By BRIAN SLODYSKO, ERIC TUCKER and ANTHONY McCARTNEY (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Alexander Smirnov was cast by Republicans as one of the FBI’s most trusted informants, offering a “highly credible” account of brazen public corruption by Joe Biden that formed a pillar of the House impeachment investigation of the Democratic president.

Then, last month, the script changed dramatically.

Smirnov, 43, finds himself charged with lying to the FBI, accused of fabricating a tale of bribery and espionage involving then-Vice President Biden and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and he has told officials he has Russian intelligence contacts.

It’s muddied the GOP inquiry plenty.

Interviews and a review of public records by The Associated Press suggest this was not likely Smirnov’s first turn in what the government says is a cycle as a fabulist.

They offer a portrait of a businessman who operated a string of murky shell companies, ran with others who have been accused of fraud, and boasted of his own ties to the FBI. The episode highlights not only the perils of the Republicans’ reliance on unverified information in their quest to confront Biden but also the risks inherent in the FBI’s use of sometimes-unreliable informants who may have ulterior motives.

“How come in all of the universe nobody in America figured out for years that this guy is a fraud and a liar? How did this (expletive) make its way to Congress?” said Yossi Attia, a Los Angeles businessman who has interacted with Smirnov and once ran a penny stock company in which Smirnov held a substantial stake.

Republicans leading the impeachment inquiry have dismissed the fabrication allegations against Smirnov as irrelevant to their investigation and are raising doubts about the FBI’s credibility. The FBI, for its part, has never publicly called the informant’s information verified or complete.

“The trust level that I have with the FBI is zero,” Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., said in a Fox News interview this past week.

Smirnov’s lawyers did not address questions about their client’s past business dealings.

“Mr. Smirnoff is charged with making a false statement to federal officials. All of these inquiries into his prior business dealings only deflect from the important question of the accuracy of his prosecution,” attorneys David Z. Chesnoff and Richard A. Schonfeld said in a statement.

Little is known publicly about Smirnov other than allegations in the government’s case, court records, corporate financial disclosures and business filings.

A dual Israeli and U.S. citizen, Smirnov moved to the United States in 2006, traveling in Los Angeles’ Eastern European expatriate circles for more than a decade while providing information to the FBI. It wasn’t immediately clear what investigations Smirnov may have contributed to, though he worked with an FBI handler based in Seattle and the indictment suggests he provided reporting related to “ROC” — a likely reference to Russian organized crime.

A short biography included in a corporate financial document from 2011 describes Smirnov as a veteran businessman “fluent in Russian, English, Hebrew and Arabic” who once was president of a “private mineral and logistic operation, with assets in Russia.”

Even as Smirnov was being paid as a government informant, he participated in duplicitous business schemes, according to court records and interviews.

One example is his investment in an obscure penny-stock company called Eco-Trade Corp.

Such companies can yield a handsome return on a minimal investment. They are lightly regulated and often subject to financial scams and market manipulation.

In 2010, Smirnov purchased a stake in Eco-Trade valued at roughly $3 million as the company was on the verge of launching an advertising blitz that dramatically inflated its value. A crash three years later saddled investors with losses.

Eco-Trade had existed on paper for years under a variety of names and purported business aims, with control of the company changing hands repeatedly until it landed with some associates of Smirnov, according to interviews, court records and Securities and Exchange Commission filings. It was sued multiple times for securities fraud, leading to at least one settlement.

The company’s fortunes began to rise in 2010 after William Lieberman, who was later convicted in a separate penny stock fraud scheme, became president. Smirnov was appointed chairman of the company’s board, but ultimately declined to take the position, SEC filings show.

Soon the company was issuing news releases promoting new financial commitments, ongoing negotiations for oil and gas rights and the prospect of riches to be made in the Bakken oil fields of Montana.

The stock caught fire online and share prices soared to more than 70 cents, even as analysts warned about the company’s dodgy past. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority suspended trading of shares for several weeks in the spring of 2013. Then the stock’s price plummeted and the company went dormant.

It’s unclear from SEC filings how much Smirnov may have made. He has not been not accused by authorities of wrongdoing in connection with that company.

Court records indicate it wasn’t his only stock scheme.

In 2016, Tigran Sarkisyan and Hripsime Khachtryan sued Smirnov, claiming he pitched them on a company called Grand Pacaraima Gold Corp. It was only after paying him $100,000 that the two discovered the stock certificates Smirnov provided were fake, according to the complaint. When they approached him about it, Smirnov told them he was working with authorities on a fraud investigation that did not involve them and he “continued to make excuses and lie” about their investment, the complaint said.

