President Biden on Thursday brushed off allegations that he was involved in a bribery scheme involving a foreign national when he served as vice president.
“Where’s the money? I’m joking. It’s a bunch of malarkey,” he said when a New York Post reporter shouted a question about an FBI whistleblower document that details the allegations.
Biden’s response came on the same day that House Oversight Republicans were allowed to view the document in a secure room on Capitol Hill. The lawmakers previously threatened to hold FBI director Christopher Wray in contempt for refusing to turn over the record.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), a member of the House Oversight Committee, said Thursday that the information in the whistleblower document “implicates Joe Biden in a pay-to-play scheme bribery scheme to get a prosecutor fired that was investigating Burisma where Hunter Biden sat on the board.”
Greene said the FBI informant is “extremely credible.” Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R., Fla.,) said that Biden is “100 percent guilty” of bribery.
The committee asked the FBI to turn over the document after Senator Chuck Grassley’s office was made aware of the FBI-generated whistleblower form. The FD-1023 form allegedly outlines a scheme involving the exchange of money for policy decisions and is said to have been “created or modified” on June 30, 2020.
“It has been alleged that the document includes a precise description of how the alleged criminal scheme was employed as well as its purpose,” Grassley and Comer previously wrote in a letter to Wray and attorney general Merrick Garland. “Based on the alleged specificity within the document, it would appear that the DOJ and the FBI have enough information to determine the truth and accuracy of the information contained within it.”
Grassley and Comer wrote that it “remains unclear what steps, if any, were taken to investigate the matter.”
“The significant public interest in assessing the FBI’s response to this information, as well as growing concern about the DOJ and the FBI’s track record of allowing political bias to infect their decision-making process, necessitate exacting congressional oversight,” the letter adds.
A source told the New York Post the alleged bribery scheme is not believed to involve China. The outlet notes Ukrainian officials held a press conference in June 2020 to display $5 million in cash offered to end an investigation into natural gas company Burisma’s founder Mykola Zlochevsky. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, served on the company’s board from 2014 to 2019 for a salary of up to $1 million per year.
The FBI refused to offer up the document on May 10, noting that tips are unverified and saying it had concerns about informant confidentiality.
“Releasing confidential source information could potentially jeopardize investigations and put lives at risk,” the FBI previously told the New York Post. “The FBI remains committed to cooperating with Congress’s oversight requests on this matter and others as we always have.”
Comer said earlier this week that FBI officials had confirmed during a briefing in a secure SCIF on Capitol Hill on Monday that the whistleblower document “has not been disproven and is currently being used in an ongoing investigation by a confidential human source who provided information about the then vice president being involved in a criminal bribery scheme is a trusted, highly credible informant who has been used by the FBI for over ten years and has been paid over 6 figures.”
“Given the severity and complexity of the allegations contained within this record, Congress must investigate further,” Comer added earlier this week. “The investigation is not dead. This is only the beginning.”
Ranking Democrat Jamie Raskin (D., Md.), who also attended the briefing, said the FBI did not have enough information to escalate its investigation into Biden based on the whistleblower’s account.
“What we’re talking about here is a confidential human source reporting a conversation with someone else. So we’re talking about is secondhand hearsay. And they did whatever investigative due diligence was called for in that assessment period, and they found no reason to escalate it from an assessment to a so-called preliminary investigation,” Raskin said.
On Wednesday, the White House accused Comer of employing a “repetitive tactic of laundering thin innuendo.”