The FD-1023 alleging corruption by the Biden family still hasn’t been published by Semafor, but we are getting a pretty good idea what’s in it. As you may recall, FBI Director Wray initially refused to allow the document in question to leave the FBI. Then, under pressure, he compromised and said Chairman Comer and Ranking Member Raskin would be allowed to see it on the grounds of the Capitol.
That wasn’t good enough for Rep. Comer who said he intended to hold Director Wray in contempt. Finally, as Jazz pointed out this morning, Director Wray backed down and agreed that the entire oversight committee could read the document in a secure setting. In response, Rep. Comer agreed to stop pursuing the contempt charges.
Now that several more people have read the FD-1023 we’re getting a more detailed idea of what it contains. Here’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene describing it based on notes she put down after leaving the SCIF. “This source that came forward is a paid informant by the FBI,” she said. The claim is that the Ukrainian firm Burisma put Hunter Biden on its board in order to sort out legal problems it was having. Hunter advised Burisma to buy a US company but the informant told Burisma it should hire attorneys and deal with its legal problems. The source claims that the owner of Burisma paid $5 million to one Biden and he paid $5 million to another Biden. The intent of all of this money was to get the prosecutor fired and end the investigation of Burisma. The owner allegedly told the informant that it would take 10 years to unravel the Bidens because of how many bank accounts were involved in the transfer. Finally, the informant said the owner of Burisma initially denied making any payments to Joe Biden but later he claimed to have evidence of payments to both Joe and Hunter Biden.
I just read the FBI’s FD-1023 form implicating Joe Biden in a political bribery pay-to-play scheme.
Here’s what the American people deserve to know. pic.twitter.com/b3X8qh9MPf
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) June 8, 2023
There’s another story about this particular document which we mentioned in the headlines yesterday. After Director Wray allowed Rep. Comer and Rep. Raskin (the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee) to read the document, Rep. Raskin put out a press release claiming the Trump DOJ under former AG Bill Barr had looked into the document and closed the investigation “having found no evidence to corroborate” the allegations.
here are the facts: the FD-1023 form, which we reviewed first-hand today, records what a Confidential Human Source told the FBI about conversations he had with individuals in Ukraine. The source, who has been described as highly credible by the FBI, told the FBI he could not provide any opinion on the underlying veracity of the information provided by these Ukrainian individuals.
“However, Trump’s own Department of Justice was able to reach a conclusion about this information. In January 2020, Attorney General Barr handpicked Scott Brady, the U.S. Attorney in Pittsburgh, to review allegations by Rudy Giuliani that President Biden and Hunter Biden were involved in a Ukrainian corruption scheme. As part of this assessment, U.S. Attorney Brady, together with a team of experienced prosecutors and FBI agents, assessed relevant information, including interviewing this Confidential Human Source—an interview that was recorded in the subpoenaed FD-1023 form. Much of the information provided by the source was information Mr. Giuliani had already provided the FBI. In August 2020, Attorney General Barr and his hand-picked U.S. Attorney signed off on closing the assessment, having found no evidence to corroborate Mr. Giuliani’s allegations.
That sounds pretty open and shut. But yesterday, Bill Barr rejected that claim in a story published by the Federalist:
“It’s not true. It wasn’t closed down,” William Barr told The Federalist on Tuesday in response to Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin’s claim that the former attorney general and his “handpicked prosecutor” had ended an investigation into a confidential human source’s allegation that Joe Biden had agreed to a $5 million bribe. “On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”
The Federalist story also undercuts another claim Raskin made, that the information in the FD-1023 was connected in some way to information provided by Rudy Giuliani.
Not so, according to an individual familiar with the investigation who told The Federalist that the CHS and the FD-1023 summary of his statement were both “unrelated to Rudy Giuliani” and “not derived” from any information Giuliani provided. This corroborates the House Oversight Committee’s representation that the June 30, 2020, FD-1023 “stands on its own” and was not part of the documents Giuliani provided the FBI in January 2020.
The Federalist has previously pointed out that investigation of the FD-1023 was effectively shut down. This comes from a letter Sen. Grassley sent to Director Wray last July:
First, it’s been alleged that the FBI developed information in 2020 about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity. It is further alleged that in August 2020, FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment which was used by a FBI Headquarters (“FBI HQ”) team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease. Based on allegations, verified and verifiable derogatory information on Hunter Biden was falsely labeled as disinformation.
The basis for how the FBI HQ team selected the specific information for inclusion in Auten’s assessment is unknown, but in more than one instance the focus of the FBI HQ team’s attention involved derogatory information about Hunter Biden. Accordingly, the allegations provided to my office appear to indicate that there was a scheme in place among certain FBI officials to undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation.
Importantly, it’s been alleged to my office that Auten’s assessment was opened in August 2020, which is the same month that Senator Johnson and I received an unsolicited and unnecessary briefing from the FBI that purportedly related to our Biden investigation and a briefing for which the contents were later leaked in order paint the investigation in a false light.
As Senator Johnson and I have publicly noted, on July 13, 2020, then-Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senator Mark Warner, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Adam Schiff sent a letter, with a classified attachment, to the FBI to express a purported belief that Congress was the subject of a foreign disinformation campaign. The July 13, 2020, letter included unclassified elements that, among other things, unsuccessfully attempted to tie our investigative work to foreign disinformation. Those unclassified elements were later leaked to the press to try and smear our Biden investigation as unrelated foreign disinformation. Then, on July 16, 2020, then-Ranking Member Peters and then-Ranking Member Wyden requested a briefing on matters related to my and Senator Johnson’s Biden investigation from the very same FBI HQ team that discredited the derogatory Hunter Biden information. The concurrent opening of Auten’s assessment, the efforts by the FBI HQ team and the efforts by the FBI to provide an unnecessary briefing to me and Senator Johnson that provided our Democratic colleagues fodder to falsely accuse us of advancing foreign disinformation draws serious concern.
It sure sounds sounds like there was a coordinated effort to do to this allegation exactly what was done a few months later to the NY Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop story. In that case you had a group of about 50 intelligence people come forward (after a call from the Biden campaign to then-Deputy Director of the CIA Mike Morell) to claim the story sounded like Russian disinformation. But none of that was true. The Hunter Biden laptop was real as were the documents and photos on it. Maybe the FD-1023 is real too.
Read the full article here
