The Justice Department, in an abrupt reversal, asked a federal judge late Thursday to release a former F.B.I. informant from prison pending appeal of his conviction on charges that he peddled misleading claims seized on by Trump allies to falsely accuse the Biden family of taking bribes.
A federal prosecutor in California filed the request, under orders from senior Justice Department officials in Washington, according to officials familiar with the situation. It is the latest in a series of moves to scrap or soften punishments against President Trump’s supporters, including members of the violent mob that attacked the Capitol.
The former informant, Alexander Smirnov, a shadowy fixer whose debunked claims were once promoted by the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, agreed in December to a six-year sentence. He admitted that he had fabricated a claim that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter were each paid a $5 million bribe by a Ukrainian oligarch.
The Smirnov case was an offshoot of the federal investigation into Hunter Biden, and the plea deal was negotiated by David C. Weiss, the special counsel leading the inquiry, who stepped down in January. The prosecutors who conducted the investigation officially withdrew from the case on the day the motion was filed, court documents showed.
Under the Biden administration, the Justice Department had argued against the release of Mr. Smirnov, who was arrested at the Las Vegas airport after returning to the United States from overseas.
In May 2024, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit backed the department in rejecting Mr. Smirnov’s request to be released from pretrial custody, deeming him a flight risk with connections overseas who might help him evade capture.
In an about-face late Thursday, the government joined Mr. Smirnov’s defense team to ask Judge Otis D. Wright II of the Central District of California that he be released and confined to Nevada with permission to travel to San Francisco to consult a doctor about a severe eye condition.
A hearing has not yet been scheduled. It is possible the judge could reject the motion.
A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mr. Smirnov’s lawyer, David Chesnoff, had no comment.
In its filing, the government said that “clear and convincing evidence for defendant’s nonviolent offenses of conviction shows that defendant is not likely to flee or pose a danger to the safety of any other person.” Last year, agents searching Mr. Smirnov’s luxury apartment found a small arsenal of firearms. As a felon, he is not entitled to keep them.
Since taking office, the department’s leaders have decimated its anti-corruption units and taken actions that will benefit Mr. Trump, including asking for the dismissal of corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York.
The indictment of Mr. Smirnov was a significant embarrassment to congressional Republicans who embraced his bogus claims as evidence that the former president was the head of a “crime family.” It was the type of assertion he included in his official reports to a bureau handler.
Mr. Patel was a particularly enthusiastic promoter of the allegations and has never publicly distanced himself from Mr. Smirnov’s story.
After F.B.I. agents had debriefed Mr. Smirnov and decided his account of the bribery allegations was not credible, Mr. Patel joined Republicans in accusing the bureau, which he now leads, of covering up genuine allegations of wrongdoing by the Biden family.
“There is new reporting that the F.B.I. did actually verify some of the substantiated claims in the document,” Mr. Patel said in one appearance on Fox News at the time. In another, he referred to a statement by an unnamed informant — Mr. Smirnov — “on bribery” and accused senior law enforcement officials of lying to Congress.
For more than a decade, Mr. Smirnov played a double game. He gave the F.B.I. tantalizing and, at times, valuable intelligence about a rogues’ gallery of oligarchs and public officials while offering himself as a consultant, with a fuzzy skill set, to some of the same people he was keeping tabs on.
But his charm, confidence and daring finally caught up with him in 2020 when he told his F.B.I. handler what prosecutors say was a brazen lie — that the oligarch owner of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had arranged to pay $5 million bribes to both President Biden and his son.
Mr. Smirnov falsely claimed that in 2015 or 2016, Hunter Biden promised to protect the company “through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” Mr. Weiss wrote in a criminal complaint.
The claim was easily disproved, prosecutors said. Mr. Smirnov was in contact with Burisma executives only in 2017, after Mr. Biden left the vice presidency and when he “had no ability to influence U.S. policy.”
Mr. Smirnov also told F.B.I. investigators that he had seen footage of Hunter Biden entering a hotel in Kyiv, Ukraine, that was “wired” by the Russians, suggesting that Russia may have recorded phone calls he made from the hotel, according to the indictment.
But Mr. Biden had never been to Ukraine, let alone that hotel, prosecutors wrote.
Under the terms of Mr. Smirnov’s deal, he agreed to plead guilty to creating a false record in a federal investigation, obstructing justice and failing to pay taxes and penalties on $2.1 million in income for 2020 through 2022.
He is also required to pay $675,502 in restitution, according to a court filing at the time.