The suit was dismissed in 2018 when Sarkisyan and Khachatryan failed to show up for a court date because they were incarcerated. The two been sentenced to prison for racketeering weeks earlier in a far-reaching case against dozens of defendants that included allegations of fraud, money laundering and murder-for-hire, court records show.

Another acquaintance, Dmitry Fomichev, sued Smirnov in 2013, claiming Smirnov failed to repay a $500,000 loan. Court records state Smirnov boasted of his connections with the FBI and said he could help Fomichev “resolve certain matters then being investigated by several agencies of the federal government” in exchange for the loan.

Several months later, Fomichev was indicted on tax and immigration charges and sentenced to probation. A Los Angeles judge ruled in Fomichev’s favor in the civil case, though, issuing a nearly $600,000 judgement against Smirnov.

Business disclosures reveal Smirnov also served as president of a company called GV Global Communications, which was founded by Avady and Galina Vaynter, a penny-stock power couple who have often found themselves at the center of litigation with investors and former business partners.

In one case settled last year, according to records, the Vaynters accepted a $250,000 judgment against them after the disappearance of 619,000 share certificates for a company they controlled, which were owed to one of their investors. The Vaynters accused a business partner of stealing the certificates from their home, though their daughter filed a police report in 2016 that stated the shares were inside a pink briefcase that was lost near a Los Angeles community college, court records show.

In an interview, Galina Vaynter acknowledged Smirnov had a role in GV Global Partners, but insisted it was only on paper and lasted for a month at most. She adamantly denied any wrongdoing in connection with past business dealings.

“All of the allegations are not true,” Vaynter said, adding, “I can state right now in front of God and any authorities — anybody — and prove myself. No one can point any finger on us.”

Court documents filed in Smirnov’s current criminal case read like a spy novel, portraying him as a jet-setting global traveler who took meetings with mysterious foreign figures and stashed $6 million across numerous accounts.

Prosecutors also have emphasized Smirnov’s preoccupation with keeping his accumulated wealth out of his own name, noting how he would withdraw large sums and use it to purchase cashier’s checks to give to his longtime girlfriend. After moving to Las Vegas in 2022, he gave her money to purchase a $1 million condo just off Elvis Presley Boulevard that is owned under her name, records show.

Smirnov told his FBI handler in 2017 that the Biden family name surfaced during a business call he had with a representative for Burisma, where Biden’s son Hunter served on the company’s board.

But after Donald Trump and his allies, including Rudy Giuliani, acting as a Trump lawyer, began to peddle unsupported corruption claims involving the Bidens and Ukraine before the 2020 presidential election, Smirnov’s story grew more elaborate.

“It’s all over the news in Russia and Ukraine” Smirnov texted his handler in May 2020. In another text at the time, he said, “I’ll try to prove it for you bro.”

He later said a Burisma official told him during the waning days of the Obama administration that Joe and Hunter Biden had each accepted $5 million bribes in exchange for a promise to alter U.S. policy in Burisma’s favor. Smirnov claimed recordings existed of a Burisma official being “forced” to pay.

Investigators determined that Smirnov had not, in fact, spoken with a Burisma official until after Trump was president and that their conversation was about a cryptocurrency venture Smirnov and an associate were promoting.

During a September 2023 conversation with investigators, Smirnov claimed the Russians likely had recordings of Hunter Biden because a hotel in Ukraine’s capital where he had stayed was “wired” and under their control — information he said was passed along to him by four high-level Russian officials.

But Hunter Biden has never traveled to Ukraine, according to the indictment against Smirnov.

Congressional Republicans repeatedly promoted the credibility of the information provided by Smirnov, whose identity they say was unknown to them. Even after Smirnov was charged, lawmakers said they were simply relying on what they claim they were told by the FBI. Comer, chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, recently asserted that FBI Director Christopher Wray had said Smirnov was “one of the most trusted and highest paid” informants in the bureau.

The FBI, however, communicated a different message in correspondence with Congress over the past year, repeatedly cautioning lawmakers that information from the source should not be treated as authenticated. In a letter to Comer last spring, the FBI congressional affairs chief wrote that “information from confidential human sources is unverified and, by definition, incomplete.”

That didn’t stop Republicans from running with it in their Biden investigation.

Members of Comer’s committee were permitted to view a redacted copy of an FBI form summarizing Smirnov’s account, a concession in the face of a Republican threat to hold Wray in contempt. A full version was later released by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

During a hearing with Wray in December, three months after the FBI said Smirnov had been reinterviewed, Grassley attested to the witness’s purported credibility. But the FBI director did not endorse any of the senator’s characterizations or discuss the ongoing investigation.

