Alexander Smirnov, ex-FBI informant charged with lying about Biden family business, faces new tax charges
Alexander Smirnov, center, a confidential human source with the FBI, leaves the Lloyd George U.S. Courthouse, on Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2024, in Las Vegas. Smirnov is accused of falsely stating that executives with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden $5 million each in 2015 or 2016. (Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — The former FBI informant charged by special counsel David Weiss for allegedly lying about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings is facing a separate new indictment on tax-related charges, court records show.
Alexander Smirnov is alleged to have evaded paying taxes on more than $2 million in income he received from multiple sources between 2020 and 2022, according to an indictment unsealed Tuesday in California federal court.
Smirnov was set to face trial beginning next week in Los Angeles on charges he concocted “fabrications” about President Biden and his son accepting $5 million in bribes from the Ukraine energy company Burisma, which Republicans repeatedly sought to seize on in their yearslong effort to impeach the president. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
That trial has since been pushed to January by the federal judge overseeing Smirnov’s case.
The newly unsealed indictment paints Smirnov as living a lavish lifestyle during the years he was allegedly also peddling lies to his FBI handler about the Biden family — detailing expenditures that include a $1.4 million Las Vegas condominium, a Bentley he allegedly leased for over $122,000, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of clothes, jewelry and accessories he allegedly purchased for himself and his domestic partner.
Despite receiving more than $2 million in revenue streams, prosecutors say that on a credit card application in June of 2022 he listed only $60,000 in total annual income and $250,000 in gross business income.
The indictment further alleges that when Smirnov sought the assistance of a professional tax return preparer who refused to sign his returns, Smirnov told the preparer that they “should not inquire about how he earned his income,” and further instructed them to delete any emails or messages sent by Smirnov.
“Mr. Smirnov intends to vigorously fight these allegations with the same intensity as he has fought the original indictment,” Smirnov’s attorneys, David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, said in a statement.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Smirnov had not yet entered a plea to the newly filed indictment, according to court records.
Smirnov has remained detained since his arrest in February, on the belief that he poses a flight risk due to his extensive overseas contacts that allegedly include known senior intelligence agents in Russia.
In this photo released by the Raleigh Police Department, a thank-you present of pineapple-shaped cookies delivered to the Wake County Board of Elections is shown that prompted a hazmat response on Oct. 29, 2024, after election workers raised concerns about a suspicious package mailed from Hawaii. Image via Raleigh Police Department
( Raleigh, N.C. ) — No good deed goes unpunished for election workers in North Carolina.
A thank-you present of pineapple-shaped cookies delivered to the Wake County Board of Elections prompted a hazmat response on Tuesday after election workers raised concerns about a suspicious package mailed from Hawaii.
“We are just on high alert with these things automatically,” Wake County elections specialist Danner McCulloh told ABC News, who cited recent incidents of suspicious packages containing powder sent to election offices across the country.
The Raleigh Police and Fire Departments quickly responded to the incident — which was treated as a hazmat situation — and bomb technicians X-rayed the package, according to Lt. Jason Borneo of the Raleigh Police Department.
After the package was deemed to not be a threat, officials opened the package to learn it was full of pineapple-shaped cookies from the Honolulu Cookie Company. The package, which was mailed from a Hawaii address, also included a handwritten thank-you note, according to a Raleigh Fire Department spokesperson.
The operations at Wake County Board of Elections were not impacted during the incident, a county spokesperson said. According to McCulloh, a person who heard a radio story about Wake County decided to send the cookies unannounced to thank election workers.
“It was a kind gesture,” McCulloh said, though he recommended against others sending cookies to his office.
(LOUISVILLE, KY) — Opening statements are set to begin Monday in the federal retrial of Brett Hankison, a former Louisville police officer accused of violating the civil rights of Breonna Taylor, her boyfriend and their neighbors in 2020, when Taylor was shot and killed in a botched police raid.
The initial trial ended in a mistrial last year when the jury reached an impasse because they were not able to reach a unanimous decision.
Hankison was charged in a two-count indictment in August 2022 for deprivation of rights under color of law, both of which are civil rights offenses. According to court documents, he was charged with willfully depriving Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, of their constitutional right to be free from unreasonable seizures, which includes the right to be free from a police officer’s use of unreasonable force during a seizure.
According to court transcripts, he was also charged with willfully depriving Taylor’s three neighbors of their right to be free from the deprivation of liberty without due process of law, which includes the right to be free from a police officer’s use of unjustified force that shocks the conscience.
He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The trial marks the third trial for Hankison, following the initial mistrial as well as a state trial in 2022, in which he was acquitted of multiple wanton endangerment charges.
U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Jennings last week granted the prosecution’s motion to exclude references to Hankison’s prior court proceedings in the retrial, according to WHAS, the ABC affiliate in Louisville covering the case in the courtroom.
The judge denied the prosecution’s request to introduce evidence of his prior alleged wrongdoing while employed as a Louisville police officer, according to WHAS.
Hankison was one of three officers involved in the raid.
The plainclothes officers were serving a warrant searching for Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, who they alleged was dealing drugs. He was not at the residence, but her current boyfriend, Walker, thought someone was breaking into the home and fired one shot from a 9 mm pistol at the officers.
