense team, but also with a Las Vegas magistrate judge who released Mr. Smirnov on his own recognizance without cash bond after requiring Mr. Smirnov to surrender his passport and wear an electronic monitoring device. There will be a conflict.
At Tuesday's first detention hearing, the judge sided with the defense after special counsel Leo Wise suggested that Smirnov might flee the country and seek asylum in Russia. He casually dismissed that claim.
“I think at this stage, if you were actually going to hide somewhere, you probably don't think that's the most attractive place to go,” the judge said, according to court records.
Mr. Smirnov's attorney, David Z. Chesnoff, accused Mr. Weiss in Thursday's filing of blinding his client and obtaining “a warrant for Mr. Smirnov's arrest on the same charges.”
Mr. Smirnov was arrested on February 15 as he deplaned an international flight in Las Vegas, where he had lived for the past two years in a $980,000 apartment with his longtime girlfriend.
In 2020, Smirnov told FBI agents what prosecutors allege is a flat-out lie: that the oligarch owners of Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid both the president and Hunter Biden $5 million. He said he had arranged for him to pay a bribe. The explosives claim was leaked to the Republican Party, which apparently published it without verifying it.
At the time of his arrest, Smirnov claimed prosecutors were planning to embark on a “multi-month foreign trip to several countries,” during which he planned to meet with officials from several foreign intelligence services.
For more than a decade, Mr. Smirnov, who speaks English and Russian, gave the FBI visibility into the shadowy world of oligarchies and civil servants, offering himself as a consultant to some of the same people he was surveilling.
In a court filing, the special prosecutor described Mr. Smirnov as a repeat liar who could not be trusted to even honestly explain his professional and financial situation.
Mr. Chesnov challenged those characterizations in court this week, indicating that he would seek to introduce into evidence that Mr. Smirnov was a truthful and patriotic source of information important to the FBI.
“There will be a vigorous defense to the claim that in fact he was not truthful,” Chesnoff said.
