FBI Informant in Hunter Biden Case Left Trail of Broken Promises

For years, the man now charged with lying about President Biden and his son Hunter brought information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation while trying to cash in on his connections with the agency.

During that time, Alexander Smirnov pitched himself to business associates in the U.S. as everything from an expert on taking companies public to being a de facto FBI official with vast operational authority in Ukraine, according to interviews. Associates often questioned whether Smirnov could deliver, including on claims that he could leverage his relationships with the Ukrainian president and the ruler of Dubai to help them.

The FBI, over time, began to question the veracity of its confidential source’s tips, too.

After telling Smirnov a half-dozen times between 2010 and 2020 that he might need to testify in court over information he provided the agency, the FBI in recent years grew skeptical of some of his claims, according to court filings. That included allegations central to Republican lawmakers’ effort to impeach Biden that the president and his son had received millions of dollars in bribes from a Ukrainian company, Burisma.

Prosecutors now say the Biden allegations were fabrications, and Smirnov recently acknowledged that one story about Hunter Biden came from Russian intelligence sources. Smirnov, 43 years old, has been detained as he awaits trial on charges of lying to the FBI, with a federal judge in Los Angeles declaring there was “nothing garden-variety” about the case. Smirnov has pleaded not guilty.

A lawyer for Smirnov, David Chesnoff, said Smirnov declined to respond to detailed questions from The Wall Street Journal. “All of these inquiries into his prior business dealings only deflect from the important question of the accuracy of his prosecution,” Chesnoff and another attorney, Richard Schonfeld, said in a statement.

Prosecutors say that when Smirnov was arrested, he had access to more than $6 million. They said Smirnov had ample means to flee in arguing that he be detained. Yet little has been publicly revealed about who Smirnov is.

A Journal review of corporate records, court filings and interviews with people who said they knew him found a complex character with ties to three countries’ intelligence agencies and a pattern of asking for hefty fees to broker private-sector deals—on which he didn’t always follow through.

In Boca Raton, Fla., in 2021, he pitched a wealthy commodities trader—and longtime associate of lawyer Rudy Giuliani—on helping the trader unlock millions of dollars in the trader’s assets that were frozen in Ukraine. The trader, Sam Kislin, said Smirnov flashed an ID badge with his headshot and an FBI logo as a way of proving his connections. The service would come with a fee, Smirnov said: $1 million, according to Kislin.

“I said to myself, ‘FBI?’ ” Kislin said. “ ‘Then he could do this.’ ”

It couldn’t be determined what Smirnov actually showed Kislin. The FBI doesn’t provide confidential sources with such identification and tells its sources to keep their cooperation a secret, officials said.

In another venture, Smirnov pitched investors on a company with questionable spending practices that he knew had sparked concerns among investors and employees, former associates said. The company was going long stretches without paying its employees, even as it occupied an office overlooking the Dallas Cowboys’ practice field in Frisco, Texas, that came at a five-figure monthly rent, the former associates said. The company’s founder told associates that Smirnov had “friends” in the FBI, they said.

Born in Soviet Ukraine, Smirnov spent years in Israel before moving to the U.S. in 2006, where he drew on his international contacts and bounced between business ventures as he fed information to the FBI, according to the Journal’s review. Prosecutors said that on several occasions, Smirnov was authorized by the FBI to engage in criminal activity as part of a continuing investigation.

A dual U.S.-Israeli citizen, Smirnov spent 16 years in Los Angeles before moving in recent years to Las Vegas, where his girlfriend in 2022 bought a high-rise apartment for $1.4 million—after he had wired her nearly twice that, prosecutors said.

Smirnov carved out a role for himself raising money for fledgling companies, connecting investors to founders in exchange for equity, former associates said. He was an officer of at least four businesses, the Journal’s review found. All of them have since closed.

Prosecutors have said Smirnov claimed to have a security business and said his bank records show large wire transfers from what appear to be venture-capital firms and other people. In court on Monday, Chesnoff described him as a financial professional.

Soon after arriving in the U.S., Smirnov went into business with a married couple in Wisconsin: Boris Nayflish, a Ukrainian who had moved to the U.S. nearly a decade earlier, and Diana Lavrenyuk. Their joint company, which focused on matters including “export/import operations,” according to filings, has since closed.

Nayflish and Lavrenyuk divorced in 2010, but Smirnov stayed close to both of them, later moving in with Lavrenyuk. (In a court filing, prosecutors said Smirnov refers to Lavrenyuk as both his wife and his girlfriend. On Monday, Chesnoff described Lavrenyuk as his significant other for years.) Nayflish declined to comment; Lavrenyuk didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Years later, Smirnov was introduced to the founder of the California-based company Skylab, which says it provides “all-in-one technology solutions to combat cancel culture and censorship,” as someone who might be able to help the company go public. He consulted with the company on those efforts for a period, but they didn’t ultimately materialize and he wasn’t paid, a former business associate said.

Skylab’s founder, Dean Grey, described Smirnov to associates as someone who could help him vet whether people had nefarious intentions, people familiar with the conversations said. The two ultimately parted ways after a series of promises by Smirnov didn’t pan out, one of the people said.

Smirnov helped another company—Texas-based Economic Transformation Technologies, a software platform focused on “sovereign economic performance”—solicit investors starting around 2019, former associates said.

Smirnov was aware of concerns among investors and employees about some of the company’s practices, one of the associates said. The company was failing to pay some of its bills and several of its employees despite spending lavishly on travel and maintaining its exorbitant rent in the Dallas Cowboys headquarters, former associates and investors said.

