The FBI had 40 confidential informants keeping tabs on the Biden family, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, disclosed in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
“Based on the information provided to my office over a period of years by multiple credible whistleblowers, there appears to be an effort within the Justice Department and FBI to shut down investigative activity relating to the Biden family,” Grassley wrote. “Such decisions point to significant political bias infecting the decision-making of not only the Attorney General and FBI Director, but also line agents and prosecutors.”
He added: “Our Republic cannot survive such a political infection and you have an obligation to this country to clear the air.”
FBI, DoJ Stymie Informational Requests
Grassley complained that the FBI and Justice Department stymied his requests for information. He noted that informants had provided information about Joe Biden, James Biden, and Hunter Biden.
“Since August 2019, the Justice Department and FBI have refused to answer our questions, cooperate with our investigation, and have made every effort to obstruct and frustrate legitimate and constitutional congressional oversight,” Grassley wrote, noting that investigations had been shut down due to uncorroborated allegations of foreign interference. “It’s been alleged that the basis for shutting the investigative activity down was an August 2020 assessment created by FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten. That assessment was used by an FBI HQ team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.
Grassley continued, “The precise basis for how the FBI HQ team selected the specific information for inclusion in Auten’s assessment is unknown, but the focus of the FBI HQ team’s attention involved derogatory information about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.”
It noted that an “avenue of derogatory” information about Hunter Biden was shut down in October 2020 at the instructions of Assistant Special Agent In Charge Tim Thibault. He noted that a contingent from FBI Headquarters and the Baltimore Field Office wanted the Hunter Biden inquiry shut down.
Hunter Biden and the Biden Family Implicated in Burisma Investigation
He noted that an FD-1023 form from March 2017 submitted in the kleptocracy investigation into Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky included a reference to Hunter Biden and his role on the Burisma board of directors.
The information about the Biden family obtained from a series of related interviews was separate from information that had been circulated by Rudolph Guiliani. Democrats have striven to discredit the prior FD-1023 by claiming that Giuliani had been the source of the information and that his source Ukrainian businessman Lev Parnas was not credible.
“The information in the Biden family 1023 was obtained separate from Giuliani from a long-standing, high-paid FBI CHS who’s been used in other investigative matters by the FBI, as the Zlochevsky case illustrates. That Biden family I023 was serialized into the Pittsburgh Assessment simply because it was the administrative avenue to house the source information,” Grassley wrote.
He noted that U.S. Attorney David Weiss opened an investigation into money laundering and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) in the fall of 2020. Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski “met with and was interviewed by James Dawson, a Washington Field Office Special Agent in Charge, Acting Assistant Special Agent in Charge Giulio Arseni, Special Agent William Novak, and Special Agent Garrett Churchill.”
Grassley called on Garland and Wray to work to clean up the alleged partisanship in their offices and to provide requested documentation by November 17, 2023.
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst 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. He writes opinion pieces for this publication.
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