Steve Laycock, a former FBI executive assistant director of the bureau’s intelligence branch who oversaw management of its confidential human source program, said informants can be vital for investigations because they offer “placement and access” that agents might not otherwise have on their own.

But, he said, it is imperative on an informant’s handler to ask probing questions of an informant and to vet information through other sources.

“We’re in a society now of disinformation and misinformation. You’ve really got to be watching and on the watch when information comes in and validating and verifying it,” he said.

___

McCartney reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writer Amy Taxin in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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The Chicago Bears are working on a deal to hire Shane Waldron as their new offensive coordinator, multiple league sources confirmed Monday morning.

Waldron has been the Seattle Seahawks offensive coordinator for the last three seasons and helped quarterback Geno Smith to a comeback season in 2022. Before that, Waldron spent four seasons with the Los Angeles Rams as the passing game coordinator, quarterbacks coach and tight ends coach.

He is well-respected inside league circles as a young, energetic coach on the rise and a strong teacher with a creative mind and — especially important to the Bears — three seasons of play-calling experience.

NFL Network first reported the Bears are planning to hire Waldron.

The Bears reportedly interviewed at least nine candidates for the opening, including San Francisco 49ers passing game coordinator Klint Kubiak, former Baltimore Ravens offensive coordinator Greg Roman, former Carolina Panthers offensive coordinator Thomas Brown and former Arizona Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury.

Waldron would replace Luke Getsy, whom coach Matt Eberflus fired earlier this month after two seasons at the helm of the Bears offense. In the search for Getsy’s replacement, Eberflus emphasized his desire to find a new offensive coordinator who is a “great teacher.”

“That’s important because you know he has to coach the coaches to coach the position, and I think that’s the No. 1 trait of any great coach,” Eberflus said. “You have to be able to have the innovation to really look at the players you have and be able to help enhance and put those guys in position to succeed and to get explosive (plays) and to move the ball down the field.”

Waldron would take over a Bears offense that has major decisions ahead this offseason at quarterback. General manager Ryan Poles must decide whether to use the No. 1 draft pick to select a quarterback — potentially USC’s Caleb Williams — or to stick with Justin Fields, the Bears starter for the last three seasons.

Poles said he expected to ask candidates for their plans to coach different kinds of quarterbacks.

“I love it because what are you going to do for these four different types of quarterbacks,” Poles said. “I want to hear that, and I think it’s really important to hear the versatility and adaptability in their teaching, in the way they implement a plan, scheme, adjust. It actually makes it pretty dynamic in terms of the interview process.”

Waldron called plays in 2021 for a Seahawks offense piloted by Russell Wilson. In 2022, after Wilson was traded to the Denver Broncos, the Seahawks pivoted to Smith and won nine games while earning a wild-card berth.

Smith, in his 10th NFL season, was honored as the league’s Comeback Player of the Year after throwing for 4,282 yards and 30 touchdowns. Both marks would be single-season franchise records for the Bears.

This season the Seahawks ranked 21st in total offense (322.9 yards per game) and 14th in passing (230 ypg). They averaged 21.4 points, ranked 17th. That was down from 2022, when they averaged 351.5 yards (13th) and 23.9 points (ninth).

The Seahawks staff is looking for new jobs after the organization and coach Pete Carroll parted ways after a 14-year union.

In addition to working closely with Wilson and Smith, Waldron worked with quarterback Jared Goff for three seasons with the Rams.

Waldron served as an offensive assistant with the New England Patriots (2008-09) and Washington (2016) and worked in operations with the Patriots early in his career. He also has coached in college, high school and the UFL.

Waldron and the Bears must hire assistants to coach the quarterbacks, wide receivers and running backs after the team dismissed Andrew Janocko, Tyke Tolbert and Omar Young earlier this month. Offensive line coach Chris Morgan and tight ends coach Jim Dray remain on the staff.

The Bears also are seeking a defensive coordinator, and NFL Network reported Monday they will interview Tennessee Titans defensive pass game coordinator Chris Harris. Harris played safety in the NFL for eight seasons, including two stints with the Bears, and started for the 2006 Bears team that went to the Super Bowl.

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Walleyes, the favorite game species in many Midwest lakes and Minnesota’s official state fish, are struggling to spawn successfully due to warming springs and highly variable ice-out dates, creating more bust years and fewer boom years for many walleye populations.

That was the finding of a University of Wisconsin study published this week in the journal Limnology and Oceanography Letters.