Still, Smirnov brought in investors to meet with the company’s chairman, Christopher Condon, and other company executives—among them Kislin, who didn’t ultimately invest. Condon described Smirnov to associates as a “Russian friend of ours” who was skilled at fundraising, a former associate said.

A lawyer for the company said that Smirnov didn’t help the company raise money and that he had no involvement in the business. “It would be inaccurate to say that he was raising money for the company, but I on the other hand am always seeking opportunities for growth,” Condon said in an email via the lawyer.

Of the allegations about ETT’s spending, the lawyer said the financial decisions were strategic and described the delay in paying some employees as a “deferred compensation” approach that was “not only proper but also strategic.”

A former investor in the company said Smirnov cultivated an image of being untouchable. Smirnov told one associate that he had pointed a gun at a pedestrian who crossed the road in front of him while he was driving and that the sheriff’s office was called—but that he had connections there, so they didn’t touch him.

In 2020, according to prosecutors’ filings, ETT wired $600,000 to one of Smirnov’s bank accounts. That payment was in exchange for a stake in an Israel-based crypto trading platform, called Bitoftrade, Smirnov was working on launching, a former business associate said.

Smirnov’s FBI connections often came up in conversation as he hawked his services. Condon, the ETT chairman, also told people that Smirnov had “friends” in the FBI and described him as his protector who could help shield him from investigations, former associates said. Condon’s lawyer said Condon didn’t know the extent of Smirnov’s FBI involvement, and Condon denied describing Smirnov as a protector.

Also in 2020, Smirnov brought the FBI allegations, which agents now believe were false, that Burisma, a Ukrainian natural-gas company, had paid both Bidens $5 million each while Joe Biden was vice president, to protect the company from a criminal investigation in Ukraine. Hunter Biden served on the company’s board, earning more than $500,000 a year for some years.

Joe Biden was “going to jail,” Smirnov texted his FBI contact. Smirnov sent along a photo of what he said were both Bidens with the chief executive of Burisma; prosecutors in their filings in February said that the photo didn’t actually show that.

Around the time that Smirnov was providing this information, the FBI was receiving similar allegations about the Bidens from other sources that investigators traced to Russian intelligence officials’ efforts to spread false information about Joe Biden, according to people familiar with the matter.

Prosecutors described meetings as recently as December of last year that Smirnov allegedly had with Russian intelligence officers and said he admitted in an interview with investigators after his arrest that “officials associated with Russian intelligence” were involved in passing on “a story” about Hunter Biden.

Around 2021, on the beach at a private club in Boca Raton, Smirnov pitched Kislin on founding a company together that would market electric-car batteries and capture federal subsidies, Kislin said.

Smirnov told him he also could use his FBI ties to help him unfreeze more than $21 million in infrastructure bonds that belonged to Kislin but which Ukrainian authorities deemed had been issued illegally, embroiling Kislin in a corruption probe, Kislin said.

Kislin had for years been seeking to unfreeze the funds, traveling to Ukraine and meeting with officials there. His travel there coincided with efforts by Giuliani and his associates to push the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden, and in 2019, Kislin was subpoenaed by House impeachment investigators who were looking into those efforts. Kislin’s lawyer said he didn’t have relevant information, and he didn’t ultimately testify.

Smirnov set his fee for recovering Kislin’s $21 million at $1 million, according to Kislin, who said he paid Smirnov $224,000—partially as an advance and partially as an investment in the car-battery company, incorporated in Nevada in May 2021 as Quantum Force.

After a little over a year, Quantum Force dissolved and registered by the same name in a different state—this time without Smirnov listed in the corporate records.

When a solution to Kislin’s problem in Ukraine failed to materialize, Kislin said he deduced that Smirnov had taken him for a ride.

Smirnov was meanwhile seeking similar payments from other Kislin contacts who also had dilemmas in Ukraine, while at the same time deepening ties within Ukraine’s military spy agency, HUR, according to intelligence sources in the country. On a trip to Ukraine last year, Smirnov and an HUR officer entered the country together via Moldova, according to people familiar with his immigration records.

“We know this person, and also that he had many contacts with various representatives of various intelligence services,” a HUR spokesman wrote in a message to the Journal, in reference to Smirnov.

In 2021, a Ukrainian intelligence officer introduced Smirnov to Dmitry Kryuchkov, a Ukrainian businessman who told Smirnov that his high-voltage electrical company was under threat from government officials seeking bribes, Kryuchkov said. A former parliamentarian, Kryuchkov was under investigation in Ukraine for embezzlement, which he denies.

Kryuchkov said that the spy officer described Smirnov as an FBI official who had the authority to make operational decisions in Ukraine, where he resolved strategic issues—a description that strained Kryuchkov’s credulity.

“The range of his powers was said to be almost limitless,” Kryuchkov said, “to the point that the ambassador of the United States of America to Ukraine was almost subordinate to him and carried out his instructions.”

Arriving at their meeting at Kyiv’s Hyatt Regency Hotel wearing high-fashion clothing, Smirnov said he was due to meet with the Ukrainian president and the leadership of the country’s law-enforcement agencies, according to Kryuchkov.

Smirnov said he could solve Kryuchkov’s problem if he took on an American partner and paid Smirnov $10 million, 30% of it up front, Kryuchkov said.

Kryuchkov said he declined to avail himself of Smirnov’s services. “He didn’t demonstrate even minimal competence,” Kryuchkov said. “So it seemed doubtful to me to maintain contact with him.”

Lisa Schwartz and Sara Randazzo contributed to this article.

Write to Brett Forrest at [email protected], Rebecca Ballhaus at [email protected] and Aruna Viswanatha at [email protected]