But big Biden-corruption questions remain.
But big Biden-corruption questions remain.
T he FBI has provided the entire House Oversight Committee with access to a reliable informant’s report implicating now-president Joe Biden in a bribery scheme. Director Christopher Wray had been resisting full-committee disclosure, citing concerns about informant confidentiality and the imperilment of an ongoing investigation. (See here, here, here, and here.)
The bureau’s eleventh-hour concession staves off a likely contempt-of-Congress citation of Wray. Chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) had scheduled the presentation of a contempt citation for the committee’s consideration to begin at nine o’clock this morning. That was canceled last night when Wray relented.
The document is a form FD-1023, a form the FBI uses to record interviews with informants — in bureau parlance, confidential human sources (CHSs). The unidentified informant is said to be reliable, such that the FBI has paid the informant for information for about ten years.
To be clear, the basis for implicating Biden in a bribery scheme is not the CHS’s own interactions with Biden (there is no indication that the source has had contact with Biden). Rather, the CHS has related to the FBI an unidentified foreign person’s claim to have participated with Biden in a bribery scheme. The FD-1023 is dated June 30, 2020 (at which time Biden was running for president) but is said to relate to the period of time when he served as vice president in the Obama administration.
Comer has issued this statement:
After weeks of refusing to even admit the FD-1023 record exists, the FBI has caved and is now allowing all members of the Oversight and Accountability Committee to review this unclassified record that memorializes a confidential human source’s conversations with a foreign national who claimed to have bribed then-Vice President Joe Biden. Americans have lost trust in the FBI’s ability to enforce the law impartially and demand answers, transparency, and accountability. Allowing all Oversight Committee members to review this record is an important step toward conducting oversight of the FBI and holding it accountable to the American people.
Let’s be clear: the allegations contained within this record are not closed as the White House and Democrats would have the American people believe. Former Attorney General Barr confirmed this information was sent to the U.S. Attorney in Delaware for further investigation and the FBI has confirmed it is being used in an ongoing investigation. We also know the confidential human source who provided this information is highly credible and trusted, has worked with the FBI for over a decade, and has been paid six figures.
The allegations contained within this record track closely with the Oversight Committee’s investigation of the Biden family’s influence peddling schemes. The Oversight Committee will continue to follow the facts and ensure accountability for the American people.
It is not clear from Comer’s statement that the full committee will be given a copy of the document, as opposed to being able to review it under the FBI’s supervision. Today, a number of committee members reviewed the document in a location usually reserved for classified information. The document is said to be unclassified. The members were not given a copy of the document.
On Monday, in an earlier effort to stave off contempt proceedings, Wray had FBI agents bring the document to Capitol Hill so that it could be reviewed by Comer and the committee’s ranking member, Jamie Raskin (D., Md.).
Comer’s reference, in his statement, to former attorney general Bill Barr was meant to refute claims made by Raskin on Monday that, in the briefing, the FBI had represented that the allegations against Biden had been “surfaced” by Rudy Giuliani (then, Trump’s personal attorney). According to Raskin’s version of the FBI’s briefing, upon being apprised of the information in 2020, Barr directed that it be reviewed by the then–U.S. attorney for Pittsburgh, Scott Brady (a Trump appointee), who, after conducting a very preliminary inquiry, determined that there was nothing to the bribery allegation, and that the matter should thus be closed without a full-blown investigation.
Yesterday, as the Federalist’s Margot Cleveland reported, Barr said of Raskin’s assertions that “it’s not true,” and that the investigation “wasn’t closed down.” Barr says the information was instead transmitted to Delaware for further investigation. Then, as now, the Delaware U.S. attorney, David Weiss, was running the investigation of Hunter Biden and, it appears, of the Biden family’s receipt of millions of dollars from foreign sources.
The FBI has also told Comer that the investigation to which the FD-1023 is pertinent is ongoing — further undercutting Raskin’s claim that it was closed three years ago because of insufficient evidence.
Similarly suspicious is Raskin’s transparent attempt to tie the informant’s information to Giuliani, whom Democrats have labored to discredit. That effort has included Democrats’ conspiring with the FBI and the intelligence community to portray Giuliani’s crusade to collect corruption evidence against Biden (particularly in Ukraine) as “Russian disinformation.”