The problem stems from walleye being creatures of habits that developed over millennia and which can’t keep up with changing climatic conditions, especially increasingly earlier and variable ice-out dates.

The timing of walleye spawning has historically been tied to the thawing of frozen lakes each spring, said Martha Barta, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of the study.

Fisheries biologists and volunteers survey walleye size during a spawning run on the St. Louis River in Minnesota in 2019. A new study has found that the generally earlier but highly variable ice-out dates that have occurred in recent decades are hurting walleye spawning success in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan waters. (Steve Kuchera / Duluth News Tribune)

Within a few days of ice-out, walleyes begin laying and fertilizing eggs. That timing, in a normal year, sets tiny walleye fry up for success once they hatch. But Barta said the study found that “climate change is interrupting the historical pairing between ice-off and walleye spawning, and that threatens the persistence of walleye populations across the Upper Midwest.”

“We’ve known for several years that many walleye populations are not doing well. Now, this adds the phenology piece where we found that either a very early ice-out or very late ice-out in the spring, we didn’t see good walleye classes in the fall,’’ Zach Feiner, a co-author of the study and a fisheries biologist for both the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, told the News Tribune. “The more the ice-out varied from a normal year, the worse the walleye class was that year.”

How much variability is occurring? In 2012, many Northland lakes had their earliest ice-out date ever. In 2013, many of the same lakes saw their latest ice-out dates on record. And while ice-out dates have always shifted by a week or so early or late, the variability now is running four to six weeks from year to year, all while the long-term trend is earlier.

Barta and her team used data from walleye surveys from state natural resource departments and the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, as well as spring harvest counts from several Ojibwe tribal resource agencies, to track the fate of walleye populations on 194 lakes across Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.

The researchers also had fall fish survey data from 122 of the lakes that showed how many walleye from that year were still around.

That data revealed “mismatches” in almost every lake. While the study found walleyes were slightly shifting their spawn earlier, the ice-off dates on Midwestern lakes were shifting at a rate three times faster than walleye spawning dates.

And that has the system mixed up.

“In an average ice-off year, you have this nice progression of events,” Feiner noted. “The ice goes off, you get light and warmer water that creates a bloom of small plant life called phytoplankton and then tiny animals called zooplankton emerge and eat the phytoplankton and, usually, the walleye spawning is timed for them to hatch when zooplankton are around in high abundance and can serve as fish food for the baby walleye.”

Now, lakes are on average thawing earlier, but the number of winters where lakes thaw late is also increasing. What’s being lost are the normal, “average” years when lakes thaw right about when they used to.

The problem with the increasing number of early and late ice-outs, Feiner said, is that the “progression of events is totally out of sync.” In an early ice-off year, for example, phytoplankton bloom early and begin to die back as zooplankton get going, which means there’s less food for zooplankton and their numbers are so low that “when the fish hatch, there aren’t enough zooplankton around and (newly hatched) walleye don’t have enough food to survive.”

A new study by the University of Wisconsin has found that walleyes don’t spawn well, producing poor year classes, when the ice-out date on a lake is highly variable from average. (John Myers / Duluth News Tribune)

There’s a similar dynamic in late ice-off years. This mix-up impacts the survival of newly hatched walleye through their first spring and summer of life, called recruitment. Losing one year of spawning success isn’t doomsday for overall walleye populations if the next year’s spawning success is good. But the increasing variability of spring thaws is “increasing the frequency of bust years, and we’re not seeing many or any boom years for a lot of walleye populations,” Feiner said.

While this is obviously bad news for walleye and the people who depend on them, the study underscores the need to identify and protect lakes that can offer refuge in bad years.

There is a need now to “find places where, through management of things we can control — like land use, fish harvest and invasive species — we can buffer or boost their resiliency to be able to handle stuff we can’t control — like climate change,” Feiner says. If fisheries managers can identify lakes where walleye populations are doing relatively well, they can at least try to keep conditions optimal so that the fish can take advantage during the increasingly rare years when ice-off and their spring spawn do line up.

Scientists involved in the study say they hope to move on to determine the impact of changing climate on spawning by several other species, including other spring spawners like perch, bass and muskie, but also fall spawning fish like lake trout that depend on ice for their eggs to over-winter.

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Bears mascot delights students in Tinley Park

A special friend stopped by last week at the Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy School for Exceptional Children in Tinley Park to help everyone shake off the winter blues.

Staley Da Bear, the official team mascot for the Chicago Bears, danced his way through a crowd of cheering students and staff, exchanging high fives with a multitude of raised hands.

“You ready to have a dance party?” his handler asked above the roar. “Let’s go!”

