On September 17, prosecutors from the Justice Department are scheduled to appear in a federal courtroom in Pasadena, California, for a rather odd event. They will argue that a mysterious former FBI informant with connections to Russian intelligence—who was convicted of lying to the bureau to spread the false accusation that Joe Biden and his son Hunter each received a $5 million bribe from Ukraine—should be allowed to withdraw his guilty plea and get a new trial.

That allegation about the Bidens was embraced and weaponized by Donald Trump, right-wing media, and House Republicans, who in 2023 and 2024 cited it as smoking-gun evidence for Biden’s impeachment—until the informant, Alexander Smirnov, a Ukrainian-born Israeli national and businessman who acknowledged he had ties to Russian intelligence, was indicted for lying to the FBI. He pleaded guilty and was subsequently sentenced to six years in prison. (The punishment also covered failing to pay taxes on more than $2 million in income that was not fully explained.)

The Trump Justice Department’s effort to assist Smirnov, a longtime confidential source for the bureau, has been puzzling. In March, I broke the news that the DOJ was helping him get out of prison by supporting his appeal, in which Smirnov is trying to throw out his sentence and withdraw his guilty plea.

Smirnov’s false report to the FBI fueled the GOP’s absurd effort to impeach Biden and provided ammo for the ludicrous MAGA mantra that Biden was the head of a crime family.

The appeal hinges on a technical point: Smirnov, who is represented by an attorney with multiple connections to the Trump administration, claims the federal judge who presided over his trial did not stick to a provision of his plea deal regarding a reduction in his sentence to match his pretrial detention. The judge denies this. What’s highly unusual is that Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general, intervened in this case on the side of this Russia-connected fabricator whose lies, according to the federal prosecutors in his case, were concocted to impact the 2020 and 2024 elections—that is, to hurt Biden.

Which they did. Smirnov’s false report........

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