In 2020, when Republican senators Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Ron Johnson (Wis.) were gathering evidence of millions of dollars in foreign payments to the Biden family (not just from Ukraine but also from China, Russia, and other suspicious sources), congressional Democrats enlisted help from two senior FBI officials — Timothy Thibault, the former assistant special agent in charge (ASAC) of the bureau’s Washington field office (who was pushed into early retirement after his active, anti-Republican social-media account came to light), and Brian Auten, a senior intelligence analyst (who was implicated in the Steele dossier portion of the Russiagate fiasco). They helped Democrats discredit the financial evidence (much of it based on easily corroborated bank transactions) as Russian disinformation. To repeat what I’ve previously detailed:
After the bureau received the letters from the top Democrats, Auten worked up an intelligence “assessment” that concluded derogatory Biden evidence was disinformation. Grassley says unidentified FBI whistleblowers have recounted that agents working the Biden investigation were interviewed in connection with Auten’s assessment and pushed back against their headquarters’ claims of disinformation risk, arguing that their reporting either had been verified or could be verified using ordinary investigative techniques (e.g., search warrants). Nevertheless, FBI headquarters purported to conclude that this derogatory Biden data was disinformation. To cover their tracks, Grassley says that in September 2020, FBI headquarters officials “placed their findings with respect to whether reporting was disinformation in a restricted access sub-file reviewable only by particular agents.”
Meantime, in August 2020, the FBI invited members of Congress to be briefed on possible foreign interference in the election campaign. Grassley says the briefing he and Johnson received, which was “unsolicited and unnecessary,” related to the Biden investigation that the Auten assessment sought to discredit, over the dissent of case investigators. Parts of the Biden investigation, Grassley explains, were leaked to the media in order to paint the evidence gathered “in a false light.” On August 13, 2020, for example, the Associated Press published a report suggesting a government “intelligence assessment” raised the question of whether Senator Johnson’s effort to investigate Biden family dealings with Ukraine, among other foreign governments, was “mimicking” Russian efforts to spread disinformation and “amplifying its propaganda.”
Grassley goes on to note that “in October 2020, an avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was ordered closed at the direction of ASAC Thibault.” Moreover, not content with merely closing this part of the case “without providing a valid reason as required by FBI guidelines,” Thibault also “attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future,” according to the senator.
Grassley does not further describe this “avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting.” We do know, however, that October 2020 — the dwindling weeks right before Election Day — is when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story. And how’s this for a coincidence: At the same time that Thibault was shutting down part of the Biden investigation, an array of 51 former U.S. national-security officials released their “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails.” It’s a remarkably deceptive piece of, well, disinformation, strongly suggesting that the Hunter laptop contents were Russian disinformation — but, when read closely, the officials admit that they are merely “suspicious” and actually have no basis in solid fact to conclude that the contents were disinformation. Naturally, the 2020 Biden campaign happily peddled this government-approved Russian disinformation storyline — just as the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign had happily peddled the bureau-promoted narrative that Trump had established a communications back channel with the Kremlin.
We now know, based in part on investigations under way by the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, that the infamous letter from the 51 former national-security officials was catalyzed by the Biden 2020 campaign — specifically by now-secretary of state Antony Blinken. He stirred former acting CIA director Michael Morrell into action. Morrell drafted the letter and recruited the signatories. The objective was to give Biden ammunition when, as anticipated, Trump tried to use the laptop reporting against Biden in the final 2020 presidential debate (a few days after the letter was published). On cue, Biden used the letter to portray his son’s laptop data as Russian disinformation — even though Biden had to know that the laptop was Hunter’s, that its records of Biden-family business dealings in which he is implicated were authentic, and that Russia had nothing to do with it.
It thus appears that Raskin is resorting to the hidebound tactic of trying to tie Biden-corruption evidence to Giuliani and dismiss it as likely Russian disinformation. In point of fact, it is not at all clear that the information from a longtime confidential human source — who was providing the FBI with reliable information for years prior to Giuliani’s efforts on Trump’s behalf — is related to or dependent on Giuliani.
This leads to the next critical questions: What did the FBI and U.S. attorney Weiss do to investigate the source’s information about Biden? And what, if anything, is going on in the supposedly active investigation of Biden-family influence-peddling?
As described above, we have already learned that senior FBI officials undertook efforts to bury the Biden-corruption investigation. The bureau also schemed to suppress derogatory information about Biden on social media by suggesting that its dissemination could be a Russian attempt to interfere in the 2020 election. Meantime, the supposedly ongoing investigation of the Bidens in Delaware appears moribund — it has gone on for years with no charges filed (even though some of the allegations against Hunter Biden are straightforward and supported by strong evidence). Not surprisingly, whistle-blower agents have told Congress that, because of the Bidens’ political influence, they have been prevented from taking rudimentary investigative steps that they would take in any normal investigation.
For now, the House Oversight Committee will finally get access to the information it subpoenaed from Wray a month ago, and the director will not be held in contempt. Critical questions, however, still await answers.