GOP corruption allegations against Biden remain transparently thin

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The press release was issued on May 3 by the Republican Majority House Oversight Committee.

[I]Information provided by a whistleblower raises concerns that then-Vice President Biden engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national, he alleged, citing committee chairman James Comer (R -Ky.).

A letter from Comer and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) to the FBI, requesting the release of documentation from a June 2020 interview, was not covered in the same way. The document, he said, describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national regarding the exchange of money for political decisions.

Over the next month, Republicans pressed the FBI to release the form publicly. Comer threatened to hold FBI Director Christopher A. Wray in contempt. He and Grassley have repeatedly appeared on Fox News and other right-wing outlets to use this pressure campaign to re-elevate the allegation they originally presented. Eventually, the FBI made the document available to members of Congress, suppressing information about the confidential source who had been interviewed.

But despite new, incremental revelations about the form and the push for the form to be released, nothing about the situation has changed since that first press release. Republicans are promoting a second-hand allegation from a single source, an allegation that was in the hands of Justice Department William P. Barrs in mid-2020 without leading to criminal charges or, it seems, he, to a specific investigation.

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It’s not hard to see why it’s happening the way it’s happening. There’s a huge appetite on the right right now for evidence that the FBI and Justice Department are deploying a double standard or that Biden deserves to face criminal charges just as much as former President Donald Trump. This provides the space that Comer and Grassley fill, far exceeding their extremely limited evidence.

According to reports from lawmakers who have seen the interview document, including Comer and Grassley, who say they have seen an unredacted version of it, the allegation is that an executive at Ukrainian energy company Burisma offered bribes. $5 million wine to Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. .

Burisma, you will recall, was central to Trump’s first impeachment. Trump wanted Ukraine to announce an investigation into Joe Biden (whom he rightly expected to be his opponent in 2020), claiming that Biden had tried to block a corruption probe into the company for the benefit of his son. This was debunked at the time, with Bidens’ calls for the ousting of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin being rooted in Shokins not aggressively pursuing corruption. There is no evidence that Shokin was investigating Burisma, and there was international consensus that he should leave.

Both because Trump was facing impeachment and because his team thought Biden was vulnerable on the issue, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani continued to seek derogatory information about Biden in Ukraine. That was worrisome to federal law enforcement, which warned the Trump White House that Giuliani could be a conduit for Russian disinformation. (One of his sources was later sanctioned under the Trump administration for being linked to Russian intelligence.) In early 2020, Barr established a process for verifying information about Ukraine, clearly in part because that he feared Giuliani’s information would trigger wild goose hunts. . The US attorney responsible for verifying the information, Scott Brady, met with Giuliani shortly afterwards.

Reports suggest the bribery allegation was brought to the attention of the FBI by Giuliani. In an interview on Fox News this week, Barr claimed the allegation did not come from Giuliani but from the FBI itself, but that may be a semantic distinction between how she got to the FBI and how she got to Brady.

Regardless, the Bureau spoke to a confidential source in June 2020 about the allegation, generating document FD-1023 that Comer and Grassley were looking for. This source, whose identity the Bureau wishes to protect, is someone who has been paid by the Bureau for information in the past and is considered credible although this of course does not extend to the executive of Burisma with whom the source spoke. It was the executive who alleged the bribery, the money allegedly offered in part to stop Shokin’s investigation of Burisma.

An investigation, remember, that does not seem to have existed.

There are also other problems with the story. House Oversight has breathlessly dissected Hunter Bidens’ finances in an effort to build a story about Biden family corruption. (There is no evidence of payments to Joe Biden, hence the hazy allegation against the extended family.) The committee detailed how payments to Chinese actors, for example, appear to have been split among people related to Hunter Biden or his uncle.

Yet there is apparently no evidence of a $5 million payment to Hunter Biden. That Comer spent the month fighting with the FBI to release an unredacted version of the interview form instead of, say, finding the $5 million in the voluminous financial documents his committee has is telling.

The same goes for the fact that no corruption charges have been brought against Joe or Hunter Biden. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Democrats Oversight Committee said that the Bureau, by showing the document to members of Congress, had informed the Committee, unequivocally, that this evaluation had been closed in August 2020 after failing to identify sufficient evidence to warrant further investigation.

On Fox News, Barr claimed there was no further investigation of Brady because that was not Brady’s mandate. He and Republicans on the committee have suggested the interview is part of the ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden in Delaware, though there’s no evidence Biden is being investigated for participating. to some sort of bribe.

On Monday, Grassley tried to inject a new wrinkle into the discussion.

According to 1023, the foreign national has fifteen audio recordings of phone calls between him and Hunter Biden, he said from the Senate floor. According to 1023, the foreign national has two audio recordings of phone calls between him and Vice President Joe Biden.

What, if anything, did the Justice Department and FBI do to investigate? he added.

It’s really important to remember that while this is new information purportedly redacted from the version of the document presented to Congress, it is not new evidence. This is the same alleged leader who speaks to the same FBI source in the same document. In other words, the claim that these recordings exist comes from the same person who claims the bribe was paid. It is no more credible than the initial assertion.

It also quite obviously undermines Grassleys point. If there were any tapes, it would seem to suggest that the FBI would have even more reason to press ahead with an investigation without appearing to have done so. Grassley argues that, given the magnitude of the executive branch’s allegations, it’s bizarre that the FBI didn’t investigate. The most obvious conclusion is that the claims were not the irrefutable gun presented by Grassley.

Even Comer braked on it. He was asked, during an interview on Newsmax, if the recordings were legit. He confirmed that the tapes were mentioned in the 1023 but we don’t know if they are legit or not and they were simply claimed by the executive the FBI source spoke with.

Grassley did something similar when asked by a Fox News host if the document was damning for President Biden.

There are accusations in there, but it’s not for me to judge whether those accusations are true or not, he said. It’s my job to make sure the FBI does its job.

As journalist Marcy Wheeler notes, Comer and Grassley appear to be engaged in precisely what Republicans have long claimed about the dossier of reports compiled on Trump by former intelligence officer Christopher Steele: raising dubious allegations from foreign sources that are transmitted by a paid informant of the Bureau. But the target of these allegations is Biden, so they are presented with credulity by default.

It is indisputably possible that some element of the allegation is true. We know that Hunter Biden was paid by Burisma to serve on its board almost certainly because of his last name and it’s not hard to imagine he was involved in even more sketchy deals. It’s also possible that the then Vice President was also involved, although the allegation as currently understood doesn’t make much sense.

But it’s also true that Comer, Grassley and their allies are more interested in elevating the allegation than evaluating it. Since that press release in early May and its initial claim that Biden was bribed, the allegation has not grown more credible. It was probably related to Giuliani? The FBI had it and didn’t pursue an investigation? Although there are tape recordings? And Oversight never caught wind of the alleged $5 million payout?

Republicans have an easy answer to this: the FBI is corrupt and anti-Trump. But that only begs the question.

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