The three officers opened fire, shooting 32 bullets into the apartment, several of which struck Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician who was in bed at the time.
Hankison fired 10 rounds, none of which hit anyone. He was fired for violating department procedure when he “wantonly and blindly” fired into the apartment. Several of the rounds entered a neighboring apartment where a man, child and pregnant woman were living, according to prosecutors. The neighbors — Cody Etherton, Chelsey Napper, and her son, Zayden — were all sleeping at the time of the shooting, prosecutors said.
The other two officers involved in the raid, Myles Cosgrove and Jonathan Mattingly, were not charged in the incident. Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron called Taylor’s death a “tragedy” but said the two officers were justified in their use of force after having been fired upon by Walker.
(NEW YORK) — The co-founder and former CEO of OceanGate said the company originally never planned to build its own submersibles while testifying during a hearing on the deadly implosion of its Titan sub.
Guillermo Sohnlein co-founded OceanGate in 2009 with Stockton Rush, who was one of the five people killed in a catastrophic implosion while on a deep-sea voyage to see the Titanic wreckage in June 2023. He left the company in 2013, years before OceanGate began conducting dives to the Titanic with the Titan, an experimental, unclassified vessel.
While testifying on Monday during the U.S. Coast Guard’s two-week hearing on the implosion, Sohnlein said when they founded the company, “developing our own subs was not in the original plans.”
He said their vision was to acquire a fleet of deep-diving submersibles that could carry five people up to 6,000 meters that would be available for charter. They didn’t want the subs to require a dedicated mothership or support ship so that they could easily go anywhere in the world and operate off any ship.
He said most active commercial submersibles dive relatively shallow — less than 1,000 meters — limiting how much of the ocean can be explored.
“We wanted to change that,” Sohnlein said. “We wanted to give humanity greater access to the ocean — and specifically the deep ocean, anything deeper than 1,000 meters.”
OceanGate pivots to building own submersible using carbon fiber
Sohnlein said they eventually realized they would need to build their own submersible to achieve that business model.
“If you think about our business requirements of being able to carry five people 6,000 meters without a dedicated mothership deployable anywhere in the world — none of the sub builders could really do that,” he said. “Then, if you did factor in the cost, yeah, it was going to be ridiculously expensive.”
Sohnlein said Rush “convinced ourselves that it’d be possible to build a sub that would meet all of our business requirements.”
Sohnlein said they started looking at carbon fiber as a potential alternative for a pressure hull.
“That’s not a novel idea,” he said. “It wasn’t innovative, it was just something that we started looking at while I was still there.”
Roy Thomas — an engineer with the American Bureau of Shipping, which classifies submersibles — testified during the hearing on Monday that under ABS underwater rules, carbon fiber pressure hulls are “not acceptable materials for submersibles.”
“They have very low resistance to impact loads, and the hull is susceptible to deformation under applied external loading,” he said.
Rush became CEO of OceanGate in 2013, as the company shifted to developing its own submersibles.
“We were transitioning from an operations phase to an engineering phase, and that was really his strength and not mine,” Sohnlein said of Rush. “It made sense for him to take the reins of the company.”
Sohnlein said he made the “difficult decision” to leave the company at that point because there wasn’t going to be much for him to do in terms of operations.
Sohnlein said he still retains approximately 500,000 common shares in OceanGate but has “basically resigned myself to the fact that I’m probably never going to see anything out of that equity stake.”
OceanGate suspended all exploration and commercial operations after the deadly implosion.
OceanGate co-founder never went on Titan
Sohnlein said he was offered “many times” to go on dives on the Titan, though he never did.
“As a shareholder, I didn’t want to take up room in the sub. I wanted to make that available for the people that the dive was intended for,” he said, people for whom seeing the Titanic was their “life dream.”
He also said he just wasn’t interested in going to the Titanic.
“Neither Stockton nor I were ever driven by tourism,” he said. “We were never motivated by going somewhere that people had already been before. The reason we got into this was because we both wanted to explore. We wanted to not only explore ourselves, but create the technologies that would allow us to explore the ocean.”
“So going to see a shipwreck that had already been well-documented, and that a bunch of people had already gone to, that didn’t excite me. It didn’t excite Stockton,” he continued.
Sohnlein reflected on a conversation when Rush told him he did want to conduct the first test dive of Titan down to 4,000 meters solo. He said Rush told him, “I don’t want anybody else in the sub. If anything happens, I want it to only impact me. It’s my design. I believe in it. I trust it. I don’t want to risk anybody else, and I’m going to go by myself.”
In addition to Rush, those killed in the Titan implosion included French explorer Paul Henri Nargeolet, British businessman Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman.
The hearing into the implosion is scheduled to run through Friday.
In his closing remarks, Sohnlein said he doesn’t know what happened but he hopes they find “valuable lessons learned.”
“This was not supposed to happen,” he said. “This shouldn’t have happened, five people should not have lost their lives.”
He also said he hopes others are inspired by his and Rush’s mission.
“This can’t be the end of deep ocean exploration. This can’t be the end of deep-diving submersibles, and I don’t believe that it will be,” he said. “But I hope that someday, in the near future, we’ll look back on this time as a major turning point in human history — when the global, general public finally took an active interest in all of our efforts, everything that all of us do to explore the deep oceans, to study them and to preserve them.”
