Multiple whistleblowers have come forward to allege the FBI did not follow its own procedures when it came to the handling of evidence in the Hunter Biden investigation, Republican Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley said.
They claimed that derogatory evidence involving President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden was incorrectly labeled as disinformation and also claimed the information could easily be verified. In some cases, evidence allegedly was placed into highly restricted systems to obstruct other FBI investigators from reviewing the evidence.
“For going on five years now, Republicans in Congress have been lobbing unfounded, unproven, politically motivated attacks against the President and his family without offering evidence for their claims or evidence of decisions influenced by anything other than U.S. interests,” White House spokesman Ian Sams told CBS News.
Congressional Republicans have been embroiled in a struggle with the FBI over a subpoena to obtain an internal FD-1023 document they say a whistleblower claimed mentioned the word “Biden” and “$5 million.” Grassley House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer alleged last month that this meant the president had involvement in a pay-to-play bribery scheme to influence U.S. foreign policy objectives while he was vice president.
Comer issued a subpoena for the document, Speaker Kevin McCarthy warned Tuesday that FBI Director Christopher Wray would be criminally charged with contempt of Congress if the document was not handed over.
He claimed that he had lost track of a key witness in his investigation, who was identified as Gal Luft, an Israeli arms trader who worked with the Bidens. He helped connect Hunter Biden with the Chinese intelligence-lined CEFC China Energy, which gave millions to the Bidens.
Luft was arrested in February in Cyprus on gun-running and illegal foreign lobbying charges.
FBI Refuses to Handover Document Citing Confidentiality, Lack of Verification
The FBI defended its refusal to hand over the document because it contained unvetted raw information that had not been corroborated.
“Significant harm to investigative work—and to the program as a whole—could result from dissemination of FD-1023s or other similar documents. It is also critical to keep confidential the FBI’s methods for identifying, recruiting, retaining, and receiving information from confidential human sources,” FBI Acting Assistant Director of Congressional Affairs Christopher Dunham wrote in a May 10 letter to Comer. “Information from a confidential human source, including as reported in an FD-1023, certainly warrants such protections. Information from confidential human sources is unverified and, by definition, incomplete. An FD-1023 form documents information as told to a line FBI agent. Recording the information does not validate the information, establish its credibility, or weigh it against other information known or developed by the FBI.”
Democrats have seized on this to charge the Republicans with engaging in a fishing expedition. They have criticized Comer for refusing to let the Democratic minority speak to the source of the information about the FD-1023 document.
“Remember, there is no public information corroborating the idea that this form even exists beyond the assertions of the House Republicans. That they believe there is such a form, of course, suggests that someone told them about it,” Washington Post columnist Philip Bump wrote. “There exists a transcript of what was alleged by the whistleblower; Comer told Hannity earlier this month that he’d read such a document. It has not been provided to Democrats on the committee.
Bump continued: “In a statement to The Washington Post, a spokesperson for the Democratic minority on the committee suggested that Comer was simply hiding the ball.”
And Grassley conceded that he had no idea what was in the report.
“I guess basically we’ve got to wait to see what the document exactly says,” Grassley said in a Fox News interview last month. “The FBI needs to explain whether it’s accurate or not.”
Critics See GOP Effort to Deny Biden a Second Term
Critics of the investigation see this as just GOP electioneering aimed at returning Donald Trump to the White House and denying Joe Biden another term.
“Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) on Monday inadvertently implied that House Republicans’ high-profile investigation into President Joe Biden’s family members and their finances is actually about helping Donald Trump win the presidency in 2024,” HuffPost Senior Politics Reporter Jennifer Bendery wrote. “Surveys from earlier this year, conducted by both nonpartisan and Democratic firms, found that most voters thought Republicans were putting too much effort into investigating the president.”
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John Rossomando was a senior analyst for Defense Policy and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