School administrators invited Staley to stop by the school to help motivate students as they settle into the second half of the school year.

About 70 students attend the therapeutic day school, including students from Thornton Township District 205, Thornton Fractional District 215, Plainfield Community Consolidated School District 202, Crete Monee District 201-U, Consolidated High School District 230 and Flossmoor District 161.

Oak Lawn library, Tinley book store reunite for RomCon

Fans of romantic literature will be swooning Feb. 17 as the Oak Lawn Public Library presents RomCon, an afternoon event dedicated to the genre. Independent bookstore Love’s Sweet Arrow, in Tinley Park, is teaming up with librarians to produce the free mini-convention featuring eight romance authors along with book signing, author panels, raffles, trivia and book sales.

Love’s Sweet Arrow owner Rosanne Backlin recruited a diverse group of authors to visit the library, including Danielle Jackson, Kelly Farmer, Tinia Montford, Tamara Jerée, Rien Gray, Hanna Earnest and Sara Fujimura. Author Olivia Dade will be doing a virtual visit to the event.

Dade, who lives in Sweden, is the author of Avon bestsellers “Ship Wrecked” (2022) and “Spoiler Alert” (2020) and she has a new novel coming out, “At First Spite” in 2024. Bettcher says,

“It’s a really big deal for us to have her participate in RomCon,” said fiction librarian Emily Bettcher.

Oak Lawn’s RomCon is from 1 to 4:15 p.m. Feb. 17 from 1-4:15 p.m. Register in advance for updates and a special treat on the day, at 708-422-4990 or cal.olpl.org/event/10993047.

Hidden Oaks Nature Center to close for most of 2024

The Forest Preserves of Will County’s Hidden Oaks Nature Center, 419 Trout Farm Road, Bolingbrook is about to be transformed, but the process will require the facility to be closed for most of the year starting Feb. 19.

FPD officials said Hidden Oaks Preserve also will close on occasion for outdoor renovations during the year, as necessary, but the renovations will not affect Hidden Lakes Trout Farm, which is in the northern part of the preserve.

The interior and exterior work at Hidden Oaks Nature Center is designed to convert the former Bolingbrook Park District site, which was purchased by the Forest Preserve in February 2022, into a nature center tailored to Forest Preserve-type exhibits and activities.

Officials said the renovation will provide new design features throughout the first floor and a new permanent live animal tank for the nature center’s resident turtles, and an elaborate indoor bird-watching lookout deck will be installed.

Oak Forest High School earns diversity award

Oak Forest High School has earned the College Board AP Computer Science Female Diversity Award for achieving high female representation in AP Computer Science A. Schools honored with the AP Computer Science Female Diversity Award have expanded girls’ access in AP computer science courses, according to a news release from the School District 228.

Oak Forest High School was one of 225 institutions in the country recognized in the category.

“We are so proud of the unique perspective our female students bring to the fields of Math and Science,” said Oak Forest principal Jane Dempsey. “This is a recognition of our belief that anyone can succeed in any field. Our graduates are a testament to the impact created by opening doors to women.”

Oak Forest Raiders chosen to lead Fleadh

The Oak Forest Raiders instructional tackle football and cheerleading program for boys and girls ages 5 to 14, which has been operating in the area for more than 50 years, was chosen as grand marshals for the 15th anniversary edition of the Oak Forest Fleadh.

Players, families and coaches will lead the parade, which steps off at 11 a.m. March 2 at 151st and Central Avenue and heads to the Oak Forest Park District. The parade will be preceded at 8:30 a.m. by the CNB Oak Forest Fleadh 5K race, which starts and finishes at 155th Street and Betty Anne Lane. More than 500 people are expected to participate. Activities also are planned before and after the race at Fire Station 1, 5620 Jame Drive. Street closures are planned for the race and for the parade. More information is at www.oak‐forest.org.

Visitor’s Bureau video highlights Southland attractions

The Chicago Southland Convention & Visitors Bureau has launched its interactive destination video for visitors’ vacation and residents’ staycation ideas.

The video displays footage of Chicago Southland amenities with their corresponding logo and website link synced on the side of the screen. Users can also scroll through the vertical list of all amenities in descending order of appearance.

“This interactive video helps our tourists and residents peruse and visit many of Chicago Southland attractions in one source,” said Jim Garrett, president/CEO of the bureau. “The video includes nature centers, art galleries, restaurants, breweries, museums, sports facilities, golf courses, and performing arts centers to name a few.”

The CSCVB interactive video is available at www.visitchicagosouthland.com/#clicktivated.