The news release went out on May 3 from the Republican majority on the House Oversight Committee.
“Information provided by a whistleblower raises concerns that then-Vice President Biden allegedly engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national,” it alleged, quoting committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.).
A letter from Comer and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) to the FBI, seeking the release of documentation of a June 2020 interview, wasn’t similarly hedged. The document, it claimed, “describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy 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. Grassley and he appeared on Fox News and other right-wing media over and over to use this pressure campaign to re-elevate the allegation they’d featured at the outset. Eventually, the FBI made the document available for members of Congress to view, redacting information about the confidential source who had been interviewed.
But despite incremental new revelations about the form and about the push for the form to be released, nothing about the situation has changed from that first news release. Republicans are hyping a secondhand allegation from a single source — an allegation that was in the hands of Attorney General William P. Barr’s Justice Department in mid-2020 without leading to criminal charges or, it seems, any specific investigation.
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It is not hard to figure out why this is unfolding the way it is unfolding. There’s an enormous appetite on the right at the moment 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. That provides the space that Comer and Grassley are filling, running far ahead of their extremely limited evidence.
According to reports from legislators who’ve seen the interview document — including Comer and Grassley, who say they’ve seen an unredacted version of it — the allegation is that an executive with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma offered bribes of $5 million to both Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
Burisma, you’ll recall, was at the center of Trump’s first impeachment. Trump wanted Ukraine to announce an investigation into Joe Biden (who he correctly expected to be his 2020 opponent), claiming that Biden tried to block a corruption investigation into the company to benefit his son. This was debunked at that point, with Biden’s calls for the ouster of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin being rooted in Shokin’s not aggressively prosecuting corruption. There’s no evidence that Shokin was investigating Burisma, and there was an international consensus that he needed to go.
Both because Trump was facing impeachment and because his team believed that Biden was vulnerable on the issue, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani continued to seek derogatory information about Biden in Ukraine. This was worrisome to federal law enforcement, which warned the Trump White House that Giuliani might be a vector for Russian misinformation. (One of his sources was later added to a sanctions list during the Trump administration for being linked to Russian intelligence.) At the beginning of 2020, Barr established a process for vetting information about Ukraine, clearly in part because of concern that Giuliani’s information would trigger wild goose chases. The U.S. attorney responsible for vetting the information, Scott Brady, met with Giuliani soon after.
Reporting suggests that the bribery allegation was brought to the FBI’s attention by Giuliani. In an interview on Fox News this week, Barr claimed that the allegation came not from Giuliani but from the FBI itself, but that may be a semantic distinction between how it got to the FBI and how it got to Brady.
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Regardless, the bureau spoke with a confidential source in June 2020 about the allegation, generating the FD-1023 document Comer and Grassley are seeking. That source, whose identity the bureau is eager to protect, is someone who had been paid by the bureau for information in the past and is considered credible — though that of course doesn’t extend to the Burisma executive with whom the source spoke. It’s the executive who alleged the bribery, money purportedly offered in part to halt the investigation of Burisma by Shokin.
An investigation, remember, that doesn’t appear to have existed.
There are other problems with the story, too. The House Oversight Committee has been breathlessly dissecting Hunter Biden’s finances in an effort to build out a story about the corruption of “the Biden family.” (There’s no evidence of payments to Joe Biden, hence the blurred allegation against the family broadly.) The committee has detailed how payments from Chinese actors, for example, appear to have been divvied up between people linked to Hunter Biden or his uncle.
“Information provided by a whistleblower raises concerns that then-Vice President Biden allegedly engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national,” it alleged, quoting committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.).
A letter from Comer and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) to the FBI, seeking the release of documentation of a June 2020 interview, wasn’t similarly hedged. The document, it claimed, “describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy 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. Grassley and he appeared on Fox News and other right-wing media over and over to use this pressure campaign to re-elevate the allegation they’d featured at the outset. Eventually, the FBI made the document available for members of Congress to view, redacting information about the confidential source who had been interviewed.
But despite incremental new revelations about the form and about the push for the form to be released, nothing about the situation has changed from that first news release. Republicans are hyping a secondhand allegation from a single source — an allegation that was in the hands of Attorney General William P. Barr’s Justice Department in mid-2020 without leading to criminal charges or, it seems, any specific investigation.
Sign up for How To Read This Chart, a weekly data newsletter from Philip Bump
It is not hard to figure out why this is unfolding the way it is unfolding. There’s an enormous appetite on the right at the moment 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. That provides the space that Comer and Grassley are filling, running far ahead of their extremely limited evidence.
According to reports from legislators who’ve seen the interview document — including Comer and Grassley, who say they’ve seen an unredacted version of it — the allegation is that an executive with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma offered bribes of $5 million to both Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
Burisma, you’ll recall, was at the center of Trump’s first impeachment. Trump wanted Ukraine to announce an investigation into Joe Biden (who he correctly expected to be his 2020 opponent), claiming that Biden tried to block a corruption investigation into the company to benefit his son. This was debunked at that point, with Biden’s calls for the ouster of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin being rooted in Shokin’s not aggressively prosecuting corruption. There’s no evidence that Shokin was investigating Burisma, and there was an international consensus that he needed to go.
Both because Trump was facing impeachment and because his team believed that Biden was vulnerable on the issue, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani continued to seek derogatory information about Biden in Ukraine. This was worrisome to federal law enforcement, which warned the Trump White House that Giuliani might be a vector for Russian misinformation. (One of his sources was later added to a sanctions list during the Trump administration for being linked to Russian intelligence.) At the beginning of 2020, Barr established a process for vetting information about Ukraine, clearly in part because of concern that Giuliani’s information would trigger wild goose chases. The U.S. attorney responsible for vetting the information, Scott Brady, met with Giuliani soon after.
Reporting suggests that the bribery allegation was brought to the FBI’s attention by Giuliani. In an interview on Fox News this week, Barr claimed that the allegation came not from Giuliani but from the FBI itself, but that may be a semantic distinction between how it got to the FBI and how it got to Brady.
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Regardless, the bureau spoke with a confidential source in June 2020 about the allegation, generating the FD-1023 document Comer and Grassley are seeking. That source, whose identity the bureau is eager to protect, is someone who had been paid by the bureau for information in the past and is considered credible — though that of course doesn’t extend to the Burisma executive with whom the source spoke. It’s the executive who alleged the bribery, money purportedly offered in part to halt the investigation of Burisma by Shokin.
An investigation, remember, that doesn’t appear to have existed.
There are other problems with the story, too. The House Oversight Committee has been breathlessly dissecting Hunter Biden’s finances in an effort to build out a story about the corruption of “the Biden family.” (There’s no evidence of payments to Joe Biden, hence the blurred allegation against the family broadly.) The committee has detailed how payments from Chinese actors, for example, appear to have been divvied up between people linked to Hunter Biden or his uncle.